Desert Grassland Whiptail Lizard Reproduction

Hi everyone. Just before we start the show we've got a couple of exciting things to announce for July to fill up your July calendar. One is that we're doing a whole bunch of live shows. Yeah, time to get back on the stage and they're going to be at the Royal Institution which is such an exciting venue . Yeah, we've played there once before, but we were missing an essential ingredient and this time we're getting that ingredient four times over. It's Anna Teshinski. It's going to be the four of us on stage for the first time in a very long time and if you want to come tickets are available. They are going quick. I think a few of them are nearly sold out. So if you head to no such thing as afish . com slash live, you can get tickets there. This is obviously in London, the Royal Institution, but if you live overseas, good news, we're live streaming the first show on the twenty first of july. So you can sit in the comfort zone your home and tune in to a room that is one of the headquarters of science knowledge. It's an amazing place. It really is. So do that now, book for all four shows. Why not? They'll all be different . And also earlier on in July to fill up your time, we are doing a quiz, a live quiz that you can participate in on the eighth of july at seven PM . That's right. And we've done these quizzes before, but they were missing an essential ingredient . And this time we have it. It's Anna Toshinski. She's going to be joining us. If you have not joined one of the fish quizzes before, it is an absolute couple of hours of chaos that you will love if you love our show. And in order to get to be a part of it, all you need to do is join Clubfish at the highest tier. So if you go to patreon dot com slash clubfish, you will find Friend of the Podcast as a tier option. Join that and you can join us eighth of July at seven PM and it goes on for an hour and a half or so and it is absolute chaos. Okay, that's all from us me, the essential ingredient and Dan just Dan. Okay, enjoy this week's episode. On with the podc ast. On with the show 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 Schireber. I am sitting here with Andrew Hunta Murray, Anna Toshinsky and James Harkin. 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 my fact . My fact this week is that if you want to make your work of art more profound , give it a pretentious name . This is scientifically the case. You mean just art has been painted or does the podcast count? Is an art form? It's an art form. Is it? It is in this in this particular case it's art painting s as opposed to art podcasts . This was a scientific paper that was released in november twenty nineteen, and it was called Bullshit Makes the Art Grow Profounder . And what they did was forced . We know fourth jokes . I mean for me , that is a lot . They did a study where they show different bits of art and they gave them different names. So one piece had a very mundane name, but then the next person might see the same piece and it had an interesting name that might make them go something like the Death Echo , right? I think this is completely makes sense. So they found it more meaningful, right? This is I guess they were just testing this idea that if you give something a pretentious name and pass into it. Yeah sorry to interrupt. Does it work with human names? Like if you give yourself a pretentious middle name like don't Oh, Andrew Hunter Murray, for instance. Right. No, hang on. You are more profound. What do we think? Write in . What's the hot touch? It's a perfectly good name. Yeah. Wow. Didn't I Very defensive How do you determine pretentious? Who's who's deciding whether Death Echo is pretentious? Good cool. What is pretentious? I think that's a really good question. I found myself asking it the whole time as I was reading this. Like what does he answer it? Oh, why is it like I think pretentious means it's completely unrelated to the content of the work, right? So if it's a painting of a lemon and I call it Sicily and Dreams, you know, Sicily grows a lot of lemon, right? That's a normalish title. I see. Or as if I call it grandfather , then is there I see this the way he said it. All right, the well the well of sorrows, then that is yes . It's much less related to the content of the picture. But if you called it shit sandwich, that's not pretentious even though it's not related . I think it can be. I think it can be pretentious. Yeah, okay. It's a bit, this is all mentioned in my new podcast. What is pretentious? Is it the cat that drinks Evion or is it the owner who feeds the cat Evion? Wow Wow . I'm going to get defensive now . Oh this doesn't it, James. Yeah . I think this is completely reasonable though, because what is apart from an artist creates a work of art of whatever kind and then the viewer engages with it in whatever way. And if you're thinking about it, and if it's more conceptual, it's harder to get your head around. And there is always the question of does this painting mean something or does it mean nothing ? And I didn't know about dis umbration . The art movement disumbration. Which is the epitome of this. It's so cool. So this is an art movement that was started in nineteen twenty four by an artist called Pavelger Danovich and he created this painting called Exaltation, which is of a woman holding a sort of floppy banana starfishy type thing and a tilting hut in the background. And it became very popular. It was reviewed and it look s a bit like kind of naive art, right? Yeah. What it looks exactly like is, do you remember that mural that was defaced by women trying to fix it a few years ago? Picture of Christ Equomo. Yeah. I thought it looked a lot like that, do not think. Yeah. So I thought a lot like Gauguin. Well, I would say a lot of his others looked like Gauguin, but anyway this guy was not an artist. He was a guy called Paul Jordan Smith who was pissed off at people like Picasso who he thought were impenetrable his. And wife happened to have done some still lives which were very realistic that hadn't been very well received . And so he said something like, you know, I've made up my mind that critics will praise anything unintelligible. So he painted this exaltation and it is , I suppose, bad , but there were art journals, like Posh art journals, who one of the best quote I thought was from the French journal, of course, the review of the True and the Beautiful that said Pa vel Jordanovich is not satisfied to follow ordinary paths . His spirit delights in intoxication and he has preyed to the aesthetic agonies which are not experienced without suffering. And then in nineteen twenty seven he went, I was taking the piss guys. Yeah. I thought some of his were actually okay even knowing he was meaning to be silly. Actually did you did you like it more because you knew the story maybe ? Because that is a thing. So there was a study where people were shown a painting by Van Gogh and they said, What do you think of it? And half of them were told it's just by Van Gogh . And the other half were told Oh this is by Van Gogh who cut his ear off . And the people who were told that he cut his ear off liked it more because their artist is slightly wacky and I think that's absolutely again absolutely makes sense. Like for example, when I make jokes, if I have a story behind them as to why the joke is there . When have you ever had a colleague? Story behind any of your jails? Well, that's what I need clearly. And people would laugh a lot more if I said I'm cutting my ear off right now. Wait, so do you think we would actually think one of your cop dramas is good if you came in with a missing earlobe. Oh, there's no question, right? A guy in an alley cut off my ear , but it gave me this amazing idea. Deaf echo cop . Yes . Yes . You only said yes once there, but it bounced up the wall . But this is a thing, isn't it? Tortured Artist is a thing that we get drawn to, the story behind the artist, and they have done a few studies where they've shown portraits and general artwork from the artists from different periods of their life. And weirdly when they voted on them, they voted for the ones that were not done in a point of mental anguish from the artist 's point. Really? And they voted that the better one. So it's interesting that it sort of doesn't correlate with their tortured artists. When someone is calm and happy and productive, that's actually when they're doing the best work. According to . That's really interesting. One encouraging thing I think about this whole tortured artist thing is AI can probably already do art better than any human on earth, right ? But people really care about the st ories behind the people doing the work . And so even if my painting of a unicorn with three legs is not quite as good as one that Chat GPT can do , if people know that I did it because my daughter loves unicorns and I love my daughter, then they're gonna think that it's a better work of art than the thing that the compositor does. Yeah question. I'm going to think it's incredibly naf. Yeah, that's why your art journal folded Abby. It's like, this is all shit . But this is the really interesting thing about how technically good quite or quite a work of art is, right? Because it's not about whether it's an accurate or a realistic drawing of a unicorn. And this all relates to the early twentieth century when photography was coming in in a big way, right? A century before that, if you could paint an incredibly good picture of a lemon , you were set for life, right? They'd be like, this guy paints bloody good lemons. I mean, it looks like a lemon , you know? That's Sicily Dream. It's extraordinary. Right. And then when photography comes along, there's this question of, oh, right, photography's kind of eaten our lunch here. So art becomes more conceptual partly as a response to the fact that you can now just get photos of things. Yeah, I had to think about that . And then that is when you get more titles coming in because the art has become more conceptual and you're getting more like theoretical work underpinning the art . Yeah Yeah.. So that's when these it's like what's the point of me painting a perfect picture of your face when I could just take a photo on my phone. But if I put the nose on the side and the eyes on the top of your head and it tells us something about your mental state then suddenly that's much more interest ing. I think it tells you about your mental state to this . Here's a question for you guys. Yeah, Jackson Pollock. We all know and love Jackson Pollock. Okay . Do you think a child could do it? Yeah. So it's just basically it's dripping lines on a canvas, right? It kind of squiggles on a canvas lots of different colors. Do you think a child could do it? Or not, I think so. Could they get away with a pollock imitation that we would say that's a pollock. Is that what you mean? They're forging a pollock. That's what I'm asking. Yeah. Let's say for instance, Andy forges a pollock. Yeah, that sounds like a euphemism . And a ten year old forges a pollock. Don't come in, mum. Mine, mom . I'm forging a pollock. What's that dripping? Like a ten year old Fogg is a pollock, or Amby Fogges a pollock, which one is going to be the best forgery? I think a child will be more naive about it and therefore better . You are absolutely right. When computers have analyzed ones that children have done, ones that adults have done, and ones that Pollock have done, the Pollock ones are more like children's ones than like adults . Because they're more simple, people like them a bit more because it's almost like shapes are easier to see and like but when adults try and do it, they always try and do it a little bit too complicated. Right. That is the skill of the artist in a way to reclaim that innocent childlike state. The innocent state, exactly. Here's an interesting thing relevant to the fact that this is about names of art. A lot of artists don't like naming their art pieces . That's why you often see something just called untitled. And a lot of people like Ringo Star of the Beatles , when he is giving names to his artwork, he has to pick a name because when you're saving a file on MS paint , you have to write a name, right? So you just call them one, two, one, two, three, four, doesn't it? Ring goes artwork one, ring goes outwork, this one. Ring goes artwork, finished, finished, this one . Real final . But yeah, so they have to give it a name. They're often asked if it was going on exhibitions, touring and so on. What's this called? And they have to give it the name so it can be cataloged and not lost. And this is a thing that only started happening sort of as the eighteenth century came around. Before then, you just didn't give names to any pieces of art because they didn't travel around. They were staying in people's houses. You didn't need a name for them. They were either massive or they were on the wall of a monastery or whatever, as in they were locationally specific. Yeah . And if it was on the monastery, you would know it was St. Clair devouring an angel because you're a monk, so you know that stuff . Or if it was in your house, you know it's Uncle George . You don't need a title for Leonard s, Leonardo , good lemon. Also nobody can read So no one's coming like going, what's this? It's that melon . So then also the names that we do have for certain paintings are not names given by the artist Mona Lisa. That was someone many, many, many years later who just needed to give it a name and that stuck. Well, I think that modern paintings do benefit from titles, so you know what's in the artist's head because that's got to be the point of all this pollock bollocks. And yet it doesn't seem to matter. I mean, there's this case of Pacify, which is one of his most famous paintings, which I actually think is quite n ice to look at, painted it in nineteen forty three, and it was originally called Moby Dick. Now, Percyfi is the queen who gave birth to the minosaur when she shacked a bull. Moby Dick obviously is Moby Dick, a whale in a story. Yeah . And so it's look like either of them. Obviously not. It looks like a load of things that a child could paint. But I find that bizarre that Pollock called it Moby Dick thinking it was that. And then he just showed it to Peggy Guggenheim and another art crit ic and they said, Like the painting, don't like the title. Have you thought about calling it Pacific? Because one art critic had read the story that morning? And Pollock was like, yeah, we could switch to that. So what then am I supposed to be saying in that painting? But does it matter? Well, we can't call them all squiggle. It's gonna give them some name Squiggle. People do. Some people say just unlike squiggle number three or whatever. Yeah. So Whistler , famous for his mother his mum. Whistler's mother. He called that painting arrangement in gray and black number one . And what that point of that was is he was trying to draw attention to how it's composed rather than look at my mum , you know, so that's why he calls it that. Yeah. Well, he shouldn't have such a fit mum whistle. Yeah. But it didn't work because everyone just calls Whistler's mother, obviously, and they're more interested in the son painting his mother, you know? Also, if you say the gray and black painting, there are just loads of those around . Whereas if you say the one of Whister's mother? Yeah, they when people started giving it the right name, you know, the black and white and gray one. People were like, Which one, you know, the one of Whister's mother. Yeah, I know it was eventually. It's a title that sounds like you're trying to be woke in some kind of way. You know, the black and white wine black and white one. You've seen it. I don't see color . It seems to me quite obvious that he didn't name that because if he did it it would be called my mother . Have you seen his your mom's series of page? Wonderful . Stop the podcast. Stop the podcast. Hey everyone, this week's episode of Fish is sponsored by Saley. Yes, this is my first advert I've done coming back off maternity leave and I'm just so excited that it is because Saley is such an essential thing that everyone should have. It is an app that you download and it allows you to sign up to an eSIM plan in any of two hundred countries in the world and it'll save you racking up all those international horrendous roaming bills. You just download it once, it's really affordable prices. It means that you save time when you arrive in a country, you don't need to wait in a queue grabbing something and you can avoid scams. It is fantastic. I use it all the time now when I go abroad. It's such a weight of my mind and you can get an exclusive fifteen percent discount on Saley Data Plans by using the code Fish at checkout. So download the Sally app or go to sali . com slash fish to use it as soon as you're going abroad. That's right, get it now. On with the show On with the podcast . Okay, it is time for fact number two and that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that most Disney princesses are ambidxtrous . I just thought we'd done too much pretentiousness . So we're going lowbrow. Is that because they've reversed the film for the projector. So obviously it's backwards. Left handed, but then they thought they had to compensate. So they remade them right handed and they ended up with both. Yeah, see my colleague Anna. Yeah, for the clarification. Is it not enough to have a sixteen inch waist and huge boobs and long blonde hair and to be perfect, you have to be good with both hands as well. Bot enough about you . So this is a study from Montclair University and they looked at how Disney princesses have evolved over the years and really they wanted to see whether attitudes towards handedness has changed and they did it by looking at the princesses. They found that before nineteen ninety two, most princesses were right handed and most villains were left handed, or more villains were left handed than princesses . But in general, things have kind of changed over the last twenty, thirty years and now the characters are much less strongly handed than they ever have been before and they have quite a few left handed princesses quite a lot of right handed villains now and they don't really know why it is. They put it down to perhaps that there was a group of animators called the nine old men who had these kind of ideas that villains should be left handed and that good people should be right handed. Someone else said that it could be the handedness of the animators. They've just employed a load of left handed animators and that's why they're doing it. I personally think probably it's because the animators keep forgetting what they're supposed to do. You can make them right with whatever hand is closest to the camera. We put the pot on this side so you can get it with that hand . But this is what they say. They think that it might be due to the left handedness being less of a bad thing than it has been in the past. Yeah. Absolutely. Because people were left handed people in the fifties and sixties in schools were forcibly made to write with their right hand So a good example of that is Ringo Starr. And we've mentioned this many, many years ago, but he was left hand ed and he got made to become a right handed person in his childhood, but then he slowly after he left school and left home went back to being left handed. So he drums as a left handed drummer, but he writes with his right hand. He'll sign with his right hand. So he's artworks. What was he produced? I think he draws them with his right hand, but he saves the file with his hand . Yeah, it must just be that it's less of a social stigma. There's much less. Well, you see it must be. I think it's bought it just because it's random, right? No, it's all thinking through the old no, but in the old days there was more social stigma. Even though this is my fact, I will kind of agree with Anna. Also, it's a very small sample size. Yeah, true. Yeah, how many Disney Princesses are? It's been like a dozen. Because they are, they're always like an indication of the society that they're produced in, right? The Disney Princesses 'cause the very early ones are homemakers, you know, snow white, Cinderella, Aurora, who I didn't know was in Sleeping Beauty . And then the modern ones are all CEOs and stuff. Moana. Girl bosses. Cereal running good in the sea ? Is it maybe like some wave power that she's getting? What's Rula doing? It's running like under the sea tidal solutions incorporated you know . But isn't you know , what agency is what I'm saying. They've changed enormously, although I can't believe Ariel is the most modern Disney princes you can think of changed. Come on. It was more of which one is least likely to be a CEO. Better CEO . No, you're absolutely right. Disney printes now are just they're sort of like painfully strong, confident woman. I'm one who's just like as lazy and crap as me. Where's the lazy crap on? I ask you . One thing that hasn't changed that much is hand size. I thought we were actually reading this ages ago and now I can't not see it. If you compare hand size of women to hand size of men in Disney films, it is insane. They are on average three to four times bigger and I was looking at the difference in hand size between women and men on average. A men's sounds are twelve percent bigger , eight to twelve percent. Four times bigger. Yes. It's mad, isn't it? You're just watching Beauty and the Beast. I'm telling you, what was it that was looked at? How to train your dragon two weirdly? Nome and Juliette Frozen. Your times bigger. Nomio and Juliet. Frozen is the only one of those that has a Disney princess. Yes. This is we're just women and men. Right. I wanted a I once did a table read through for Sherlock Nomes two . Oh, sorry, Nomo and Juliet II Sherlock Gnomes. Who did get a load of improvised comedians in to read the script? Who did you read as? I'm very proud to say I played Sherlock Nomes. Wow. And then they went with someone called James McAvoy for the real thing, but what was going on there? I thought I was auditioning. I was not. Your hands are too small . Maybe if I read this really well, they won't get the role to James McAvoy Disney princesses, I did not know that this is a canonical thing. There are only thirteen of them and they have to be very specific kinds of person . So they have to be human , they can't start off in a sequel. What about the mermaid? Yeah, you're right. That's controversial. I guess you're just saying she's half she's only half human. But she's a princess, for sure. She is a princess. How does it end? Does she stay in human form? No, she has leg hers at the end, doesn't she? Yeah, exactly. So she does stay in human form, and she doesn't go back to fish. So maybe that's right at the end she qualifies. Fishman in the sea, isn't she? But they can be born royal or they can marry royal or they can be Mulan who apparently just gets around it. Anyway, there's I found this wonderful argument on the website Polygon that there is a Disney owned franchise which does have a queen, who should be included in the Disney Princess Canon, which is the queen from Alien you know, nigger her hands. Well , but you know , she's bipedal, so that's a she's human like in some respects . You know, she's a wonderful mother. She's explored multiple planets, defends her children. She's a strong woman, inspirational figure from a magical far off land. I just love the idea. Does she have blond hair and big boobs? It's not clear . She's got big eggs. I'll say that . We eggs on her . Yeah, two of the princesses that were part of the canonical thirteen got demoted . So I don't know what the number was when they were there. You should be I'm sorry . Yeah, it was Tinkerbell. Was one? Tinkerbell from Peter Pan. Not a human, not a human, fairy. So she got put in her own new category and she was a sidekick, she didn't have her own sidekick. There's quite a few interesting things that qualify for it. And in the hunchback in Notre Dame, Esmeralda got taken away because of princess. But neither is Mulan. The whole thing's right . Exactly falls apart on his examination. Basically whoever they're going to put in the big show in Disneyland , isn't it? Yeah, basically that's it. If the film does really, really, really well, you're likelier to be made a princess. As in some films just bombed and they know Mulan So Mulan is a Chinese girl who is not a princess or anything , right? This is the original Chinese story . So she's like a peasant girl and then she joins the army, pretends to be a boy and then they find out that she's not a boy and then she saves the country or something . I can confirm that's also in the Disney film. That's in the Disney film. What isn't in the Disney film is in the original stories she served under the Emperor Yang of Sui , who wanted to take her as a concubine , but she took her own life before he could. That's in the seat have you not seen Milan Tube? I haven't seen him. Very short film Milan Tube. Yeah Wow. Yeah. Gosh. Oh, she could be a concub ane in Moulin Rouge. Brilliant . I haven't seen the Hunchback and Notre Dame one , but I do know that the character Esmeralda in the book certainly does seductive dances for nearby men. And I don't know if she made it into the film. Well, you know who you know who did it? Yes, oh my gosh, there's the most dark song in the film about how much the villain fancies and wants to shag Esmerelda even though he also hates her. It's very inappropries. You know who voiced Esmeralda. I believe I'm right in saying this, Demi Moore. Who was in Stripes? Hey , well, as well as many rests, your honor . That was you presented that was, such a flourish. Yeah, and it's really good knowledge . But I don't think it means what you think it means . It's just like we said, Demi more, it was like everyone was automatically supposed to go, Oh who was famously inscribed? I can't believe I had to say the excribit of that sentence in fact. And go, Oh, it's come full circle. Okay . There's a toddler woman in the rescuers. Okay, pardon. Sorry, what's the rescues? The two mice. Mice. Dale, I think. Yeah. It's so much like Chip and Dale, but Bernard and Bianca Mice ride at a large bird. This is the topest woman you're talking about. It's not the dog with woman. Chippendale are such better names for kids animation characters than Bernard and Bianca. It was the Simon. Wait a minute. What other name of the strippers? Chippendales. Oh , this is coming for Sir. I rest my case we go and you know who played Chip Demi Moore . Andy did the run through . There's a top list woman. She's not meant to be there, but this is amazing. I'd never heard this because you know there are all those in the lion king he plumps in the sand and it spells out sex and there's always rumours like that. This is for real. In nineteen seventy seven the first rescuers was released, it wasn't until nineteen ninety nine that it was noticed that in a few of the shots, Bernard and Bianca on the back of the big bird, the albatross, and in the background, in the window, there's a real, it's not a cartoon. It's a real image of a toppless woman. I couldn't make out her head. It's just her boobs and sort of slimmed torso. And it stayed in between nineteen seventy seven and nineteen ninety nine when someone pointed out and Disney suddenly had to say we don't know who put that in there. Wow. No animators are putting their hands up and saying it was me and they removed it in a very recalled all the videos. Imagine if you're the woman and you know your boobs were in the rescuers. You're not gonna watch it like in the cinema and go wait a minute, rewind, rewind, rewind . Darling, how dare you ? I really like the way all these studies are done on Disney princesses and the social attitudes that they reveal or how they change and all of this because they get a lot of stuff pinned on them. And I know it does have an influence on the children watching, right? I do know that, but I think sometimes academics might go a bit far . So there was a study by a Durham University expert about the cultural perceptions of work who says that these princesses and these films may have contributed to reluctance among the younger workforce to join traditional workplaces. So you're always hearing, right, that the kids these days, they don't want to come into the office all of this. Maybe that's because Cinderella has to slave away for her stepsisters. And that's why millennials want flexibility of the workplace. Millennials aren't watching Cinderella lads. University academics. Exactly. Maybe they all want to grow their hair really, really, really long and sure lyly. Sure surely you do want to do the work because if you work hard enough eventually you'll get swept away by a prince or something. Is that what happens? Yeah , and that's and exactly this same expert said, if you think about that situation in a modern workplace, that's a dangerous view to you. You just carry on being exploited because you think everything is going to turn out to be okay. I just don't think that's a reasonable there's plenty of stuff to pin on those films, but I don't think people wanting to work from home two days a week is but I Cinderella. I also think it's a stretch to call people who do these studies academics, to be fair. Wow. And I'm very happy with them to confront me about me. Interesting. It comes out as big crunching fist again. I've just got ambidextrous stuff. So there was the Ambidextral Culture Society in the early nineteen hundred ' s, which I hadn't heard of, but it is the cause of boy scouts handshakes . I also didn't know this I don't know that I Boy Scout handshakes always left handed apparently . And it's because there was this guy called John Jackson , who was a head teacher at a Belfast School and he decided that we all should become an dextrous because we 're wasting half of our brain by being either right handed or left handed. He wrote that each hand eventually should be absolutely independent of the other. One hand should be writing a letter while the other can play the piano with no diminution of concentration , he said, Why are you playing on the piano with one hand Chopstick . You're right. Piano was a terrible example. Maybe this guy was an idiot. I mean, his theory is pretty wacky, but he said he imagined a brave new world of two handed two brained citizens. And it was a very pervasive view that training yourself to use your other hand would make you smarter. It really pervaded until the fifties and sixties when they disapproved it. And Baden Powell was one of the adopters who was vice president of the society and who believed that, you know, make yourself right with the other hand and your brain will get better. Actually, it doesn't at all, and there's some evidence that maybe it would make it worse because the reason that we have lateralized brains is so that we can specialize in certain things. Was anyone else here in the scouts? Yeah. Are you in the Scouts? Yeah. Did you ever do this left hand ? I've never heard of that either. Yeah. I don't think of Soutcs as having a handjack. I think of Mason's as having one. Yeah. Freemason. I'm sure they're sure it does exist, but we didn't do it at Boltz. I know no, I think maybe it might have died out. You know, we're all getting more ambient extras. Oh we? Yeah, as we get older, one thing that we do gain as we get older is more ambient dexerity. There was a two thousand seven study that looked at a bunch of different age groups, youngest group age twenty five on three writing tasks, much better with their right hand, or their left hand and everything, depending on if they're right or left handed. At fifty and they were better with their dominant hand at some things, but like at an aiming task , they were about equal. And then by seventy and eighty people were equally good with both hands at most of the tests and it's because you're just quite shit at that point . It's literally just because your right hand gets worse and worse and worse until it's as bad as your left hand or vice versa. So you're kind of not ambixtrous, you're ambiinister. I'm afraid that's the case, yeah . Okay , it is time for fact number three and that is Andy. My fact is Saddam Hussein and Nelson Mandela had the same tailor where there are always awkward waits in the property in the room . So this was a guy called Respaesar. The really strange thing about him is he was a Kurd, right? In fact, I think he might still be alive . But you know, Saddam Hussein visited enormous evil on the Kurdish people. But as RESEPaes Car said, he was a good custom er to me . So Salam went there for, I think, eighty suits. He was a very loyal customer. And this guy Caesar has served all sorts of people, lots and lots of world leaders. So Pakistan's president , Afghanistan's Nelson Mandela was only a one time customer. So yeah , he bought a jacket and trousers from Resipes' label. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not sure he even went to the shop or anything. Well he, was probably on Robin Island at the time. So yeah. So it was in two thousand, so I think he's welcome by then. Do we know why he didn't do repeat custom? You know, did he not like the clientele? Yeah. Yeah, well shots of Husaine being sent to him. Nelson Mandela had very specific suits that he wore, didn't he had like African patterns on his stuff so he wouldn't have worn Yeah. So maybe this was for a rare rare occasion . Do you think Mandela would make her your headline And,y, or I think you'd forgive me for it . This guy I saw an interview with him who said that he watched Sadam's trial with great interest because he wanted to see how he looked in his suit Yes, the only guy watching for that reason. He said that sales in Iraq tripled during the trial. Yeah, because people were watching saying , love the fit. Why would you need ever eighty suits? How sweaty a man was Saddam Hussein? Well, I mean, I suppose that's kind of the Zuckerberg thing, isn't it? You know, you have like you open the wardrobe and it's just all the same clothes. So you don't have to think about what you wear just taking another suit off the thing. But that means that he only does a wash once every two months.. Yeah Yeah , that's true. That's true. So it's a very busy day when you see Sadam at the launderette I don't know, Anna, why did why did it kill us to get dozens of cars? When you can only drive one at a time. I don't know. It's not all about practicality. Exclusively. Why have the Royal Family got such a big house? I can just live. I'm too down. You can only have running living room. You've only got one ass to sit on one sofa What I've been wearing the same pants for ten years and I'm absolutely fine When he was in court, I love this little detail in an interview that he gave where they said, Do you know what you provided for him? And he brought out a list from his files. And he said it shows two complete outfits with a total cost of one thousand five hundred and forty , and we included two pairs of socks as a gift. A little extra detail of the socks is wonderful. Gosh, yeah. Speaking of socks, did you know you can buy socks made by the Pope's official tailor? Amazing. Yeah, I've bought some but they've not arrived yet. Have you? Yeah, I've got some coming in the post. We might bring it up in a duel sometime. Oh wow . But yeah, the tailor of the pope is called Gamerelli. And basically in the late twentieth century the rules on like investments for priests kind of changed and there were not as many priests anymore. And when the Iron Curtain came down, the priests in Eastern Europe were not getting these clothes anymore. So basically they lost started losing a load of money . And so they decided to diversify and started making normal suits for normal people . So they were making stuff for priests and popes and stuff, but now you can just buy one of the suits and you can buy socks. And are they sort of novelty socks with like lots of brightly colored box on them? They're the ones that the pope wears and neither the same color . No because I so James I was reading about this too Gamerelle because they do how's you sayo?ly H socks? Well, h notoly socks, as it 's not bag . But they're an individual pairs and they're knee length silk apparently. Lengthil . And if you're a different level in the church, you get tos wear a different color.. They do It's like karate belts. You get black scarlet and violet socks and only the pope. So hang on, are you saying you've managed to get an egg to sell them? If you put your dresses like the Vatican, you're having a redirected to a PO box. They supposedly they only sell the white knee length ones to the Pope. But I maybe you're wrong on the website they sold them. I don't know. Maybe I've ordered something different. Maybe a different shade or something. Maybe there's going to be a Swiss guard arriving with them to rescue and take you into custody. Well, maybe I bec'omed pope as soon as I put them on. Okay. The easy way in the pope . This is a movie. This is a movie . The pope sucks basically. There's a mix up at the sorting office. Yeah. The pope gets my sort of like wacky go lf socks and I get his. And then when I put them on I turn into the pope beautiful and he wins at PGA He has to do a podcast and he I'm gonna say it he's out of his depth . Those are the kind of stuff we do? Yeah. Right He delivered amazing speeches. He knows fuck all about Disney Princess . This is a good film. Oh wow. You know, your question earlier about why would you need so many suits? James Bond on average will have sixty suits of the same kind s not real. Yeah . You need per film. So this is when they're filming. If they're doing a scene where he's in a particular suit, sixty versions of that suit will be tailored made to Savile Row standards and they use Tom Ford for the last Daniel Craig ones. Thirty of those will go to the stunt doubles who will be acting in the scene. Now this is for an action scene. Okay , but he basically has an impossible suit because when he's on a motorbike, the coat that he's wearing has longer arms specifically made so it doesn't come up. Think of Inspector Gadget, right? Exactly. It's so odd. But his trousers are tailor made to be longer if you see him on a motorbike in that suit so that his ankles don't show. It doesn't look like Rushsoon, I kind of imagine . That's amazing. So Bond is wearing technically an impossible suit. That's amazing. Why doesn't everyone do that? Why don't all men when they want to cross their legs immediately put on a different pair of trousers? Another famous tailor is a guy called Jonathan Mayer who was Bau Brummell's tailor and he and Bao Brummell, the reason I bring it up now is that they invented a new kind of trousers which had a loop underneath and you would put the loop underneath your feet . And so whenever you moved your legs, it wouldn't ride up or down. I don't want to reveal my social status here, but just like jogpers . Yeah, actually , I don't like jogger, but I do a bit of horse riding myself say James exactly like that. James has been on a horse once in your absence and he's not let us forget about it. But did they squeeze you into a pair of choppers with those elastic bits around the foot? No, they did Not pro yet. Several row tailors are having a good time at the moment. Are they ? Can you guess why? Because you've just mentioned them on the podcast. Yeah, so if you guys do want to send a few over to us, we'll read out our inside legs at the end of the show . And I like a Disney princess, I dressed to both sides . Is it to do with pop culture, Edward? It's to do with something that's happening a lot now. Okay. What's happening a lot now? People are wearing suits. People are having to go back into the office. No, people on Zoom wearing suits because they want to seem professional. It's got an O and a Z in it, this thing that people have. Australia, no, not Ozz. I was on Wizard of Oz yeah, there's a big Judy Garland core trend in the city at the moment. A lot of businessmen wearing gingham suits . So many pairs of red shoes there. It's a zempic. So basically people are having a zempic, finding their shape is changing quite a bit, and they're then getting clothes altered, you know, maybe clothes that fit them perfectly a year ago, but now really don't . Or clients are saying things to one tailor like I'm going to wear a thick velvet dinner jacket for the first time. That's what you naturally do when you've lost a stone Getting Borimental. Circling back to Saddam Hussein and having so many different having so many different suits while in jail. He was on the pen, wasn't he? No, but he was losing his weight going up and down. And so they did do it to different sizes . Yeah. Well, one of my favorite conversations with a tailor , and I've got a lot in my bank is about that. It's about how size changes and the tailor needs to adjust to that. And this is the conversation that Lindon Johnson had with this tailor, which if you haven't heard it, is absolutely fantastic. You have to look up on YouTube. He's ordering six new pairs of trousers. And Lindon Johnson, I think we probably talked about him, he's a quite unpleasant man. He's doing a power play a lot of the time and he's really obsessed with his penis . And he said I want a half an inch left in the waist . I varied ten to fifteen pounds a month. Is that a good Lyndon Johnson? No, he's more. Has anyone heard him? I've not heard it in England. I don't think the voice is so well known that yeah. I think just tell us what he said. He says look, I vary ten to fifteen pounds a month so you need to leave half an inch in the waist so I can let it out if I want, which I thought quite impressive that he can let out his own trousers when he wants to. And then he said the crutch down by your nuts hang is always a little I've gone back into it . You can't say down where your nuts hang in an English accent, can you? The crutch down where your nuts hang is always a little too tight, so when you make them give me an inch so that I can let it out there because they cut me. It's like riding a wire fence. And when I gain a little weight, they cut me under there. Leave me an inch from where the zipper that's a big burp he does . From where the zipper ends , round under the back and back to my bumhole and it just goes on and on this incredibly in depth conversation with this tailor talking about how much more space he needs for his balls and his bum hole. And then at this end Who is recording this by the way? I don't know why it's recorded, I guess it's just a matter of public records. Why else conversations? But probably because it's America there and said right, this needs to go in the presidential library. Now we need to preserve this artifact for all time. it's just a bizarre touch at the end where then the guy says, Where would you like it? Sent and s heays, The White House, look, I have to go, I've got to go to a funeral now, so let me hand you over to my boy who will take it from here. Right, right . It's just amazing. Very interesting. Yeah, I'm sure tailors any tailor who doesn't know to conceal the bumhomle isn't doing their job . It's good out of me. It feels like as soon as you get your cloth, that's the first bit of cloth that goes there . And then you work out from there, don't you? It's amazing. I wonder if you searched the Library of Congress with the word bumhole. How many times has that come up? Might that be the unique moment President Garfield, of course. He ate through his bumhole. So maybe maybe there's a book in it Powerful bumholes . Why else bump first bumhole? Yeah. There's something in this. I think we should focus on the body swap with you and the pope first . But I do think that's good . Not paying your tailor is a big thing, isn't it? Sorry. What do you mean? Not paying your tailor. You know, the old days, if that was the mark of a true aristocrat, was that your tailor was constantly saying, My children are hungry, I need to eat. You're saying, Yeah, I think I'll pay in a year. Really? Yeah Not paying a tailor was a huge, you know, thing for the upper classes. Okay My friend is a tailor, a Savile Road tailor, and weirdly she was saying this just the other day. She says, No one ever pays. Yeah. She's like, it's nuts. We have to invoice for months and months and machine at the till now. I just don't understand. So basically I only bring this up because of speaking of world leaders Taylors. There was a nineteenth century one called E. Torts, which was a great name . And Churchill never paid. Spent six years, I think, owing for some gold lace trousers . And then another tailor he had later on, nineteen thirty seven, he owed them a one hundred ninety seven quid, quite a lot of money in today's money, over ten grand . They were so insistent on saying look, can you just pay us for the clothes, please that he said, right? I'm not coming anymore. I'm dumping you it was my tailor. Outrageous. Did they fight him for the breaches? Okay , it is time for our final fact of the show and that is Anna. My fact this week is that desert grassland whiptail lizards get pregnant by pretending to mate with each other . Yeah. This is crazy. Yeah, this is pretty amazing. Yeah, it's basically by grinding. Oh sorry, I wish I hadn't used that word. I feel sick. These are amazing though . So many species of whiptail lizards are all female. Desert grassland whiptail lizards are an all female species. They're across North America and basically this fat was discovered in nineteen seventy nine , there was a biologist called David Cruz who had collected a bunch of them because he'd heard these are all female. This is amazing. I would have a look how this works . And he noticed one lizard in the cage biting its cage mates legs and tail , which he knew was a sign that they were mating because that's what they do. They bite their legs and tail and then climbed on top of her and started riding her, adopting, as I think he described it, the donut pose, which is kind of where I imagine you're riding someone, but also you're bending your head around and biting their tummy and there's a little hole in the middle that you could sort of fit your hand through. They looked like a bracelet or a donut in fact. But these were female lizards, both females. Females . And the thing is this actually helps them to get pregnant because by simulating this act of mating at the right time it triggers these hormonal changes in the receivers as in the person underneath body , that mean that the egg can start developing into a new lizard. Yeah, it's really interesting. And at different times of the month, they'll be either like the male as it were version or the female version different times of the month if they,'re higher in progesterone, then they'll know that they're to go on top. And they do it as a couple. Is it the same two lizards or might they find another lizard to act the male role ? I think they go to find another. I think maybe they pass it on. So once you've got pregnant as a female, then you can play the male role and go and pass it forward to someone else. Oh wow. Yeah, pay it forward. It's nuts. Well, there are no nuts. That's the thing, isn't it? It's nutless. Nutless . One thing I found interesting is there's a guy who studies this called Professor Alexander Mikaev , and he says that it's almost I mean he slightly anthropomorphizes it but he says it's nature and evolution placing certain checks on eliminating sex completely. Even though they're not having sex, they're still going through some of the motions and that means that sex is not going away because actually having sex is a good thing for animals because it usually means that they can diversity. Yeah, you get diversity in your genome and stuff like that. But this is the really bizarre thing because they are doing the activity of sex, but they're not having sex. And as a result, the one who gets pregnant, her gen ome is completely replicated in the next generation, right? So they're not getting the advantage of sex which is mixing up your genes and more resilience and diversity across the species . They're just having to do the sex and tennis like a little clone. Beginning to do the sex, Andy. Let's not say having to do the sex. Okay . All right. I wasn't aware we were suddenly a sex positive podcast . But actually, I think in some of these lizards, I don't know if it's this exact same species , but they have twice as many chromosomes as other lizards. And so actually it's not an exact clone because let's say you have a hundred different genes or whatever, you might get half of them from one of your set of chromosomes and half of them from the other set of chromosomes. So actually there is some shuffling going on and probably what happened is this species is a hybrid of two other species but when they mate it one time , they somehow got both sets of chromosomes inside them. Yeah. And in fact, they've got because we have like two sets and they've got a third set which makes it so they've got three sets so they're doing all this shuffling like recombination we call it when we do it via sex . So yeah, it's not what I thought at all. Like carpenogenesis doesn't lead to clones. So it actually seems that if we could perfect it, men become okay I'm actually Look, just I want to read a quote that I really enjoyed because I thought this was good. It was in a Nautilus article, I think, website Nautilus, which is very good. Sex is far from the perfect way to reproduce. It imposes a huge cost on a species and that cost is called males. If half a species is made up of males, obviously, who can't make babies, like what's the point in that half just a massive waste? So there was a big push for this in the nineteen seventies , especially among radical feminist lesbians who basically said this is happening in the animal kingdom. Let's do it in humans as well and let's get rid of all the men. And when you look into it, basically, they're all radical feminist lesbians , but they're also quite eugenicistic and also quite into racial superiority. There's one amazing paper about these people written by Greta Resenbrink , but it's almost impossible to like find anyone who was into this idea who wasn't also eugenicist necessarily saying I'm definitely married to it. But for evolutionary purposes you can see basically you can see the advantage of not having a male. Right. Everyone can have a baby at one point or another, which means he can spread . And there was it all came from some work by a friend of the podcast actually , Dr. Helen Spurway , and she was the one who was, I think in a relationship , in a relationship with JBS Haldane, and those two did loads of experiments about not having oxygen in their bodies . So as well as doing that, she did a lot of work on guppies who reproduce through parathenogenesis, and she was the one who said I, don't see any reason why humans can't do it. In fact, there's there are reasons why humans can't do it. But she was one who said it. And it was her work that all of these people started jumping on the back off saying, Well, let's do this. How did they propose to do it. There's quite a big jump isn't there from let's do this to let's start reproducing parthenogenetically. Yeah, I think the idea well, for instance, when this started, there was one tabloid who kind of got on the back of it as well and started sending out messages saying have you ever given birth to someone without having sex? And loads of people replied going, Yes, I did. It was me. It was me. This is really cool. One percent of Americ an mothers nearly claim their births are virgin births . Come on, why do you say that? I read it completely insane. No, I read it. Okay . I find it fascinating. Okay , because there's qualifications behind that one percent. Absolutely. So this comes from twenty thirteen and it was nervous eight percent of respondents who said that they gave birth despite being virgins. And the good news is there are things you could do to make it like clear that you can have a virgin birth. So thirty one percent of the Virgin Mothers had signed a chastity pledge. That really helps . If it's during advent, that's even more helpful. I think something like sixty percent, some mad number found out they were pregnant during advent brought up to Christmas . You're likely to be younger and also to have parents who did not tell you about sex or contraception. Those are the things you can do to really game the system and ensure you have a virgin birth. Very cool. Yeah, very nice. Hey, by the way, this whole thing that these two lizards go through, the act that you were describing, if you would like to experience that yourself, there's actually a workshop you can do to simulate it. Where you kind of get in a donut with someone. Yeah, well I assume the donut must be part of it. There was there's a play that gets put on in various places around the world by two performance artists. It is called The Desert Grassland Whiptail Lizards. It's a dance drama. They dress up as the lizards, they come out on stage , and there's sort of scientific captions explaining what's going on. They just sort of put their tongues out and so on. And then they start mating on stage . And then you see a postcoatal moment at the end of the play and it was so successful . It was so successful. It's literally called desert grassland whiptails lizards. They needed to give it a more pretentious name because at the moment I'm not really into it. . But there is a donut of erotica would be good. Oh yes . Donut of love. Donuts of love. Double glazed . Oh uts have glazed. They're glazing. Yeah, I don't think anyone's getting glazed scenario. But clearly it was so popular they got asked how do I get involved? And so they do workshops now where you come and you lay down as the lizard and you understand the movements and it's this specific one. And I've seen photos, it looks fantastic. That's got to be one hundred percent pervert audience for the wave chopper, isn't it? It doesn't look like that's how it's being presented. But we have actually touched on these guys before. Yeah, just to quickly say people listen to the Merry Roach episode might remember we talked about the state lizard of New Mexico , which is the leaping lesbian lizard . And that is a subspecies of the ones that we're talking about. Another whiptail. Another whiptail, yeah. And again, it's because the reason they're called the leaping lesbian lizard is because they mates without need the for males. Right? Did anyone else start to feel a bit sorry for all whiptail lizards that they are known for just one single thing? When you actually try to research anything else about them , you can get to pace twenty thousand on Google and you're still oh they have lesbian sex, they probably have really interesting hobbies. I read that they stress eat in response to noise so there's a load of them who are living near an air base in America and whenever the aircraft go over, they have a higher level of cortisol so they're more stressed and they're also eating way more . So that's one thing they also don't like eating very colorful grasshoppers . They found that the more brightly colored a grasshopper is, the less likely it is that these whipped tails will eat it. Okay. May I be honest? I can see why this is left of page twenty thousand one obviously Is sex worthwhile? This is the debate. Is it? Yeah, between who? and your wife. Yeah . Yes it is because you get genetic diversity. That's it, right? All animals, right, have genetic mutations that crop up every now and again. Yeah. In humans , it is possible to deal with negative mutations through this recombination thing that Anna you mentioned , but with other animals like pure parthenogenesis animals which never have to have sex, they only clone themselves, the bad mutations just escalate and their mutations are normally negative, so they just slowly affect your fitness over time until that genetic line, that particular lizard or whatever is just absolutely screwed . You know, it just can't function very well in the world. Yeah. Because I'd like to go back to only having two balls, please, or whatever. Well, learned how sex. Yeah , well actually that does sometimes happen. So there's some species of stick insects that have arguably the best or the worst of both worlds, whichever way you look at it in that they reproduce parthenode genetically , but every now and then they have sex . And so yeah, they've just they've looked at their like the genetic line of all these guys and seen that it's very similar, very similar, very similar, very similar. And then sud denly there's quite a big difference and it looks like they're having sex at that moment and then they'll go back to parthenogenesis for a few more generations. Crazy. That generation must be so disapproved of when it comes . But every generation thinks they invented sex, right? In this case, it's actually true. Yeah. But it's not fashion. It comes around in seventeer cycles or something, doesn't it? Sex is back There seem to be other species that have sex sometimes and then parthenogenetically procreate sometimes. One of them is boa boa snakes are boa snakes. So in twenty twenty four there was a Brazilian rainbow boa called Ronaldo I don't know why doesn't have any feet been kept in a cage in Portsmouth and hadn't been in contact with another snake for nine years , so they claimed . And there was a student monitoring his cage and student the came report anded to their superiors, her superiors that fourteen babies had appeared in Ronaldo's cage . And I figured how bad would this intern have been that the animal care technician who this was reported to said, We just didn't believe him at first. They thought they'd made a mistake . Which is quite weird to come and report that you've seen forty new snakes in the cage for the boss to go I don't think you have. You must go and recount it's just one 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 are all online on social media. I'm on Instagram under Schreiberland Andy. Andrew Hunter M. James? No such thing as James Harkin. Yep, or you can get to us as a group by going, where Anna . You can email podcast QI. com or on Instagram at no such thing. That's right. And if you would like to contribute to the Monday show which is known as Little Fish, do send in your best facts to that email address as well. Podcast at QI. com or the feedback that you've got about the show generally because we gather all that stuff up and we bring it to our secret club Clubfish, which exists on Patreon. If you want to join patreon dot com slash clubfish and you'll find multiple tiers of exciting stuff that you can get involved with . One of which is Drop us a line. This is the audience feedback show. We love reading out your mail. So do check that out. Otherwise, just come back next week because we're going to have another episode. Thank you as ever to our team here, Lee Lee, Ethan Ruperlia, as well as the other fishbusters, and we will see you again next week with another episode. Goodbye