No Such Thing As An Unlucky Fountain

Jamie Morton joins Dan, Anna and Andy to discuss symmetry, lottery, and an erotic bee. 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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:27Speaker 01

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• 0:57Speaker 02

  Hi, everyone. Welcome to this week's episode of No Such Thing As A Fish, where I, James Harkin, was replaced by the wonderful Jamie Morton.

• 1:07Speaker 03

  That's right. James is away, but subbing in is Jamie, who you may know as one of the hosts of the brilliant My Dad Wrote A Porno podcast. It's so funny. It was an absolute globe straddler, and it's still available to listen everywhere you get your podcasts, so do give that a listen.

• 1:22Speaker 02

  Bigger news, though, for us personally, because we are returning to the London Podcast Festival. We will be there on Saturday, the 12th of September, at King's Place in North London. And Andy, it's not just gonna be one show.

• 1:35Speaker 03

  It's gonna be two. We're doing not only a live, normal episode of Fish, which we're very excited about, but for the first time ever, we're going to be doing a live Drop As A Line. That is, it's our audience feedback show. I present it. There are a lot of wacky format points. It's great fun. And we're gonna be doing it live for the first time ever. It's gonna be mayhem.

• 1:54Speaker 02

  It's gonna be great fun for Andy and probably the audience. Not so much great fun for me, Dad and Anna, but, you know. Anyway, if you could not be in London on that date, then do not worry, because both of these shows will be livestreamed and they will be available on catch-up. But how do people get tickets, Andy?

• 2:11Speaker 03

  Well, tickets are going to be on sale from the 7th of July, Tuesday, the 7th of July. You can get tickets at nosuchthingasafish.com/live. And if you are already a Club Fish member, there is a 24-hour pre-sale exclusively for you. And to guarantee your tickets, all you need to do is go to patreon.com/clubfish. Join now, get access to that pre-sale.

• 2:32Speaker 02

  Absolutely. So go there to get your tickets. Go to your normal podcast provider to listen to My Dad Drove a Pono. But before all that, sit back and relax and enjoy this episode of No Such Things as a Fish with Jamie Morton. Okay, on with the podcast.

• 2:47Speaker 03

  On with the show.

• 3:02Speaker 03

  Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Things 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 Andrew Hunter-Murray, Anna Tashinsky and Jamie Morton. And once again, we have gathered round 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, that is Jamie.

• 3:27Speaker 04

  My fact this week, guys, is a Titanic passenger credited swimming in the saltwater pool the morning of the sinking with helping him survive.

• 3:37Speaker 03

  As in he'd already, he was used to it?

• 3:39Speaker 04

  Well, he thought, you know, I've already done this saltwater thing. Survive the swimming pool.

• 3:42Speaker 03

  I didn't realise there was a swimming pool on the Titanic. I should have guessed there would be because obviously it was so luxurious, but...

• 3:47Speaker 04

  Very luxurious. One of the first ever swimming pools to be on any kind of luxury liner.

• 3:51Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 3:52Speaker 04

  Saltwater as well, so you really did acclimatise to the sinking.

• 3:55Speaker 05

  Does that help? It doesn't matter if you've trained in a chlorinated pool and then you end up in the sea and you're like, well, I don't know how to swim in this one.

• 4:01Speaker 04

  People will never know.

• 4:02Speaker 03

  There's something quite nice about it because we know that the band kept playing for a long time. I can imagine maybe the lifeguard at the pool kept the pool safe. Right to the end, you know, until the pool just got bigger and bigger and bigger.

• 4:14Speaker 04

  Yes. Actually, because it was a heated pool as well. So actually, if you were in the pool as it sank, you probably had a better chance of surviving the initial swim. Because you were still in heated water, as long as you travelled with that batch of heated water. If you're swimming in the swimming pool, are you technically sinking though? Because you're just really just still swimming. You could just pretend that I'm just swimming in the swimming pool, even though it's...

• 4:35Speaker 03

  Swimming pool is like, you know.

• 4:36Speaker 04

  Right.

• 4:37Speaker 03

  The Atlantic.

• 4:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. Well, this guy, so he was, um, his name was Archibald Gracie the fourth. And he, uh, came from quite a prominent family. His, uh, ancestors had built what is now the mayor's house in New York. So Mandami lives in.

• 4:51Speaker 03

  Oh, Gracie Mansion.

• 4:53Speaker 04

  Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Gracie Mansion. Yeah. So he came from good stock. He was a first class passenger and said a few things about why he survived it. But he said his swim made him really hungry. So he had a really hearty breakfast. So that might have helped him as well in the survival process later on that evening.

• 5:08Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 5:08Speaker 04

  When he was in the water itself.

• 5:10Speaker 03

  Calories, energy.

• 5:11Speaker 04

  Yeah. And he'd read a book recently as well about something to do with recs and extreme survival. So he felt like, whoa, that's in my head as well. We've all had that. You come out of the cinema having watched an action film. You think you're James Bond for about 20 minutes.

• 5:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 5:25Speaker 04

  It really helps. Yeah. Archibald Gracie the fourth, by the way, these are his dates, 1858 to 1912.

• 5:33Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 5:34Speaker 04

  Died the same year the Titanic sank.

• 5:36Speaker 03

  Um, he was the first person to die.

• 5:38Speaker 04

  He was the first adult, yeah, adult survivor to die.

• 5:40Speaker 05

  Was he?

• 5:41Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 5:41Speaker 03

  What, um, did he, was it swimming related again? Or was it, did he jump into an empty swimming pool on land? And that was the tragic.

• 5:48Speaker 04

  Really, yeah.

• 5:49Speaker 03

  Wow, that's so sad.

• 5:51Speaker 04

  Uh, diabetes.

• 5:52Speaker 03

  Okay, okay. Sorry. Um, in fact, about this, swimming pools are getting colder in the UK.

• 5:58Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 5:59Speaker 04

  Do, do, do, do, do, do, do.

• 6:00Speaker 03

  Why?

• 6:01Speaker 04

  Why do my Twilight Zone scripts keep getting rejected?

• 6:07Speaker 05

  Is it a mystery?

• 6:08Speaker 03

  Riddle, well, riddle me, riddle me this.

• 6:10Speaker 05

  Right, okay.

• 6:10Speaker 03

  It's not a mystery.

• 6:11Speaker 05

  Is it environmental reasons?

• 6:13Speaker 03

  Very close.

• 6:14Speaker 05

  Um, is it because we think the young need to toughen up?

• 6:16Speaker 03

  No.

• 6:17Speaker 05

  Gen Z, get them used to a bit of ice cold water, no?

• 6:20Speaker 04

  Is it because it's more ocean based pools? It's, it's now tidal pools and so on?

• 6:24Speaker 03

  Oh, that's very good. No.

• 6:26Speaker 05

  Right.

• 6:27Speaker 03

  It's just because it's very expensive to heat up a swimming pool. A huge volume of water to 30 degrees. And all councils are broke and councils run most of the pools.

• 6:34Speaker 05

  Oh.

• 6:35Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 6:35Speaker 03

  But there is one place in Devon, Exmouth Ledger Centre, which for three years has had the answer. Do, do, do, do, do, do. What is it? What's the answer?

• 6:43Speaker 04

  What is it?

• 6:44Speaker 05

  Oh, you just keep putting the cattle. On and running out of swimming pools, topping it up.

• 6:48Speaker 03

  Well, we didn't we do a fact about one, you start building them next to morgues and the cremations. Crematorium. Yeah, yeah. There is one, I see the Reddit or Reading, which is using a, no, this one is using the most modern of all things, a data centre. Oh, very good. Tiny data centre. Apparently it's only the size of a washing machine. So I don't know how much data is pumping out. So AI is heating our pools as well as. Basically, yeah. And all the computers in the data centre are surrounded by oil and that just goes through a heat exchanger, heats up the water. Lovely. Brilliant idea.

• 7:18Speaker 05

  Lovely. Maybe they're not so bad after all these data centres.

• 7:20Speaker 03

  Maybe not. In the White House, there is a swimming pool in the White House that's, the press briefing room is now above it and it's just an empty swimming pool and it's full of data servers. That's where they keep all of their old computers just in the pool. But the pool's empty. The pool's empty. They should fill it up. Well, I know, right? But no, FDR got this pool built in the White House because he had health issues, right? Health issues? Yeah, I think it helped with his, you know, whatever. But then Nixon wanted to get rid of it, but he was too afraid of the potential political backlash of demolishing FDR's pool that he just built on top of it. So the pool's actually still under there and they just use it to keep loads of like wires and.

• 7:58Speaker 05

  Oh, cool.

• 7:59Speaker 03

  Computers in there. Yeah, I know. Has anyone been to the sky pool near Battersea Power Station? Oh, no, I didn't think you were allowed. No, you can't be, if you befriend a resident, have you been? I was like, no, I really want to. So if anyone's listening and wants to have me as a plus one, I'd love to go and swim in it. Right.

• 8:15Speaker 05

  That's not how you befriend people, Jamie, is that? You don't announce on podcasts that you want to use people for their facilities.

• 8:21Speaker 03

  And I'm lonely. Pals, that's all I want. I just want a little pal. It's really cool. Have you seen it? It's like it's all glass. Actually, it isn't glass. It's made of acrylic. Oh, okay. Oh. I know. Yeah, very good. And it's, and it's, but it's so cool. It's like you're swimming in the, in the sky. It's completely see-through. Yeah, terrifying.

• 8:40Speaker 05

  And it's between two buildings, right?

• 8:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:41Speaker 05

  It's hanging.

• 8:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. But it's bad because there's some social housing in that building and they aren't allowed to use it. Oh, really? Here you go. What is not allowed in French pools, swimming pools? I know the answer. Like swimming shorts.

• 8:53Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 8:53Speaker 03

  Oh. Because I knew there were rules for, you know, various kind of restrictions on clothes like, they have lots of laws about burkas and things like that. And there are burkinis and there's those sorts of stuff. But for men, just swimming shorts are completely verboten.

• 9:09Speaker 05

  You need to go Y-fronts?

• 9:11Speaker 03

  You need to wear un slip de bas, which is the extremely small Speedo stuff.

• 9:17Speaker 04

  G-string.

• 9:19Speaker 03

  It's not, I don't think it's a G-string, but they're very, very short. You can wear un boxer, but those are also extremely form-hugging. And this dates back to 1903. And there are a few, just to forestall any emails, there are a few sort of perverted holiday centres which do allow shorts. But they're extremely un-French. And most public swimming pools in France, if you go along and try and get in there in swimming shorts, you'll have to take something from the lost property box.

• 9:44Speaker 04

  Right.

• 9:44Speaker 03

  You're talking to someone who's done it. Get out.

• 9:46Speaker 05

  No.

• 9:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, as a small boy, as a child.

• 9:48Speaker 05

  Really?

• 9:48Speaker 03

  We were on holiday and yeah, we didn't have Speedos. And so my parents didn't say, oh, it's all right, we'll go and buy some and, you know, come back tomorrow. They said, there's a lost property bin, fish something out. Yeah. And so I did. So I was wearing some French person's. Wow. Very, very slender. Yeah. Piece of fabric.

• 10:08Speaker 05

  But it's because. What's the thinking behind it? Yeah.

• 10:10Speaker 03

  Because they think that the shorts are kind of unhygienic because people tend to wear them in there every day. Yeah. So it's covered in dirt. So I mean, it is logical. That does make sense.

• 10:19Speaker 05

  Well, no, it's not. You guys have never turned up to the podcast wearing swimming trunks, ever.

• 10:24Speaker 03

  On holiday, though, you would. You'd like maybe go for dinner with them. Wait them into town. Yeah. Roll around in mud in them.

• 10:29Speaker 05

  I hope you guys holiday with, but everyone's wearing a tux on my holidays.

• 10:33Speaker 04

  I once got in trouble in a swimming pool in, I want to say Romania. I was in the pool with my uncle and my nephew, my nephew really young at the time, so we're in the kids pool. And they got out of the pool and suddenly all the children started leaving the pool and all the parents. And a man started yelling at me, couldn't understand what he was yelling. So I was just alone in the kids pool. And.

• 10:54Speaker 03

  You were a kid as well?

• 10:55Speaker 04

  No, no, I'm like in my late twenties.

• 10:58Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 10:58Speaker 04

  And what it was, was it's boiling hot. It was an outside pool. And I had my rashy, as you wear into the surf in Australia, rash vest. The guy thought I was a homeless man who had got into the pool and was washing myself.

• 11:13Speaker 04

  And so he was yelling, out, you homeless man. And that's what got translated to me by one of the locals is they think you don't have a home. She. Oh, it's like, you know, um. Like a string. Surface wear it. No, no. Sorry, I'm just not understanding.

• 11:26Speaker 05

  It looks like a wetsuit, but a t-shirt.

• 11:28Speaker 04

  But it's, yeah. Oh, okay.

• 11:29Speaker 03

  Oh, right, okay, to protect from the sun's rays.

• 11:31Speaker 04

  Yes, exactly, yeah.

• 11:33Speaker 05

  What was your vibe generally back then? Was the beard a bit less?

• 11:36Speaker 04

  Long hair, quite beard. To be fair, I was like, I totally get where you're coming from. And you had all your plastic bags with you as well.

• 11:43Speaker 04

  Hey, listen, another thing you're not allowed to do in pools is. Fuck. Petting. Petting.

• 11:50Speaker 03

  Sorry.

• 11:51Speaker 04

  Heavy petting. Yeah. Have a wee wee.

• 11:53Speaker 03

  Oh, that too.

• 11:54Speaker 04

  It's really frowned upon. I don't know if there's official rules that don't allow it, but it feels like a huge oversight because physiologically, we're built to pee in pools.

• 12:03Speaker 05

  Sorry?

• 12:05Speaker 04

  Our body. You really are the homeless man, actually. We take it back. As I said to the lifeguard, I am built to pee in here.

• 12:15Speaker 04

  Why do you have an uncontrollable urge to urinate when you're in a pool? It's your body reacting to your surroundings, right? One of the responses is that they let more water out of the bloodstream into our kidneys, and that's converted into urine to get out of there so that we regulate ourselves.

• 12:29Speaker 05

  That's so interesting. I can't believe I'd never wondered why you always need to pee in water.

• 12:33Speaker 04

  This is a big problem, obviously, for Olympians who have to get into their swimsuits 20 minutes beforehand. They're locked in, they go in the water. So in most interviews, if they're asked, do you pee in the pool? They also say, yeah, of course, we all pee in the pool.

• 12:45Speaker 05

  And also, it can propel you forwards if it's got, if you've got a strong enough.

• 12:48Speaker 04

  If you've got a good stream, yeah.

• 12:49Speaker 05

  Do you know what happens if you've got a swimming pool and you empty it? Let's say it's winter. You think, I don't need to use this anymore. I could use it for like a.

• 12:58Speaker 03

  Storing all of your hard drives.

• 12:59Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 13:01Speaker 04

  They'll make it easier for the police to just parcel them all up when they pop over.

• 13:07Speaker 05

  So as we're establishing, there's no good reason, I guess, to empty your pool in the winter, but you might want to. But it pops out of the ground. Don't do it. Swimming pools, if you empty the water, it's actually what's keeping them in the ground, it's weighing them down. So it's a balancing act with the ground. And the swimming pools, it's called like pop-up syndrome in the swimming pool engineer world. And if people empty their pools out and not properly, then yeah, all the walls cave in and they just jump up.

• 13:33Speaker 03

  They just sound like a complete faff.

• 13:35Speaker 05

  Too much faff, yeah.

• 13:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, and elitist.

• 13:38Speaker 03

  And elitist.

• 13:39Speaker 04

  But if anyone does have access to that pool in London, I'd do it. Swimming pools lost one of its great champions the other day.

• 13:46Speaker 03

  Oh no.

• 13:47Speaker 04

  David Hockney.

• 13:48Speaker 05

  Oh yeah.

• 13:49Speaker 04

  David Hockney, the artist, famous artist, who loved painting swimming pools. In fact, he had a painting which went for 90 million, which was to someone swimming, someone standing over it. In all the obituaries, you might have seen that exact painting. It's quite famously associated with him. But I found out that not only did he love painting pools, but he loved painting pools. David Hockney literally painted the inside of pools as well. So yeah.

• 14:15Speaker 05

  Was that just a misunderstanding where someone hired him to do that one, not realising?

• 14:19Speaker 03

  Repaint my pool.

• 14:20Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 14:21Speaker 04

  90 million, guess out.

• 14:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, that was a hobby of his. When he moved to his new house at one point, it had a pool and it was empty and he painted these waves underneath and he used to repaint it all the time. On his 80th birthday, in fact, he spent the day repainting.

• 14:39Speaker 03

  So he painted designs on it?

• 14:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly.

• 14:41Speaker 03

  I thought you just meant like painting a uniform colour, like mapped all over the inside of it.

• 14:45Speaker 04

  No, no, exactly. It's like little waves. So in fact, there's a pool in America called the Tropicana Pool. It's at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel and that still has the Hockney painting underneath of all these lines of blue. It looks really cool. Looks amazing.

• 14:57Speaker 05

  Because I've tried painting underwater. I haven't, but I imagine it wouldn't work.

• 15:01Speaker 04

  You take the water out first.

• 15:02Speaker 05

  So he does empty the pool?

• 15:04Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 15:04Speaker 05

  How's he doing it? That man is a magician in so many ways.

• 15:09Speaker 04

  I have one last thing. One of the great moments in recent swimming popularity is Vim Hof.

• 15:15Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 15:16Speaker 04

  The amazing Iceman. He likes to swim in fountains. And so I just want to give you a little, a little warning about swimming in fountains because quite a few years ago, he was swimming in a fountain in Amsterdam. And he decided to give himself an enema on the nozzle of the jet in the fountain. Now, he'd done it before and he was meeting his son in that park. He was waiting for him.

• 15:36Speaker 03

  Clean.

• 15:37Speaker 04

  He decided to give himself another enema. What he didn't know is that a few weeks earlier, the city had altered the jet to be more powerful than it was.

• 15:45Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 15:46Speaker 04

  And so when he placed his anus over the jet, according to the report, the water cut through his colon and intestines.

• 15:55Speaker 03

  Okay. Oh, my God.

• 15:57Speaker 04

  And he had to be rushed to hospital by his son. Now, because he's such a hard man, when he got to hospital, they thought he was fine. He was probably dying in that moment, but they were like, oh, he's totally fine. And so he just lay there for ages and they didn't do any proper surgery on him. Yeah, they didn't realise to what the extent of the damage was. So after a few hours, he fainted and they suddenly realised how bad it was and they stitched him up. But it took a long time for him to recover. So do not give yourself enemas in park fountains.

• 16:26Speaker 05

  Never has the phrase, I have no sympathy for that. Felt more opposite. Jesus Christ.

• 16:33Speaker 03

  Because it sounds like it's going to be a funny thing, like he just goes flying into the air. But actually, it's a very serious medical thing he went through.

• 16:38Speaker 04

  You can.

• 16:39Speaker 05

  That's why if you're not a cartoon character, a lot of things are more dangerous.

• 16:43Speaker 03

  But why to meet his son?

• 16:45Speaker 04

  That's what I'm really.

• 16:45Speaker 03

  But if you've got time to kill before an appointment and you think, I'll just give myself a quick enema, you know, look, I sympathise.

• 16:52Speaker 05

  Did it on a whim.

• 16:53Speaker 03

  Oh, really good.

• 16:54Speaker 04

  Really good.

• 16:55Speaker 03

  Really good.

• 16:56Speaker 04

  Let's end on that.

• 17:01Speaker 06

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• 17:46Speaker 06

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• 18:30Speaker 04

  Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is Andy.

• 18:34Speaker 03

  My fact is, in 19th century Egypt, one of the sexiest dances imaginable involved pretending you had a bee inside your clothes.

• 18:43Speaker 04

  Go on, let's see.

• 18:44Speaker 03

  Well, I was reading a book about Cleopatra's needles and how they came to be. There are a few of them, and two of them are in London and New York, respectively. And it's not as bad a story as you might think from the century they came over in. Anyway, it just contained a side detail, this, this book, all about the, the dancers of Egypt. And this dance, the dance of the bee, sometimes dance of the wasp, is basically, this was catnip to kind of white, middle-aged blokes from Europe who, who were enticed to the Egypt by the sound of this unbelievably alluring dance.

• 19:20Speaker 04

  The Bangkok of it. It's time.

• 19:21Speaker 03

  It was the Pancho, it basically was. And, and you know, the dancer will pretend there's a bee in her clothes and takes them off one by one. And you can, you can see where that goes.

• 19:28Speaker 05

  Oh, but does she take them off at frantic mad speed? Because that's what you would do, isn't it? I imagine she's doing it sort of seductively.

• 19:35Speaker 04

  I'm saying, not the sexiest.

• 19:36Speaker 03

  I think she probably finds a way of spinning it out and making it a bit more fun than, you know, the sort of, everyone has a friend who doesn't like bees at all. And, you know, will go a bit tonto when there's a bee anywhere near them. So I think she doesn't do that.

• 19:46Speaker 04

  Are there connoisseurs that can tell the difference between Dance of the Bee and Dance of the Wasp?

• 19:49Speaker 03

  I'm sure there are. I'm sure there are. I'm sure this led to a lot of connoisseurs making the journey down to Cairo or whatever. But there was this whole group of women called the Gawa Zee who lived apart, spoke a different language. They were street performers and they were, you know, quite controversial in Egypt. They were, they were seen as immodest. They were seen, they were described by one writer, Edward Lane, as the most abandoned courtesans of Egypt. And, and they were, in fact, they were so attractive, they were expelled from Cairo en masse, you know, as a social grouping. And they were exiled to Upper Egypt, which on a map is just below, uh, Northern Egypt, below Lower Egypt.

• 20:24Speaker 05

  Cause that's where the Nile flows.

• 20:26Speaker 03

  Cause that's where the Nile flows. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So yeah, the Gawa Zee, and they had this Dance of the Bee.

• 20:30Speaker 04

  And was there any, sort of a pun, was there the Queen Bee of the dancers that was sort of leading the, the rage?

• 20:38Speaker 03

  Don't, Hannah, you don't have to look so upset when you do.

• 20:41Speaker 05

  No, I really enjoyed being pre-warned about the pun.

• 20:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's very rare, isn't it? To get that. Yeah, yeah.

• 20:47Speaker 05

  I wish James would do that, then we can all steel ourselves.

• 20:51Speaker 05

  Sorry, go on.

• 20:52Speaker 03

  I don't think there was. I don't think there was a Queen Bee. Well, you may have found differently though.

• 20:55Speaker 04

  No, no, I mean, there, there were a few people, but it was, you know, this is what has been bracketed as well as belly dancing. And that used to be seen as vulgar, you wouldn't think that now, but you would say, son of a belly dancer if you were insulting someone.

• 21:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's a huge insult in Egypt. I think maybe still to this day in lots of North Africa. Yeah.

• 21:12Speaker 05

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

• 21:41Speaker 03

  It's like if Morris dancing was unbelievably sexy.

• 21:44Speaker 05

  Do not find it?

• 21:45Speaker 03

  Sorry, and obviously I do find it unbelievably sexy.

• 21:50Speaker 05

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

• 22:26Speaker 03

  Loads of his weddings.

• 22:28Speaker 05

  He's a lethario.

• 22:32Speaker 05

  Weddings of his friends and family.

• 22:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, right. Andy, when you were talking about them being kicked out, that was in 1834. But more recently, in the 1960s, the government put an actual clause into their rules. Oriental dance is not permitted to show the following: lying on the back, lying on the ground in a vulgar fashion, or making rapid movements in such a way as to cause excitement. The thighs are not to be fully open while on the ground. There are to be no wobbling up and down movements. And it goes on.

• 23:05Speaker 03

  You don't always have control over whether there are wobbling up and down movements, I find, increasingly.

• 23:10Speaker 05

  Sumo wrestlers are also banned under these rules.

• 23:12Speaker 03

  Wow. Yeah, the ruler who banned them in 1834 was Muhammad Ali. He was just called Muhammad Ali.

• 23:18Speaker 04

  Sting like a bee.

• 23:19Speaker 03

  Stings like a bee.

• 23:23Speaker 04

  Sexy dancing, pole dancing. I don't know if any of you are

• 23:28Speaker 03

  I'm grade three. I've got my blue band. Yeah, yeah.

• 23:30Speaker 04

  Well, keep practicing because people are now lobbying for it to become an Olympic sport. Because it's just a bit like the parallel bars. It's just like a pole, it's like a vertical bar.

• 23:40Speaker 03

  They've got the poles left over from the pole vault thing. They're not being used 98% of the time.

• 23:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, just use them. Because it is very technical. I mean, it's sexy, obviously, you know.

• 23:48Speaker 03

  But it's just very technical, isn't it? You know, it's strength, it's a sport. Yeah. Yes.

• 23:52Speaker 05

  Wow. But if you say to a lot of people, John, I'll come for a night seeing the parallel bars with me, then you don't get as much interest, in my experience.

• 24:01Speaker 03

  And it's very, very hard stuffing a tenet into a pole vaulters jockstrap right in the top of them.

• 24:09Speaker 03

  You mock, guys, but when it is an Olympic sport, you're all gonna go. Do you think it will be? I think it will. Like, a lot of people now do it just as a recreational sport, right?

• 24:17Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 24:18Speaker 03

  Yes. Men, women, it's not just a women thing, it's F1 user, because it's just very good for your kundalini.

• 24:22Speaker 05

  You went towards your crotch now, but is it good for your crotch?

• 24:24Speaker 03

  I thought it was kundalini. Excuse me, it is good for your crotch.

• 24:27Speaker 05

  Oh, sorry.

• 24:28Speaker 03

  Well, this is, this is a thing about belly dance in particular. Right. Which is that it's. So different, back to that. Yeah, back to that, so sorry. That is good, preventing urinary incontinence in the cohorts of dancers who've tried it. But not if they're in a swimming pool. I don't think if you're in a swimming pool. Because then you are just pissing yourself, as we know.

• 24:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, it improves your pelvic strength a lot, basically.

• 24:49Speaker 05

  That makes a huge amount of sense. If you do the belly dancing motion, which I'm trying to on my seat now, it does feel like you're doing a pelvic floor exercise, doesn't it?

• 24:56Speaker 03

  Oh, yes, it does.

• 24:57Speaker 05

  Mmm, there you go.

• 24:59Speaker 03

  There you go.

• 24:59Speaker 05

  There was a rumor that's repeated to this day, almost everywhere, that it was also used in North Africa in the 19th century and 20th century to help women in labour. And everyone repeats this thing where its origin was sort of, women would flood to the woman who was giving birth and belly dance around her as a way of saying, you know, do these motions to ease labour, which having, I think, the only person who's been through labour around this table, I don't imagine that doing a belly dance would have made it that much easier. And I don't think there's that much evidence for it. There's a couple of mid 20th century accounts. But I do like academics who really dig into this. So there's an academic who wrote a whole massive thesis on,

• 25:39Speaker 05

  is belly dance a birth dance? Sort of debunking it and saying this just wouldn't help.

• 25:46Speaker 03

  Very annoying, really.

• 25:47Speaker 05

  Just to say no. But she did describe something else. She was like, it's possible that, you know, this one account we have in the 20th century was leftover of something that was really common in the 19th century, much like other dances that seem to have disappeared. And then she described another example of this, and I just love this. She said, Arabic scholar John Lewis Burkhard described a marriage custom in which a man wrapped head to toe in white, wearing a massive male organ made out of cotton, cavorted in the wedding procession of a bride. And this interesting custom seems to have faded out as well. It is a shame, isn't it? And she didn't say where he's wearing the organ, and bizarrely, I imagined on his head. But having read that out again, he's just wearing it on his crotch.

• 26:27Speaker 03

  I don't think it's clear. I don't think it's definitive.

• 26:29Speaker 05

  Not clear.

• 26:29Speaker 03

  There is a thing which persists, I think even to this day, where the Gouazi women were seen as immodest and they were taboo and they were banned, all sorts. There were kawals who were men who did the women's dance. They dressed as women. They, I think, acted and walked and spoke as women. And I think even today Morocco has a few kawals. I suppose it's sort of analogous to drag in a way, but it's it's centuries old, it's tolerated. And it was a way of, I think, maybe getting around the exclusion of gay men and allowing self-expression in that sense. Because belly dancing and singing in public were both seen as so immodest and so almost akin to prostitution. That actually, we should just let the fellas get on with this. And that's, you know, they trusted to do it in a non totally immodest way. That's fascinating, I think.

• 27:15Speaker 05

  That is.

• 27:15Speaker 04

  You know, when we started our podcast in 2014, it was still the case that you would need a permit if you wanted to do any of this kind of dancing out on the streets of Egypt. And they have a sort of morality police that goes around. And so, well, show me your papers, you know, if you're doing it out on the street. And my papers are just in here. Oh, no, hang on. Oh, no, they're in here. Oh.

• 27:32Speaker 03

  We should say that belly dance is a completely Western phrase. It's a translation of the French danse du ventre, dancing of the stomach. So it's not an Egyptian phrase at all. And I think in Egypt, people get quite annoyed with it being called belly dance, basically.

• 27:43Speaker 04

  I was looking into other dances that had a sort of animal element to it.

• 27:49Speaker 03

  Oh, crumbs, okay.

• 27:49Speaker 04

  You had a bee that was running around in there that you needed to take your clothes off. I found the tarantella.

• 27:55Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 27:55Speaker 04

  My pronunciation.

• 27:58Speaker 04

  This was a, this is a dance. It's a folk dance that became so popular that classical musicians like Chopin and Liszt wrote songs for it, for tarantella dancers. And its origins go back to the 15th and 17th century. And it's connected to a thing called tarantism. And people thought if you were bitten by a venomous tarantula, that you could frenzy the dance and get it off. And it's from Taranto in Italy, which is also where the tarantula got its name as well, sort of.

• 28:26Speaker 03

  Is it from there?

• 28:27Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 28:28Speaker 03

  I thought those were South American things.

• 28:30Speaker 04

  Well, it's really interesting because it's a wolf spider, which is often called a tarantula. So it's not in your head a classic tarantula. It's more a wolf spider.

• 28:38Speaker 03

  Interesting.

• 28:38Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 28:39Speaker 03

  Cool.

• 28:39Speaker 05

  Because also I came across another animal related dance, which I don't know if it was real, but it was claimed to be real by a late 19th century anthropologist from the West, who were always reliable.

• 28:52Speaker 05

  And he was in Senegal and he said there is a dance called the bambula, which is a dance of the Wallach people. And he said that it imitated the mating of ducks. But what I was impressed by in what is otherwise quite an objectionable text, is that he did specify that the Drake has a member of a corkscrew shape.

• 29:11Speaker 04

  Which is true.

• 29:12Speaker 05

  Which is absolutely correct. Ducks do have their corkscrew willies. And good on this old bloke for knowing that. And he said, "A peculiar movement is required to introduce it into the hole of the duck." And so that is the movement.

• 29:24Speaker 03

  It's the hole of the duck.

• 29:27Speaker 03

  The whole duck or the hole of the duck? Because they're about 45 centimetres long, it does go into the hole of the duck.

• 29:33Speaker 04

  The hole of the duck.

• 29:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 29:35Speaker 05

  Another dance that's quite sexy is your classic Irish dancing, Riverdance style.

• 29:40Speaker 03

  In which I am trained.

• 29:42Speaker 05

  Of course you are.

• 29:43Speaker 04

  No, you're not.

• 29:44Speaker 03

  I am.

• 29:44Speaker 05

  Why are you trained in Riverdance?

• 29:45Speaker 03

  I just did it for a while when I was younger. What do you mean you just did it for a while? That isn't a thing. I had some Riverdance. Why are you so coy? You mentioned it. Come on. Yeah, I shouldn't have mentioned it.

• 29:54Speaker 04

  Did you perform on stage?

• 29:55Speaker 03

  Of course.

• 29:56Speaker 04

  Have you met the flat?

• 29:57Speaker 03

  Across Europe. I taught Flatley everything he knows.

• 30:04Speaker 03

  No, I did do a bit of that.

• 30:05Speaker 04

  How old? What age?

• 30:07Speaker 03

  I'm not telling you that.

• 30:07Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 30:08Speaker 03

  Let's just say I had to stop to do my degree.

• 30:14Speaker 05

  Yeah. And you hold your hands by your sides in Irish dancing, right? Did you do the classic Michael Flatley, hands by your sides, legs flailing out everywhere?

• 30:21Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 30:21Speaker 04

  Very straight.

• 30:22Speaker 03

  Great. Yeah, yeah.

• 30:23Speaker 05

  Well, nobody knows why that is how you do Irish dancing. So there are just lots of theories that are claimed confidently by various Irish dancing societies. And I just like one of the theories, which is that it is so that you cannot touch members of the opposite sex. So it's because it's too sexy a dance and you've got to keep your hands by your side. Otherwise you'll end up groping your partner in the Irish dance. But I also just really like this theory, which is another potential reason why. It's that when the British were trying to dominate Irish culture, basically, kind of like flatten it out in the 19th century.

• 30:55Speaker 05

  Then they wanted to get rid of all aspects of Irish identity, including their dancing. But the Irish wanted to keep their songs and dances, so.

• 31:02Speaker 03

  Compromise halfway up and down the body. Is that what we're saying? Is it like Ireland and Northern Ireland?

• 31:07Speaker 04

  This is what I think you're going to say. This is the most exciting thing. Well, it's that the British would be patrolling outside pubs at night.

• 31:15Speaker 03

  No.

• 31:16Speaker 04

  And so they would look through the windows and everyone would be standing still, just holding a pint of Guinness in their hand chatting. But underneath that window, the legs were, they were going for it.

• 31:28Speaker 05

  This is like.

• 31:31Speaker 05

  They could do it behind hedges, behind bars, wherever you like.

• 31:35Speaker 03

  This is weirdly more offensive than anything I imagined you would say.

• 31:40Speaker 04

  It's clever. It's very clever.

• 31:46Speaker 04

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

• 31:51Speaker 05

  My fact this week is that according to ancient Hindu astrology, if you have matching testicles, you will be a king.

• 31:59Speaker 05

  Yes, this is, this is in one of the many hundreds, thousands of Hindu texts there are. It's such a fun religion because there are so many fun texts you can draw on. And this is in one called the Burhat Samhita, which is a 6th century Sanskrit text. And there's a chapter called On the Features of Men. And it's sort of like palm reading or something, you know, predicting your outcomes depending on your body qualities. And one of the bits says, if both a man's testicles be alike, he will be king. If the testicles be not alike, he will be fond of sexual intercourse. A person with a single testicle will suffer death by drowning.

• 32:34Speaker 03

  Is that because of a lack? Of buoyancy aids.

• 32:37Speaker 05

  Yeah, you're just always tipping onto your side.

• 32:39Speaker 04

  I think we can assume Archie Baldgrace the Ford.

• 32:43Speaker 04

  Was a double bald man.

• 32:45Speaker 05

  If they be raised up, a person will not live long. And if they hang down, he will live to the age of a hundred. So where do you guys fall, as it were?

• 32:54Speaker 04

  What's confusing is you've read out some there and it sounds like that's a lot. There is so much more to do with the penis. That means I don't even know where you would begin. It starts contradicting itself so much. Here's another set of ways you can tell if you'll be rich or poor. If the penis be small, the person will be rich. Oh, congratulations, David.

• 33:14Speaker 05

  This is the 1980s.

• 33:15Speaker 04

  That's great. If large, he will have no sons. If it be, so that's okay. So now we've gone size. Okay, so you've got two sons, cool.

• 33:24Speaker 04

  If it be. But he is poor. It's so confusing. If it be inclined on the left side, he will be poor.

• 33:33Speaker 03

  Oh, there we go.

• 33:34Speaker 04

  If not straight, he will be without sons and without money. Check this one out. If covered with mussels, he will have very few sons. And I now have on my Google search, can you have a muscly penis?

• 33:50Speaker 04

  And no, you can't. It's a muscle free zone. So what's going on here? That muscly penises existed back in the day. Did evolution get rid of it?

• 34:00Speaker 05

  Yes, that's what happened. In the past thousand years, evolution has just a very speedy, speedy evolution.

• 34:05Speaker 04

  Well, I guess if covered with mussels, you'll have very few sons. They've died out.

• 34:08Speaker 05

  Break out.

• 34:09Speaker 04

  The muscle penis humans are gone.

• 34:13Speaker 04

  Look at this one, because this one is also an answerable one. If the urine fall in a line and twisted, the person will get very beautiful sons. If the urine fall in two, three or four lines and twisting from left to right, the person will be a king. Is that interesting? Oh, king predictors.

• 34:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 34:32Speaker 05

  Two, three or four lines does imply that you've got some sort of hole punch.

• 34:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's some sort of problem there. Yeah, yeah.

• 34:38Speaker 05

  I'd say get it checked out.

• 34:39Speaker 03

  But it's interesting how many things are predictors of being a king, as in there can't be that many kings to go around. So is it all of these things are quite rare, as in because the testicle symmetrical. Also, if your feet are dry, you'll be a king, but you have to have soft soles, closed toes, beautiful red nails and invisible ankle raised like a turtle. So actually, that's very specific and that presumably narrows down the number of people who are claiming kingship. Because I don't know if what you what you can do, who do you report to and say, excuse me, I'm a king?

• 35:06Speaker 04

  But maybe it's like colloquial, like she's a queen. He's a king.

• 35:10Speaker 05

  Oh, how disappointing.

• 35:11Speaker 03

  Very possible, very possible. All of this is to do with astrology, isn't it? And it's to do with divination and, you know, this is a very lengthy text written in the, oh, what century? It was AD, wasn't it? Sixth century. Okay. And the subjects are unbelievable because the number of things from which you can predict an omen, according to this system, enormous. So there are omens from slits of garments, you know, particular. Well, if you've got a slit in your garment, just literally a slit in your clothing, you know, that where it hangs, how it falls, if it's large, small, left, right, all of that, that has particular divination. Omens number eight, the intention of horses. Omen nine, the attitude of elephants. There's just all sorts in there, you know.

• 35:49Speaker 05

  Wait, so what, a slit in your garment could tell you what the intention of horses was?

• 35:53Speaker 03

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

• 36:01Speaker 05

  It is extraordinarily detailed. It seems to have come from some fevered minds.

• 36:05Speaker 04

  Well, it comes from someone, this particular text comes from a very specific person who lived so long ago that we don't know the proper dates of, but it was someone called Vahara Mahira, ancient Indian mathematician, astrologer slash astronomer. He lived about 500, the year 500, roughly. We're not, we're not 100% sure. But this is, this was his text, wasn't it?

• 36:27Speaker 05

  Yeah, and this is what is so interesting about Hinduism. So there are all these texts. So a lot of Hinduism is based in the Vedas. But then there are all these auxiliary texts and this comes from that, which are about Hindu astrology. It's called Geotisha, I think. And this is one of those texts, but yeah, hundreds of them. So you can kind of pick and choose and they are fun. They are more fun than the bits of the Bible that I've read, which granted, aren't that many.

• 36:51Speaker 04

  Well, it's funny, like my sister is married to, my brother-in-law is Indian and they had an Indian wedding and. The astrologer dictated what time the ceremony had to be. And it was at 3:30 AM on Boxing Day. And we were like, okay, well, I guess that's what we're doing then.

• 37:09Speaker 03

  Had they done to annoy him?

• 37:11Speaker 04

  Which country? It's in India, yeah.

• 37:13Speaker 03

  You didn't, you didn't, it's 3:30 AM somewhere.

• 37:17Speaker 04

  It isn't like a beer, no.

• 37:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, so it was like, everyone just had to get up at 2:00 in the morning, get ready.

• 37:23Speaker 05

  Wow, that's so funny.

• 37:25Speaker 04

  But it was because of the astrology, yeah.

• 37:26Speaker 03

  Did you go back to bed afterwards or did you stay up and do the whole?

• 37:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, that was a dry wedding.

• 37:33Speaker 03

  Really?

• 37:33Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 37:34Speaker 03

  Okay. That's an astonishing, because any overseas wedding in its own right is annoying when you're sent the invitation. You've got, now I'm flying where to go to this wedding? To then see, wedding starts 2:30 AM, I think is pushing it.

• 37:48Speaker 05

  And there's no alcohol.

• 37:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, we were like, cool.

• 37:52Speaker 03

  Lots of people get married on certain days, don't they? So I think when it's.

• 37:56Speaker 04

  Saturdays is very common.

• 37:57Speaker 03

  Saturdays is common, but if it's auspicious, then the number of weddings rockets. And there are, obviously, there are a few different astrology systems, but for the very big ones. So for example, there was a day in 2003 where 12,000 couples got married on that one day because it was auspicious. I know there are more than a billion people in India, so I don't know whether that's, it feels like that is reasonably high, but, you know. And there is now a trend, once you've been married a little while, you might be expecting a baby. And there is a huge trend for pregnant women to book Caesarians for auspicious days.

• 38:30Speaker 05

  What if it's three months in?

• 38:32Speaker 03

  There was a woman who asked to have hers four weeks early to avoid any astrological problems. And I think the doctors.

• 38:38Speaker 04

  Creates some more problems, I feel.

• 38:39Speaker 03

  Well, I think doctors don't like it for obvious reasons, which is that, you know, they're trying to just do what is best for the health and, you know, the health of mother and baby. And, you know, women are being asked to be induced, to have their labour induced in particular hours to guarantee the right star sign and things like this.

• 38:55Speaker 04

  Yes. I mean, the planning goes into the conception in a lot of cultures. I know that the Chinese birth chart is often used if people want to have a boy, for example. That's a, you don't try for a kid until the chart tells you.

• 39:08Speaker 03

  Just put a rubber band around one testicle and that's

• 39:10Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 39:11Speaker 03

  Sort of solves it.

• 39:12Speaker 04

  You might drown then. You might confuse your body into thinking you've only got one ball.

• 39:16Speaker 03

  Maybe the biggest geopolitical thing that's ever happened as a result of Hindu astrology, Indian independence, the transfer of power, 15th of August, 1947. Now that happened a day earlier for Pakistan, which was the other, you know, huge area of British territory. Pakistan went a day earlier, 14th of August, and India waited a day for an inauspicious period to end.

• 39:40Speaker 05

  Really?

• 39:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. And various astrologers have claimed that actually Pakistan paid the price for that. Because in 1971, it split off into Bangladesh, which I don't need to say it was for other reasons as well as astrology, the complicated politics happened. Yeah.

• 39:54Speaker 05

  I would say if I'd lived through the partition of India, which did not go very well for many people, I'd be asking for a refund from that astrologer.

• 40:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 40:03Speaker 05

  Are you sure the inauspicious period had fully ended?

• 40:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 40:07Speaker 05

  Yeah. Hinduism, polytheistic or monotheistic?

• 40:11Speaker 03

  I would say poly.

• 40:13Speaker 05

  You'd think, wouldn't you? Only 7% of Hindus say that there are multiple gods.

• 40:17Speaker 04

  Ah, really?

• 40:18Speaker 05

  Yes. So the 61% of Hindus say that there is just one god who has many manifestations, which I really didn't realise that that was the conception of god for most people. And then the other 30% just say there's only one god.

• 40:31Speaker 04

  Interesting.

• 40:32Speaker 05

  Yeah. Okay. Do you want to talk about testicles, Andy?

• 40:35Speaker 03

  I do.

• 40:38Speaker 04

  I feel like you have been this whole time anyway.

• 40:41Speaker 03

  Okay. Jamie, have you ever heard of balls maxing?

• 40:45Speaker 04

  Balls ma- I haven't, but I feel like I should. Well, I'm about to, so.

• 40:50Speaker 03

  Well, it's the pursuit of bigger balls, that's all.

• 40:51Speaker 04

  That's all it is.

• 40:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 40:52Speaker 04

  So it looks maxing, but for your bollocks.

• 40:55Speaker 03

  Right, so, yes.

• 40:56Speaker 04

  Okay. How do you do it?

• 40:57Speaker 03

  Injection of saline solution.

• 40:59Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 41:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, I know. As ever, with all of these trends, is it a trend? Or is it actually a few, a few weirdos on one Reddit thread?

• 41:08Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 41:08Speaker 03

  [email protected]. If you're a keen balls maxer, do write in and please, no photos. Yeah, yeah. There's also ball ironing or scrotox, which is a thing. And all of the, I mean, this is, this is mostly mad stuff, but basically, when studied, scrotums are just not attractive. And this has been studied scientifically.

• 41:29Speaker 05

  Why? Just ask any human.

• 41:32Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 41:33Speaker 04

  Why is that even logged in the scientific study? Why is that a thing? The aesthetics of the study.

• 41:38Speaker 03

  There was a specific study. I think it's because more men, and again, the numbers are small, but it's rising. I was sort of worried about their personal appearance. You know, in that region beneath the beneath the.

• 41:51Speaker 04

  Below the Irish pub window.

• 41:54Speaker 03

  And it was just to see whether any of this makes any difference at all. So it was a small sample size, but women, a range of women were asked rank eight unique scroti on the the Leica scale, which measures how much people like something. Although it was named after someone called Leica, never mind that. But

• 42:14Speaker 03

  of the of the eight scrotums that they were asked to rate, not one of them got a positive ranking. So it's plus three to minus three was the scoring system. All of them scored below zero. And the researchers concluded, I just love the phrase they used. It was barely possible to identify a quote, beautiful scrotum. We must instead speak of the least ugly. So I just think there's no point in doing any of this stuff, you know? If you're balls maxing.

• 42:39Speaker 04

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

• 42:46Speaker 05

  Oh, were they were they not part of the study? I thought some people had balls maxed. Some people had it. Anyway, all I have to say is let's keep funding academia.

• 42:58Speaker 06

  Hi, I'm Jenna Ashkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

• 43:13Speaker 00

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant. So I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic. In a big way.

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• 43:55Speaker 00

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• 44:27Speaker 04

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

• 44:49Speaker 05

  God, that's worse, isn't it? It's so much worse than not winning.

• 44:52Speaker 04

  Yeah. Do we know how much it was worth? Well, um. It was a pound each, who cares? No, no, these would have been big sums. The main source that we have for this is one newspaper, as far as I could find. It's been repeated multiple times in books about improbability and luck and so on. But it was first published, as far as I could tell, on May 16, 1980, in the Morning Union. It was a little piece.

• 45:14Speaker 05

  My birthday.

• 45:16Speaker 04

  Oh, my goodness.

• 45:17Speaker 05

  Oh, and gee, not the year. I'm not that old. Jesus.

• 45:21Speaker 04

  Oh yeah, okay.

• 45:22Speaker 05

  Sorry to interrupt, but it felt worth saying.

• 45:24Speaker 04

  Yes, happy birthday. So, this is what the article said. The odds were one in 2,400. And this was calculated by a University of Rhode Island mathematics professor. And this lady, Mrs. Wilcox, beat those odds. So she said, "It's like buying a new suit with two pairs of pants, getting ready to go out to a special place and getting a huge gravy stain on the jacket."

• 45:52Speaker 05

  What a laboured and unnecessary metaphor.

• 45:54Speaker 04

  It took a while for me to get it, yeah.

• 45:55Speaker 03

  Hang on, Dan. The odds surely are much, much longer than one in two and a half thousand.

• 45:59Speaker 04

  That's what I thought as well. That seems very short, doesn't it? But this is the, this is the original source and it's often used this story as one of those examples of the opposite of luck. How to be unlucky.

• 46:14Speaker 04

  The kind of person who sits on a fountain to give themselves an enema, thinking it is at the same jet propulsion.

• 46:20Speaker 05

  No, that's not unlucky. That's not, oh god, how was I possibly to know that I could have in any way backfired as an idea?

• 46:29Speaker 03

  Because also you'd surely see that the water was blasting out with an unnatural force before you decided to lower yourself onto it.

• 46:35Speaker 04

  Yeah. I guess sometimes the fountains take a break, don't they? So he might have positioned himself over, ready for the next, for the next round.

• 46:42Speaker 05

  I assumed that. He can't, because he can't have pulled himself on while it was going.

• 46:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, if it was that heaviest stream.

• 46:48Speaker 05

  You'd notice.

• 46:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Maybe it's got one of those little senses, you have to wave your hand in front of it, like, or a button like a jacuzzi.

• 46:54Speaker 05

  Yeah, a Dyson fountain.

• 46:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 46:57Speaker 04

  Anyway, back to this.

• 47:00Speaker 03

  I do like stories like this. And I also like, this is bad, but I like stories when lots of people think they've won the lottery and then it turns out they haven't.

• 47:07Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 47:09Speaker 03

  They happen often enough. So there was a story quite recently in The Guardian. It was about 47,000 Norwegians, all of whom got told they'd won big amounts of money on the lottery. And the terrible thing was, it had been got wrong by the lottery company. So they had made a mistake converting euros to Norwegian kroner, which have very different values. So people were told, for example, one guy got told he'd won the equivalent of 86,000 pounds, he'd actually won nine pounds. And it's just, and they, I think when that happens, the lottery company should have to honour it. I think they should have paid 47,000 people a hundred pound each. I would like that.

• 47:49Speaker 05

  Oh, I wonder how extensive his plans had got before he realised.

• 47:52Speaker 04

  I know, I know. I got quite obsessed with the lottery curse. Ooh.

• 47:58Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah.

• 47:58Speaker 04

  You know, people who kind of win a lot of money and then their lives just kind of disintegrate.

• 48:02Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 48:03Speaker 04

  And have you read about someone called Vivian Nicholson? No. So she won a hundred and fifty two thousand pounds in nineteen sixty one, which is like worth millions today, I think. Yeah. On the pools, the football pools with her husband Keith, lovely couple. And she was interviewed when they won this money and they said, what, what, what are you going to do with it? She said, spend, spend, spend. Oh, that's a famous quote, isn't it? It is a famous quote, yes. And she bought fur coats and sports cars and holidays and like she just went mad and

• 48:33Speaker 04

  lost it all within a few years.

• 48:36Speaker 05

  Yeah, it was pretty quickly.

• 48:37Speaker 04

  Keith died in a car crash. Oh, man. Yeah. With a very nice posh car they bought. Yeah. And then she went through four more husbands and they all died. Interesting.

• 48:49Speaker 05

  Did they all die?

• 48:50Speaker 04

  Well, that's done as suspicious. Did.

• 48:53Speaker 05

  That's, you wouldn't become the sixth husband at that stage, would you?

• 48:56Speaker 04

  Right, right. And it, and it, and it became a stage musical. What was it called? Spend, spend, spend.

• 49:01Speaker 05

  Do you know who produced that stage musical?

• 49:03Speaker 04

  Oh. No. Your dad?

• 49:04Speaker 05

  My dad.

• 49:05Speaker 04

  Choking, really?

• 49:07Speaker 05

  And I'm here to tell you, it was not successful.

• 49:10Speaker 04

  But he did spend, spend, spend a lot on it.

• 49:12Speaker 05

  He did.

• 49:12Speaker 04

  And got nothing back.

• 49:13Speaker 05

  Look, I thought it was great, lovely soundtrack, some cracking songs.

• 49:16Speaker 04

  Was it successful in any way? Artistically perhaps?

• 49:19Speaker 05

  It was critically successful and no one went to see it, to the extent that I think his company bought him a big poster, which we still have somewhere, which says, spend, spent, skint.

• 49:30Speaker 04

  Oh, that's brilliant.

• 49:31Speaker 05

  Nicholson and he worked with her on it.

• 49:33Speaker 04

  Really? Right, was she involved?

• 49:34Speaker 05

  Yeah, she was.

• 49:35Speaker 04

  Her photograph is on the cover of the Smith song, Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now. Oh, really? That's her, that, you know, there's a picture of that old lady, or not old lady, that lovely lady.

• 49:44Speaker 05

  That's her.

• 49:45Speaker 04

  That's her?

• 49:45Speaker 05

  Yeah, so sad. So do you think winning the lottery makes you more or less happy in life?

• 49:51Speaker 04

  More.

• 49:52Speaker 05

  Oh, do you?

• 49:53Speaker 04

  I think it makes you a bit.

• 49:54Speaker 03

  Bit more to begin with.

• 49:56Speaker 05

  Well, the vast majority of people say that it makes you less happy because there's such a conception now. Because people have claimed there are all these studies about the lottery curse. There's such conception. So when people are asked, is it destructive to people? They mostly say, yes, it is. And I'm afraid for any lottery losers out there, it's not true. Winning the lottery does indeed make you happier. And there's all this stuff that it's more likely to make you bankrupt. It's not particularly, although I will say that the only two studies that have confirmed that it does make you happier were in Germany and Sweden, which I thought might be about their national mentality. So maybe they're more sensible people who kind of invest it and think properly about what to do with the money. And I reckon lottery winners in Britain are probably still idiots who spend it all.

• 50:37Speaker 04

  Not necessarily though, because I think they've identified that. So I was in a cab the other day and the cab driver was telling me that his best mate had won the National Lottery. And so I said, oh, well, you know about this crazy curse thing where people spend it? How's he doing? And he said, the National Lottery paired him immediately up with a bank manager or a investment consultant. And they put all the money into various different places. He bought a horse for the races, which won its first race, apparently.

• 51:07Speaker 03

  That's how the horses get you in though. All the horses agree, oh, like Jimmy's got a new owner, so we'll impress him today. Get him really on the hook. He'll buy five more horses.

• 51:15Speaker 04

  Keep that funding going.

• 51:18Speaker 03

  All right, I think it's a scam by horses.

• 51:22Speaker 05

  What are they getting?

• 51:24Speaker 03

  Like nose bags full of wheat.

• 51:26Speaker 04

  And a rosette.

• 51:28Speaker 05

  Of course.

• 51:28Speaker 03

  All the carrots you can eat. That's very interesting. So this is another thing that happens when you win the lottery. This might be the Swedish study. Anna, you mentioned different things happen depending on your sex. So men who win the lottery, again, in this Swedish study, were more likely either to get married or stay married. Doesn't make women in the best light, is it?

• 51:51Speaker 05

  No, it doesn't. And I think I can predict it. I think I can predict the fact that's coming next.

• 51:55Speaker 03

  You do have more children either way. That's by the by. If you're a married woman and you win a lot of money on the lottery, the odds of you getting divorced double.

• 52:02Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 52:02Speaker 03

  So I think clearly.

• 52:05Speaker 03

  Well, that it's actually not, it doesn't say a lot of good stuff about many than Jamie's. We're so unbearable.

• 52:09Speaker 04

  Humans are awful.

• 52:10Speaker 03

  Our wives want to divorce us, but they just don't have the capital together yet.

• 52:13Speaker 04

  Right.

• 52:14Speaker 03

  I think that's it.

• 52:16Speaker 04

  But would any of you guys, if you won the lottery, would you admit to it?

• 52:19Speaker 03

  No.

• 52:19Speaker 04

  Because there's this big thing of like, if you, because immediately, great.

• 52:23Speaker 05

  Jesus Christ.

• 52:24Speaker 04

  No, because people come out of the woodwork.

• 52:25Speaker 05

  Even if you won 20 quid. I'm not bloody letting those other guys get their hands on this.

• 52:33Speaker 03

  I don't even like confessing that I did Irish dancing lessons when I was younger. You think I'm going to tell you guys about winning the lottery? It's not going to happen.

• 52:39Speaker 04

  Because in some countries, you, and some states in America, actually, you have to legally.

• 52:44Speaker 03

  No.

• 52:45Speaker 04

  Say that you've done. So people go to extraordinary lengths to try and disguise themselves. Because they have to do press conferences and in some countries, people dress up. So in Jamaica in 2019, there was a guy called A. Campbell, who won 158 million Jamaican dollars. And he arrived at his press conference that he was legally obligated to go to, dressed with a ghost face mask from Scream.

• 53:12Speaker 03

  Brilliant.

• 53:12Speaker 05

  Nice.

• 53:12Speaker 04

  And he's just sat there. Do they make it compulsory so that it's good publicity for the lottery? Basically, like that's a condition of winning? My research didn't go that deep.

• 53:20Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 53:22Speaker 04

  Someone else came as a giant yellow winking emoji. Which is a huge, I mean, I think that's kind of ingenious.

• 53:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 53:30Speaker 04

  I don't know. I feel like if you want a lot of money, you suddenly realise life's going to be a lot classier. You're going to have the best of life. If I then had to get into a big, I don't know, Yogi Bear costume to go to a conference, that would be humbling. Yeah, that's true. But no one would know it's you. Yes. So it's fine. Oh, that's true. Yeah.

• 53:45Speaker 03

  No, I, well, I just think it'll wreck your life, won't it, if all your friends know?

• 53:49Speaker 04

  Well, it's not even that. It's that people, you get all of these sob stories, people coming up to you constantly. Because how could you not, you know,

• 53:57Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 53:57Speaker 04

  give money to people that are in need? Yeah, so you should.

• 54:01Speaker 05

  Then give it to them.

• 54:02Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 54:02Speaker 03

  Well, exactly.

• 54:03Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 54:03Speaker 05

  That would be my answer to anyone who's won the lottery and is pissed off about the people asking them for money. If they need the money.

• 54:09Speaker 04

  Help out.

• 54:10Speaker 05

  There's just, this is similar to Dan's facts.

• 54:13Speaker 03

  I wouldn't do it, Jamie.

• 54:14Speaker 04

  No, I wouldn't either.

• 54:15Speaker 03

  I'd immediately, you'd never see me again, in fact. I'd immediately go into hiding.

• 54:19Speaker 04

  Anna doesn't even take a salary from QI.

• 54:23Speaker 05

  I'd give it to Andy, actually. He made me sign this thing years ago.

• 54:29Speaker 04

  Just give it to him. Okay, cool. To me, that's how I have a roof over my head now. My homeless dad is gone.

• 54:36Speaker 05

  And yet he still has the beard. I've bought him razor after razor. Okay, do you have sympathy for this person? In 2007, there was a headline, "Court rules woman who didn't enter lottery not entitled to money from the lottery." This was a woman who'd entered a postcode lottery. So, um, sorry, this is a woman who hadn't entered a postcode lottery, crucially. So the postcode lottery is where if you're in a certain postcode, then you win a certain amount of money, can be a huge amount of money. Now, I think everyone else, or seven other people with her exact same postcode, did decide to opt into the postcode lottery. She decided to opt out. They won 13.9 million euros each.

• 55:14Speaker 04

  Each?

• 55:15Speaker 05

  Each. 13 million each. That's 13.9 actually, so if we're rounding.

• 55:19Speaker 04

  But after taxes, but even so, it's a lot.

• 55:21Speaker 05

  No, good point.

• 55:22Speaker 03

  It's tax-free, I think, most lottery wins. National lottery wins are tax-free.

• 55:25Speaker 04

  Are they?

• 55:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 55:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, they're tax-free. They're not in America, but they are here. How did you know that, Andy?

• 55:35Speaker 03

  I'm not gonna say, I'm not gonna be on this podcast again without my lawyers and my PR team, okay?

• 55:41Speaker 03

  And my horse.

• 55:45Speaker 05

  So she sued the postcode lottery.

• 55:48Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 55:48Speaker 05

  For emotional distress. She said it had been so upsetting for her. She said one winner ostentatiously displayed his new Porsche in her very sightline, which is hard not to do if you've bought a new Porsche.

• 55:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, the same postcode, literally lives opposite you. So, interesting choice of word, isn't it, Andy? Ostentatious.

• 56:07Speaker 04

  Who is this?

• 56:09Speaker 05

  She said that it was really difficult because every time she had to write her own postcode, it was just another reminder of what she'd lost.

• 56:16Speaker 04

  I mean, it is a shitter, like, you would feel so stupid, but like, surely there were other people in their postcode that didn't win as well?

• 56:22Speaker 05

  I'm not sure I think she might have been the only one, if it's the exact postcode, there are sometimes.

• 56:26Speaker 03

  I mean, all seven of them will probably have moved house quite soon, so that'll be, that'll make things a bit easier.

• 56:32Speaker 04

  We'll see that Porsche again, won't we?

• 56:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. What if you find a lottery ticket which wins?

• 56:39Speaker 04

  On the street?

• 56:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 56:41Speaker 04

  Your pocket. What can you do about it?

• 56:43Speaker 03

  So this has actually happened.

• 56:45Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 56:45Speaker 03

  It happened in 2009, a couple in Swindon found a lottery ticket. It won. Not a huge amount, but £30,000. Not bad.

• 56:55Speaker 04

  Not a huge amount. What's going on here? You definitely have won the lottery.

• 57:00Speaker 03

  No, but compared with millions, you know, it was just...

• 57:01Speaker 04

  No, sure, I'll believe you.

• 57:02Speaker 03

  £30,000 is very, very welcome, right? But it was not theirs. It had been dropped by a woman called Dorothy, who was the rightful owner. She had bought it. The couple spent half the money, £15,000, clearing their debts. Because they had some debts. But then she took them to court over this. She was able to prove that she had bought it because she kept the receipt. And they had to pay back the other half. But they paid it back, I think... I'm not sure whether they paid it back to her or to the lottery. Either way, Dorothy only got half the £30,000 winnings. And Camelot said, "Well, look, if you didn't write your name and address on the back of the ticket, as we advise everybody to do, then we can't prove that it's yours."

• 57:43Speaker 04

  I'm with them. Like, she lost it, sorry.

• 57:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 57:46Speaker 04

  Find its keepers. And also, how is the couple supposed to know who it belongs to? What do you do? Yeah.

• 57:51Speaker 03

  You go to Camelot and you'd say, "We found this."

• 57:52Speaker 04

  Right.

• 57:53Speaker 03

  "Please give me, please give me, have it." Yeah, well...

• 57:55Speaker 05

  Does the receipt show... Do lottery receipts show what the numbers were on your lottery ticket to prove it? Like, how, does the receipt actually prove it?

• 58:01Speaker 04

  There might be a serial number that's on the...

• 58:03Speaker 05

  Yes, there must be.

• 58:04Speaker 03

  Transaction number.

• 58:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, you match that. Hey, do you know that the Sydney Opera House only was able to be built because of a lottery?

• 58:12Speaker 03

  Oh, really?

• 58:12Speaker 04

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

• 58:47Speaker 04

  Okay, that is it. That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast, we're all online. I'm on Instagram at @shreiberland. Andy. At AndrewHunterM. Jamie. At UncleEagle. I know. Should've changed that. And if you want to get to us as a group, Anna.

• 59:08Speaker 05

  You can email [email protected] or we're on Instagram at nosuchthing.

• 59:13Speaker 04

  Yes. Or if you want to contribute yourself to our shows, we have a bonus show every Monday called Little Fish, where we read out your facts. We put ours down and we pick out the best that you have sent in to that email, [email protected]. Andy goes through them all. He brings them to that show. But also, if you have general feedback, he cherry picks the best of those and he brings them to our Club Fish episode, which is called Drop Us A Line. Club Fish, our members' club, it exists on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/clubfish. We've got so many fun things there. There is bonus episodes, there's video episodes of Drop Us A Line. And also, if you want to find out about live shows and so on, nosuchthingasafish.com. That's our actual website. But come back next week because we're going to be here with

• 59:56Speaker 04

  another episode. Thanks as ever to Lean Lee, Ethan Rupperelia, as well as the larger Fishbuster team. And we'll be back again next week with another episode. See you then. Goodbye.

• 1:00:19Speaker 06

  She's been thinking about this sleepover all week, but I think about her food allergies all the time. Fortunately, her doctor prescribed Zolair, omalizumab. It's proven to significantly reduce allergic reactions if a food allergy accident happens. Zolir 150mg is a prescription medication used to treat food allergy in people one year of age and older to reduce allergic reactions due to accidental exposure to one or more foods. While taking Zolir, you should continue to avoid all foods to which you are allergic. Don't use if you are allergic to Zolir. Zolir may cause a severe, life-threatening allergic reaction called anaphylaxis. Tell your doctor if you ever had anaphylaxis. Get help right away if you have trouble breathing or if you have swelling of your throat or tongue.

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  Zolaire should not be used for the emergency treatment of allergic reactions, including anaphylaxis. Zolaire is for maintenance use to reduce allergic reactions, including anaphylaxis, while avoiding food allergens. Serious side effects such as cancer, fever, muscle aches and rash, parasitic infection, or heart and circulation problems have been reported. Please see zolaire.com for full prescribing information. Ask an allergist about Zolaire. This is an advertisement for Zolaire paid for by Genentech and Novartis. ChatGPT for Teens is designed to help teens learn, think critically, and grow their skills. ChatGPT for Teens supports active learning by breaking concepts down. Rather than giving teens the answer, study mode helps teens work through problems, and interactive quizzes test their knowledge and provide immediate feedback. Safety protections are on by default, and parental controls offer families additional

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