Biological Wonders of Naked Mole Rats

Hi everyone, welcome to this week's episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, where we were joined by our good friend and erstwhile colleague Anne Miller. That's right, Anne Miller. Not just a QI elf these days, not just a brilliant producer , but a children's author. Yes, she has a new book out. It is called The Monster Diaries. What's that about indeed? It's about the Cyclops and the worst party ever. It's a telling of the Cyclops myth from the Cyclops' Turns out Odysseus is a complete prat . And the Cyclops is the one who should be the hero of the story, but has been mistreated by history, so Anna's setting the record straight. I gotta say it's an amazing book. My daughter has been swimming in it for the last week. She cannot put it down and she's been asking for it to be read to her at every bedtime. I know other kids will love it too. And it's a part of a trilogy, so there's two more on the way. If you want to subtly get brilliant bits of history and mythology into your child's brain, this is the way to do it. Yes, that's right. And if you have a very big brain yourself and you would like to show people how big your brain is, then guess what? You have a chance to do so this coming week because we have our next No Sits Things of Fish Quiz Night. Yes, if you're a member of Clubfish or at the Friend of the Podcast tier, you can come to our online quizzes. The three of us have been beavering away, writing questions. I am getting a costume for my round. I haven't told you guys, this yet. No. It's orderered. Is it a beav costume? It's not a beaver costume. It's so much worse than that. But basically, it's an enormously fun night. You can join as a team with friends or family, and it's it's all done over Zoom. So we will send you a link and you can just join. It's going to be on is it the 14th of April 2026? Yep, this yep, this year. A D. A D. And it's at 7 p.m. UK time. So go to patreon.com slash clubf ish. Look for that friend of the podcast here. And then you will be able to join us and see if you can pit your wits against other fish fans. Okay, on with the podcast. 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 Schreiber. I am sitting here with James Harkin, Andrew Hunter Murray, and Ann Miller, and once again we have gathered round 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, that is Andy. My fact is the author of Ben Hur dedicated the book to his wife, but he accidentally made it sound like she died. And when he tried to fix it, made it sound even more like she died. So this is uh Lou Wallace who wrote Ben Hur, which was one of the biggest books of the world in uh it was out in about eighteen eighty. I think it was the biggest selling novel of the nineteenth century. Right. Until Gone with the Wind, I think. It was massive. And it's a Roman epic that also takes in the birth of Jesus. The life of Jesus. It's a bit like the life of Brian, but it's serious. It's the best way I can describe it. Like it's it's huge though. For many people, it was the first fiction they'd ever read. It was it just sold so many millions of copies. It's like the modern version of the Da Vinci Code, Fifty Shades of Grey, Ann Miller's new book. Yes. It's all of that. It's all of that. Do you have um leprosy in yourselves? No. that always adds adds fifty percent to sound like. Um I should say this was sent in by Amber O'Ran, so thank you very much Anne, but it's a terrific fact. Basically, Wallace was married to his wife Susan, and he said, I'm gonna dedicate the book to you. What would you like? And she chose the wording to the wife of my youth. Oh, a lot of people only my youth. Yeah, exactly. A lot of people read that as oh that's so sad. She passed away, you know, some years ago. Ah to the wife of my youth. And he wrote, I began to receive letters of sympathy and inquiries as to when and of what poor Mrs. Wallace died. She was alive and well. Um and he got so many I think he started getting marriage proposals by people thinking, hey, well he he's single. He writes a good book. Yeah. Um and he so he had to go back and he asked his wife to help him fix it. So later copies read To the Wife of My Youth Who Still Abides With Me. Oh my god. Like the world's most famous funeral song as well. Just to my wife. To my wife. To my wife. Who's here right now. She's looking great. She's never looked better. I think here's a problem. It's a great novel. He's written this great novel. His wife has only doing one little bit. His wife has done the dedication both times and she's messed it up twice. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah . She had one job. But she's played the long game in terms of PR because now she's on no such thing as a fish. Oh Susan Wallace. Susan Wallace. Is she still alive? Well she outlived him by a couple of years. Do you know that she was a writer as well? And I read that she came up with the phrase the pastor of little feet in a poem. Oh that's huge. People will know that more than Ben Hur, so she it's Chris Snappier isn't quicker. It was a big book. I mean there's no doubt that this was a huge huge moment in literature. Um it supposedly was blessed by Pope Leo the Thirteenth. That's a story that goes around. It was one of the first books that was turned into a braille book, but that's a big book. Oh wow. To be braille. Yeah. You get tired fingers. Yeah, and and it was uh it was well you would you get tired fingers, yeah. And tired eyeballs from eating it, 'cause it is a monster book. Uh tired ears if you listen to the audio book. Do you see it as one of the first like big like merch tie-ins as well? So his son was a businessman and he licensed it to all sorts of things. So you could get Ben Her cars, bicycles, cigars, Ben Her soup, Ben Her Perfume, and Ben Her flour. As in stuff you make cakes with? Yeah. Wow. I also read you could get Ben Her and Ben His bathroom towels. Stop. Very good . I didn't think they had his and hers stuff in the eighteen eighties, but I'm wrong, clearly H U R I think the merch that I'm talking about came after the movie came out. And so the movie came out in the fifties, didn't it? Wow. Yeah, the Charlton Heston version. The the like real colossal famous one. Yeah. But there have been four films. Have there? Yeah. Four films. And one was it the first one MGM ever made. Yeah, the first was in nineteen oh seven, which was fifteen minutes long, which at the time was an epic. Oh my god. I'm gonna have to go for a wee three times. Fifteen minutes. Um and they they didn't get the rights to it. They just made the film. So all prints of that film by law were destroyed except one. Yeah. Then there was a nineteen twenty five one which was very faithful to it and they got the rights. And then yes, the nineteen fifty nine one is is a very famous old Hollywood, you know, swords and sandals epic. Yeah. Trolton Heston plays Ben Hur in the movie Um Judah. And in Greece it was not starring Trollton Heston. No, sorry, John Travolta.. Yes Yes. Anyway, just a little fact there for you guys. Two different people, it turns out. Anyway. So in Greece they released this with another actor. No, it was still Trollton Heston, but he was billed as Charlton Easton. And the reason is is because in modern Greek, hesto means to shit yourself. Yeah. Does it? It's a defecation. That's amazing. That's wild. I read that the film got the it won eleven Academy Awards, which is like the most anyone had got until Lord of the Rings, the third one that also got eleven, and both books, Harper Collins books. Interesting. Oh what are you trying to say here? This is a this is a woman in publishing . Who um could you name any other Harper Collins books? Um Yeah. Oh, Sidaris by An Miller. That was a yeah, an imprint, Mudlark of Harper Collins. The really nice thing about the film versions is that there's a guy who directed the chariot race in the nineteen twenty-five movie. Assistant director. It was called William Weiler. He directed the nineteen fifty-nine film. He worked his way up from assistant chariot race director to overall film director. But um the nineteen fifty-nine film is the only Hollywood mov ie ever to make the Vatican's approved list of films. Really? If you're having a Vatican movie night . Vatican approved movie night. Yeah. Yes. You can only watch one Hollywood film and it's Ben Hammer. That's the only one. Still to this day. I don't know if they've updated the list. I should write to them. I should write to them. So what are the other ones on there then? Um there's Dude Where's My Car Two. Not Dude Where's My Car One. But that's Hollywood as well, right? So what I mean? Is it like European films or something like that? It's gonna be a load of boring boring stuff, won't it? Yeah. What if what if it's what if it what if it's literally just Ben Hare? Maybe when I was in primary school we had one video to record to every wet play or end of turn, we all watched Mrs. Doubtfire, but only the first fifty minutes. Wow. Why only the first fifty? Because how long a lesson was. So I didn't have till I was like twenty. They're both the same guy. It blew my mind. I'm not kidding you watched the same fifty minutes everywhere . And like presumably you went to school in Scotland, right? So for you guys it would be like a document ary. How was the accent for Robin Williams? Um can we talk a little bit about Lou Wallace? I'm obsessed with Lou Wallace. I knew nothing about him. Very, very interesting fellow . So he started writing this book after basically being buttonholed on a train by an agnostic for some time. What do you mean by buttonholed? Sorry, where someone it's like where someone grabs your lapel and just talks at you for ages about something, being cottonhold, you know. Um so he he was on a train with another soldier. He was a he was a soldier in the uh I think Union Army in the Civil War. In the Civil War. Um and he got talking to this soldier called Colonel Robert Ingersoll for ages and ages, who was quite a well known agnostic speaker about, you know, doubts about the existence of God. And he just seems to have written a huge epic religious novel off the back of this conversation saying just Just to piss him off then. Seems like it, yeah, yeah. And it was read by so many famous people. So friend of the podcast, I would say first and closest friend of the podcast. Robin Thickey. Um who? President James Garfield. No. Oh he was a very well read man. Well he had time on his hands, didn't he, while he was lying around. Did you read about the job he gave him? No, what so apparently President James Garfield, so he went while he was president, he loved Ben Hurst so much and this I wish people in power did this more often. He wanted to read the sequel so much that he gave Lou Wallace the job of ambassador to the Ottoman Empire based in Constantinople in the hope that being there would make him inspire him to write a sequel. Oh wow. That's so cool. But he didn't write. Well he was probably busy being the it sounds like a big job. Like ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. That's a huge game. I imagine Donald Trump's done the same with Eric Carl to try and get into a very hungry caterpillar too . I'm here for it. But this guy life is absolutely incredible. He's basically kind of like the nearest comparison I can think of is like the Jules Brandreth of his time. Because he 's gonna love it. He did everything. So he when um Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, he was one of the people who investigated the co conspirators. He was a general in the Civil War, he was sent um and made territorial governor of New Mexico, which is where he wrote Ben Hur. Then he wrote the book, then he did some deal with Billy the Kid that went wrong. So he had like people going past his house and shooting at his candles while he was trying to write, because they were so cross with him that said gone south. Sorry, hang on, back up. Billy the kids people were shooting at his candles. He had to stop him writing. That's pretty cool. I mean, I don't think they were that good at shooting in those days. I know they were good. Like to be able to shoot a candle. Yeah, you've got Calamity Jane who can do that, but that's about it. I don't think you're shooting a candle. Oh, you just aim for the top, don't you? No, but how do you not accidentally kill Lou Wallace in the process? I think they wouldn't have minded. Yeah, okay. Well he um he did end up having Billy the Kid arrested. Um which is I think what happened with Billy the Kid, I might be wrong about this, but I think what happened was Billy the Kid was an outlaw and he said, Well I'll pardon you. Come back and we'll let bygone speak bygones and maybe you can like tell us about some of your accomplices. But then he'd kind of lost his power a little bit and the other people who were in charge said, Oh, we're not gonna we're not gonna agree with that deal anymore. And Billy the Kid then went to prison . So I think it was like a deal that he did, but then he wasn't in a position to honour it. Interesting. Uh and I think that's then the reason that Billy the Kid's people were so upset with him. I think. Right, right, right, right, right. That makes sense. Like what a life. What a life. He made his own violins, Lou Wallace. He patented eight inventions. One of them was a retractable reel inside a fishing rod handle. This guy. Very useful. I was looking at the website of the um his his study which he built to play the violin in is now a museum. And on the website they've got these FAQs. So they're like, oh did he really go back on his word to Billy the kid? Did he really know Abraham Lincoln? But one of the questions is, did Lou Wallace really invent the snooze button? And the answer is no. It says and we're not sure how this rumor got started. Oh, it's frequently asked is this question, really. Well yeah. Um I feel like with what we've heard about him that doesn't sound out of place. Uh he was in he invented. He did invent things. Yeah. But not this not not a snooze button. And then there's this lovely quote from him where he said, Um, let's read the whole thing because it's beautiful. He says, I would not give a tuppence for the American who has not tried to do at least one of these things. Um, paint a picture, write a book, get a patent, or try to play a musical instrument. That is the genius of the true American in those four: art, literature, invention and mus It's easy for you to say you're a sort of multi-award-winning genius inventor. Military leader presidential writer. Did he produce any other major work outside of Ben Hurst? He wrote the big biography for Ben jamin Harrison while he was running for president because Ben Harr? He should have called him that . Because there wasn't really much like there wasn't you know like a like a T V news circuit you could go on. So to like get to know the candidates they pr they pushed these books and he wrote Benjamin Harrison's good job. It was like the book about him for like seventy years. But with the wrong tit le. Stop the podcast. Stop the podcast. Hi, everybody. Just to let you know, this episode of Fish is sponsored by Squarespace. Ah, sorry, you know Squares pace. It is the all-in-one website platform that is designed to help you stand out and succeed online . That's right. No matter what you're doing, Squarespace gives you absolutely everything you need to claim the domain. Make a gorgeous-looking professional website and get paid all in one place. Yeah, you've got all the choices of all the design kit that you need. If you want to do fancy fonts, if you want images and so on, you can set up a donation page. There's so many brilliant things that it makes it just as easy as a click of a button to do. There are all the sort of basic nuts and bolts that it's incredibly useful to have. One of them is a thing called Squarespace Domains, right? So every Squarespace domain comes with extra privacy and security tools included to ensure that your domain remains online and protected. So Andy's big world of moss is safe. That's mine. Yes. And they just provide everything you need. They make it incredibly easy. So all you need to do is head to Squ arespace.com slash fish to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. That's right. Go to squarespace.com slash fish, save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain, use the offer code fish at the checkout. Okay, on with the show. On with the book code . Okay , it is time for fact number two and that is Anne. My fact is that as well as more famous Greek gods like Poseidon and Zeus, there was also Chiamat es, the god of beans. Yummy. Fantasti c. What what was what would be your job as god of beans? Just making sure counting them, I guess. Counting Um There's very little known about Chiamatis, I should say. So we think specifically the broad bean, and we think he may have hung around with Demeter, who is the goddess of agriculture, but he's quite mysterious. Do you guys kind of junior 'cause like in the government you have the main minister of transport but then you'll have the minister of buses who's a it's got a smaller brief, obviously. Is it the same kind of thing? You'll have a god of the big deal like god of war, and within that is a uh goddess of archery or I would say yes, but with a lot more um having sex with your sister. Well, we don't know what the Minister of Buses gets up to . That's what one of the buses is about. There's not much written about this guy, um Chimites, but um Pausanias writes I cannot state for certain whether he was the first to sow beans or whether they gave this name to a hero because they may not attribute it to Demeter, the discovery of beans, whoever has been initiated in Eleusis or has read what I called the Orphica , knows what I mean. We don't know what that means. But Andy's kinda right. There it kind of is like a government setup. So you have you basically you're like twelve Olympic gods who live on Mount Olympus and there's kind of two groups. There's Zeus and his siblings and then there are his children and there's some crossover. And so you have Zeus who's married to Hera who is his sister. They have some children. There's also his sister Different time. Demeter. They also have a ch childild. And then there are hisren, so that you've got like Athena, Aphrodite, Hermes. But again, with Greek mythology, because the stories were told so often and in different places, there's different versions of everybody's parentage. Um so Aphrodite's one is brilliant because there are one version that she's Zeus's daughter, but not Hero's. Um far, so straightforward. The other telling is that her father was a different god, Uranus, god of the sea. Sorry, Uranus, god of the sky. Come on. And in that story version of the. Come on on . Not because of what's coming next. And in this version, he um his testicles were cut off and thrown into the sea. Oh yeah. And near Paphos in Cyprus and the resulting foam led to the creation of Aphrodite and her name comes from the Greek Aphrod But there are very famous paintings of Aphrodite coming out of the sea and being born, and so as far as I can tell, no testicles in the paintings.. Okay Okay. That's interesting. Um is that the same as the birth of Venus? Yes. Where she's on the shell. Yeah. Yeah. But before me. Oh yes. I find it all very difficult to keep in my head. You know what I mean? It's like you get it in quiz questions and stuff like that. It always comes up and I've often tried to learn how everyone's related to each other but it's so difficult. It mashes together and it changes and there's different versions. So even the twelve Olympian gods, those different twelves depending on who you talk to. They're kind of like Zeus is always there, but some of them vary around a little bit and it all starts slipping into each other. Aphrodite, we've mentioned the the goddess of love, she just has an interesting uh entourage of of junior gods around her. There's Eros, uh, there's Hermaphroditus, and there's Hymen, the god of marriage. Oh. Um but there are various other, I like this kind of very junior level gods. So there's more gods, as Terry Pratchett would call them. Hed Hedilogos, God of sweet talkin'. Nice. Sweet talkin. Yeah. Right. Flirting. Yeah. Chat. Good chats. Bants . Top but hot bants. Um but Aphrodite has another very interesting thing that she gave the world because she may have been the first mother ever to slipper her child. As in like thrash with a slipper. Oh really? There's a vase uh from three hundred and sixty B C which depicts Aphrodite giving naughty little Eros a spanking with a slipper, which has obviously that's become, you know, that was a staple of things like the Bino. Yeah. Um we did something ages ago which was about Pythagoras and his his uh beans. Yeah and his fear of beans. Is that connected in any way to the fact that I think it might be connected in some way in that the reason that he didn't like beans is because some people thought they had the souls of dead people in them. They were definitely associated with death. Uh, and they were an offering that you would give if someone had died. Uh, and so for that reason, they were obviously important in society and when something was Yes. So I think that's what what the other th And they also had sort of like deities. They weren't specifically like gods, but they like sort of had special powers or they couldn't for certain areas. So there was Horcus who personified the curse on those who make a bad oath you would sort of call to him. Mommas were mockery and satire. Um there's a whole bunch of like skills. Mommus is the bastard child of night. Um Mommas was thrown out of Olympus eventually for hanging around making unhelpful comments. How dare you sound like your patron saint. I did think, oh wow, like the the class clown has a yeah yeah yeah. Um so I get quite I get quite confused about th how people in ancient Greece experienced all this. Yeah what was the day-to-day life like with all of these gods? I know they had individual temples and some major ones and some smaller ones, but I just wanted to do a little quiz question for you guys. When was the last temple built to the Greek gods? Oh, I there's probably still people around who believe in it. So I would say twenty twenty five. Yeah, I 'm feeling that's very likely. But to play along with your game, let's say it was five hundred B C Yeah, hundred B C thank you. May 2025. Thank you. This morning. It was in 2025. Well done now. Well well done. Yeah. It's in the Peloponnese and um it was the idea of a doctor called Manilus Heliotis who Cool. Is it for specific gods or for all of them? It do you know, I don't know. It sounds like a tax break to me. It's v to the to the god s. Yeah, yeah. Um it opened on the eighth of March. Oh the same birthday as no such thing as a fish. Oh that's the day after this. Um it was illegal to worship Zeus until 2006? Yes. In fact, any of these lot. If you wanted to do a Chiamites festival, then that was no can do. But then in 2006, an Athens court decided that you can do this kind of pagan worshipping. Because before that you could only be, I think, an Orthodox Christian and one or two other things were allowed. But yeah, then they came in and then there were censuses and the US State Department in twenty oh six reckoned there were two thousand followers of the ancient Greek religion. Although people who do that they reckon the number's more like a hundred thousand who still believe in those I mean it's in their interest to pump up the numbers right as well. But it's not like it's not like a thing it's not like a thing of saying you're a Jedi, which was on a census a few sentences ago. Or like, you know I sorry to the Wiccans listening 'cause I know people get that wrong a lot as well. But it's it's worshiping the old gods. Yes. Which definitely there are people in the UK who do that too. And the Greek Orthodox Church are very down on this sort of thing. They were very against this temple. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, they were very hostile to it, and uh they said it was a regression to a dark world. Right. Gosh. So uh Uranus, who you who you didn't pronounce properly beforehand, um it's like the only planet that we have that is named after a Greek god. that's this is where it again gets confusing because generally the planet names are the Roman versions of the gods. Right. So Aphrodite becomes Venus. But Neptune is Roman because the Poseidon Poseidon is the Greek. Yeah. So you're Neptune's. Jupiter's Roman. Jupiter's Roman. Saturn's Roman. Yeah. But Uranus is the only one that's slightly both. Pluto is the dog. Yeah, yeah. Running around barking a lot. Yeah. Um Mercury is the lead singer of Queen. Yeah. Would you like some fun ancient Greek etymology? Yes. Yes The word tantalizing? Yeah. It's from Greek myth. I didn't know this until very recently. It's a myth about King Tantalus, and he was punished by Hades made him stand in a river up to his neck in water and he wasn't allowed to eat or drink. So if he moved to get the fruit trees above him, the water the trees would move. If he moved to drink the water, the water would move. So he was like always trying to get food or drink and he couldn't. But would you like to know why he was punished by the guns? Yes. He did three things. He can we guess? Uh you can try. He stole grapes. Yeah, kind of. He stole nectar and ambrosia. That's a uh first hit rate. Next one, two and three. He s he smacked the wrong child with a slipper. He um had sex with Sora goddess naked. That often happens. That's a good one. I mean, they're not a million miles off. So the second one is secrets. He told secrets he'd overheard. that he shouldn't have And the third one is a worse version of the slipper, he killed his son and served him to the gods to test their powers of observation. And they did not like this. How was he serving him? I think in his true. Oh, how that's impossible to tell . A stew . Is this chicken? Is this pigeon? Is this your son? I don't know. The God of Beans is going though, what meat is this in with guys? Something's up. We should all be vegetarian. That's really interesting because tantalus is so I was looking at the the things we covered it ages ago that there are various financial houses named after Greek gods. It's a really common thing to do to make your grubby little hedge fund sound like it's been around for two thousand years. You know what I mean? Like sort of like Olympian Olympian handlings. Yeah, like exactly like Jupiter investments or whatever you know all of this stuff but sorry so many hedge funders listening if you want to sponsor an episode we'll very we'll very happily do that um but there there's a there's a very niche one there was this amazing article by Thomas Feder ek who spotted there's Yuri Claire Partners. Okay. Right? And I'd never heard of Yuri Clare. No. And Yuri Claire is a minor character in the Odyssey. And this is actually I think the best named financial institution you could have named after a character from ancient myth. Because in uh the Odyssey, Odysseus gets home twenty years later, where have you been? All that. Um but there are loads of chances living in the house trying to shag his wife, basically. That's the and and she is putting them off and saying, Look, my husband's gonna be home any minute. Yeah. But it's been it's been twenty years and it's wearing increasingly thin and it's the god of snooze buttons going I'll give you nine more minutes . So when Odysseus is on his way home, he will be killed by all the chances who are you know, sort of like young warlords trying to try to get with his wife. So the goddess Athena disguises Odysseus as a tramp so he won't be killed on sight, right? So he can get into the house and suddenly throw off his costume and win win the prize and reclaim his wife and all this. Everyone is fooled by the sight of this tramp, except Euryclea, who is an o elderly servant living in the house, and she is the one who spots a familiar scar on his thigh and says Eurydiceus. How does she know his thigh so well? Well, good point. Good point. But she observes him and it means she can, you know, she can buy stocks in Odysseus, basically. So I think that is a that is a terrific , like she has the insight based on good market knowledge. So I think that is a fantastic name for a financial organization. Okay, do you know what my hedge fund will be called? Yeah. Mine will be called Epimetheus Holdings. Okay. Uh because Epimetheus was the god of after thought and excuses and he was the brother of Prometheus. So Prometheus in this story creates humans and Epimetheus creates all the other animals uh but he's so sort of stupid and just really impulsive that he puts all the best bits on all the other animals so he puts the wings on the eagles and, he puts the humps on the camels and the trunks on the elephants, and all the best bits were there, so the humans just get a shitty little human body. That's so funny. Yeah. So should we have had humps and wings and we should have had humps, but in the end, only the black eyed peas have them . Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that the greatest ever treasure trove of original American comic strips was discovered in a naval warehouse by a man called Blackbeard. Ooh. It's a great name. He's uh William Black beard. This was a guy who really is credited by people within the community of comic books in America as single-handedly the reason that we have all the original source material from you know the 30s onwards. Um, he made it his mission to track down and find all the original newspapers. So he would go around to people's garages, you know, and he would just say, Do you have any old newspapers? And often they did. And he would cut out this comic strips and he would log them and so he kept this huge archive and he was having to do it very slowly but then eventually he discovered that the Library of Congress had six acres of naval warehouse in Virginia and it was where they were housing all of these newspapers that went back to the 19th century. And so he suddenly thought, great, they're safe. But then it turned out that they were getting rid of them because they thought, oh, they're going to deteriorate. So they were photographing making microfilm of them and then they were going to toss them away now the issue for him was if you'd make a microfilm of comic strips they're in black and white they're no longer in color and so he did a deal and he was able to extract them all and as a result saved all the originals of these things. So he's a real hero in that community. That's really cool. Did he have to cut out the strips individually or did he keep them as like full of the No he did he just kept them out. I I don't know if he did that for every single one. Because like for every paper. That's You can't keep the whole pa ' that's why they were in warehouses, these huge stacks of papers, and all he wanted was one tiny strip of paper. So we should say, yes, this is comic strips, not comic books. Exactly. It's not a first edition Superman, it's a first edition Garfield. Garfield. It was something like two point five million clippings that he managed to get hand his hands on. They're still going through the archive. So there's a a couple of Instagram accounts where they show latest findings. I saw one the other day of a poster of Charlie Brown , which they were really excited because it's you know, it's it's original. Um so yeah, a a huge, huge hero to this community. I guess people didn't realise what they had. Like you need somebody to like like every book, the British Library takes a copy. You need a system to store the comics. And it sounds like that guy set it up and Yeah, him and his wife. He just did it. He just set up his own company and that's so cool. Yeah, which he had to do, I believe, otherwise they wouldn't give it over to him because he wasn't an institution. Um Are people like using this resource now? Yeah. It's kind of the main archive that is used for any comic book history. Um he wrote a lot of books as well off the back of it. Um did he? Yeah. He printed the strips, didn't he? He said, look here are a load of peanuts cartoons. I think he did a lot probably sold it a bit better than that. I think I read he did a lot of like consultancy work for people who wanted to know what was in the comics or to find out stuff 'cause he knew them all so well. Yeah. He was like the go to comic strip guy. Yeah, the reason I was thinking is like what use is it to have this stuff? Lot of medical knowledge in there, lot of like ancient lost secrets. Yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah. When did people start wearing braces? Well let's look at this ancient edition of Fred the Dog or whatever it is. Yeah. There's a lot of debate about when comics began. What about hieroglyphs? Well, you've just outgunned my early bid, which was for the biotapestry. Oh yeah. A comic strip? Is it a comic strip? What about like um the cave paintings? I seen cave paintings where it appears like one thing comes after the other one. Yes. Oh yeah. Yeah. That's a good one. Cave comics. Arguably cartoons and comic strips are the oldest medium. M When were you gonna say the Bayer Tapestry? Yeah, because that is sequential though, isn't it? The Bayer Tapestry. And it's lo it's a strip. It is. It's coming here. We're gonna get it in the UK. We're so excited. There are some vases which are technically a kind of animation. I know they're not as old as the cave paintings, but there are some ancient Persian vases. There's this is really cool. I've never heard of um Iran's burnt city. Unfortunate timing now. But there is a place called the Burnt City, which is an ancient historical site. They found a bowl in there which was 5, 200 years old. And it's got these five images on it. And if you spin the bowl, it shows a goat jumping up and grabbing some leaves from a tree. Oh cool. Like a zootrope, the thing you spin round and round and the animation repeats itself. Wow. That's amazing. I've seen a uh they've you know rendered it into an animation. So that's like the original flip book as opposed to comic strike. You're right. It is more of that. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. That's very cool. Do you know where the word cartoon comes from or when it was first used in the UK? Shakespeare? No, after that, it was 1843 and it referred to some things in the houses of parliament. So they'd recently put some murals in there. And the word cartoon at that time meant um like a little sketch you would do on cardboard before you did your big painting. So if you're in Italy for instance, it was an Italian word. So let's say Leonardo da Vinci wants to do the last supper, but first he's gonna do a little scribble on his Shredding's box. Like to get all the spacing right. Yeah, to get all the spacing right and stuff. So that was an Italian word, and then the magazine punch used the word to refer to these murals in the House of Parliament that people were able to go and see. And then it became kind of a risable thing 'cause it was a comedy magazine. And then they started using the word cartoon to refer to their political cartoons. Ah that's which became big around that time as well. And that's why we use it today. Wow . I have a another Italian word. The Italian for a comic strip is fumetto, which means literally little puff of smoke. And it's named for the shape, the little speech bubbles you get in cot in comic strips. Beautiful word? I think it's pronounced fumetto. Right. F-U-M-E-T-T-O. Fumet. Fumetto. But it's little clouds. It's very beautiful. That's wonderful. I was looking into a few of the major comic strip creators of the nineteen thirties onwards in America. When when circulation was like, you know, it was getting thirty-four million readers a day because it was syndicated to all the newspapers. So these people were amongst the most read in America at the time. Um Elzy Segar, who we've mentioned before, he's the creator of Popeye. This guy died quite young. Um, so he did about nine years worth of Popeye, but the cultural impact that it had is massive. Most of the illustrators who came after, like Charles Schultz and so on hold this guy up as one of the great geniuses. Okay. Um so that stuff is kind of obvious, but it had an even bigger impact that I didn't realize, which is that Popeye was meant to be Mario. So in Japan when Mario was first made, was never meant to be Donkey Kong and Mario. It was meant to be Pluto and Popeye, but they couldn't get the rights to it. So they had to change it so that it became that. So we could have been playing Popeye cart, you know, these days. But actually Yeah, that's it was just simply a rights issue and they had to pivot into making it something else. So like literally necessity is the mother of invention. I read that during um the Great Depression it made spinach consumption go up 33%, as the American children named it one of their top three favourite foods after ice cream in Turkey. That's unbelievable branding for spinach, isn't it? Position on the podium. Um there have been a lot of concerns about comics over the years. And I'm speaking here more about comic books rather than comic strips. Like no one's ever been made depraved by Garfield in the paper, but there were a lot of worries in the nineteen forties. There were even some comic book burnings that happened. So a lot of editorials which said they were a national disgrace. Um one American critic called John Mason Brown described them as the marijuana of the nursery. Um I know. There was a big work in nineteen fifty four, Seduction of the Innocent by That was Frederick Wortham, right? Yes. Um he was a child psychologist, who did a lot of good in his career, you know, ensured that a lot of uh poor uh uh or mentally unwell people got fair trials, helped fight mental illness in children, but he had a big B in his bonnet about comics. He decided they were evil. Uh he decided that Batman and Robin were an item, which was less socially acceptable in the forties than it was today. Well they weren't an item. They absolutely weren't. He was I think he was seeing what he wanted to see there. He he did a bit, didn't he? He decided Superman was a fascist, very much not the point. And he basically thought they should all be a fifteen certificate blanket. No exceptions. So we we have slightly mentioned him before. Have we? Um yeah, but what I didn't know about him is he did this sort of like comic books a terrible thing, and then a load of right wing people started giving him money because they really liked the fact that he was trying to censor cartoons and stuff. But on the side he was an anti racism campaigner and like you say, he was running clinics for um mental health and stuff like that. But specifically, he was running them in Harlem , which had a very, very high African American population. And he was really helping those communities. And so all the money from these right wingers that they thought was going to kind of ban Porky Pig or whatever was actually going to help these hospitals. It led to this thing called the comics code, which had all these rules like um if crime is depicted it should be as a sordid and unpleasant activity. No lurid, unsavory, or gruesome illustrations, no walking dead, torture, vampires, ghouls, cannibalism, or werewolfism . Guess what year this code lasted until? Twenty tw ruined the game. Is it two hundred BC? Thank you, James . It was two thousand and eleven. Wow. The final members of this code. People gradually like comic bookmakers gradually fell away from it, but the final members kept going to until twenty eleven. You still get that a bit today where like in a movie it's quite rare that you get a film where people do something bad and they don't get caught for it or they don't get you know they don't get the comeuppance somehow. Do you know what I mean? It's quite unsatisfying when you watch it and people don't get that. On um you were talking about werewolves and all that kind of stuff. In nineteen fifty four in Glasgow, there was a vampire hunt . Uh, and this was basically a load of kids were going around Glasgow trying to find vampires, and eventually it led to the Children and Young Persons Harmful Publications Act of nineteen fifty f whichive banned the sale of comic books with, you know, evil characters in it. And what they thought was that people had been reading comics with vampires in and had decided to go around cemeter ies attacking people. But people pointed out that actually there were no vampire comics around around that time. No one had read any. Right. They cut they couldn't point to the one that these kids had been reading. But there is a monster with iron teeth in the Bible in Daniel seven seven, which had been mentioned in local schools around the time. And what they think happened was they'd heard this story from the Bible, they thought, let's go and find that person, and then the police had said, Oh, they're looking for vampires . Wow. But it did lead to an actual act of parliament. So it's sort of excess Sunday school is what we're saying. That's what it seems to be. Ban it I was reading about um Sujna's lovely fact that there were two Dennis the Menace cartoons launched on the same day. So the Scottish one and the American one. But I didn't realize that they think that the reason that it happened at the same time was there's a really popular music hall song called Dennis the Menace from Venice. Okay. So they they may have heard that song and then it was sort of like a catchy name and they developed it. I mean it's still it still came out on exactly the same day on t both sides of the Atlantic, which is absolutely wild. Yeah. But not that insane if two years earlier there was another character in that same thing I still find it hard to get my head around. I still think that must prove something. I don't know what it proves. Simulation theory. Simulation theory, yeah. I mean, Dennis the Menace, we should say doesn't Which one? Which one? British one. British. Black and Red, spiky hair, dog called Nasher, all of that. Yep. Doesn't, of course, get slippered anymore. Does he not? No, if you buy the beaner these days, it's very rare to end with corporal punishment . Which I just sort of accepted when I was reading it as a child that that was the thing that would happen was that you get slippered, yeah. Your grumpy mustachio dad would would hit you with the slipper. And that was That was normal. That was normal. And it never did never did us any harm. Do you know that in Dundee we have a um our big statue in the town centre is Desperate Dan? Is it? Yeah, there's a mini that makes next thing. Oh, that's very cool. Because that was the other thing. We've mentioned that on the show. The um the meat pies that he would eat. Um they got changed into vegan pies for a while as well. Cal pies. Cow pies, sorry, yeah. Yeah. They would change into veggie. Um hang on, this is my son in here. Ah, it wasn't observation test, so Oh here's a tiny tiny fun detail. Um Scrooge McDuck was invented by a man called Carl Barks. The wrong sentence person . It sounds like a cartoon of a socialist dog, doesn't it? Why don't we all share the bone? So funny . Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is James. Okay, my fat this week is that naked mole rat toilet cleaners have no hope for promotion. It's a tough enough gig being a naked mole rat. And it's a tough enough gig cleaning toilets for a living. Yeah. But being a naked m ole rat and cleaning toilets for a living does feel like you've drawn a bit of a short straw. Are they only cleaning naked mole rat toilets? Yes. Good question. That'll take a really long time to do like King's Cross Station. That's such a good point. So this is naked mole rats. Yeah. I think one of the poster boys of QI over the years. We love Naked Mole Rats. Uh they're hardwingork, they're hideous looking . They live in Africa, where we don't, um, and they live on the ground. And there was a recent study from the Journal of Science Advances that showed individual naked mole rats perform specific duties for their colony. Okay, there's digging, transporting garbage, cleaning the toilets, 'cause they have all these tunnels and some of the tunnels are used for um pooing and we ing. Uh and the team from Kumamoto University in Japan, they put RFID chips in some of these naked mole rats, you know, like the ones you get in your oyster cards or whatever or in your credit cards. And they managed to monitor these Nick and More rats over a certain period and found that they never changed their job. So what they think is that basically once you're a toilet cleaner you stay as a toilet cleaner. It's not it's it's still early days whether this is completely right because um it was quite a short survey but that's what they think. Absolutely hideous looking. Are we talking about the scientists from Kum oto University? I am um but that we should say if you've never if you've never seen an Egamora and you're listening to this, do have a little Google because they they just are not classically fit animals like they live underground. They l ive terrible eyesight I know they've got bad so it doesn't mat so it doesn't matter, is that what you're saying? How does she look? I have no idea. But they've they've basically got they've they're naked, they've they've got this sort of wrinkly nude flesh. They look like a sausage with teeth is, what the scientists who work on them say. But would you eat that sausage? No. Uh I'd have to have gone a long time without a sausage to consider it. I wouldn't take that off the barbecue first. But especially not these guys, they have such amazing super powers. So like they don't they we think they don't feel pain. They can survive eighteen minutes without oxygen, but they can do so many cool things. They're incredible. I wonder, by the way, if the toilet cleaners are also partial chefs because I hope they washed their paws. Well, naked mole rats, they eat each other's feces . Oh boy. Um and the queens, they have a queen, which is an amazing thing. Yeah, I mean queen of the toothed sausages, you know. It's got I think I thinken Que is putting it a bit strong actually. That's very unfair. They probably wouldn't find you very attractive, Andy, actually. They'd be like, he can he survive for 80 minutes without oxygen. Harry Stickman. Can this guy shut his lips behind his teeth? No he can't. Yuck But yeah, the Queen dad. Well the the Queen yeah, she um she has particular hormones in her dropping so they'll eat the queens to get you know sustenance and so on. But yeah, pooing. So I wonder if the if the toilet cleaners are sort of going, hey, let's let's eat this stuff. I feel like I read that by eating the poo, they sort of learn like how best to protect her and what she needs. Actually, she can fire her estrogen out in the poo, they think. Um so when she has babies she gets a whole load of estrogen in her body. Some of it obviously goes out in the poo. The other naked mole rats eat it and they get estrogen in their body, which makes them better parents so they can all look after the children together. They live in colonies where there's one sexually active female who's the queen, there are a couple of sexual males and then there are workers. And it's between like forty and a few hundred workers . But the queen suppresses the sexual instincts of almost everyone else in the colony. Yeah. Most adults don't even develop genitalia. Yeah. As the males have immature sperm that could not penetrate an egg. And that's thanks to the queen being in position. Well, because the queen, it is game of thronesy. Like the queen isn't born queen. They fight to find who the next queen is. Yeah. So they re- It's like a bloodbath. They're just killing each other right until the point where the female mole rat becomes pregnant and then that becomes the queen. And uh just kill the females with the most estrogen just fight and kill each other until one of them establishes enough dominance. And then they start giving birth and then it's an amazing process. So the first time they give birth, it's between one and ten naked mole rat babies. Pups. But then every time they give birth, their body stretches. It's like you've pulled them a bit longer because their spinal column stretches, which means they can hold more pups in them to give birth. So they end up being able to give birth to 30. Oh. And they get pregnant every few months. They're insane. Yeah, the most insane. I can't believe it's taken us 12 years to cover naked mole rat. Every time I find the naked mole rat fights, I just think, oh, we've probably done them before. I just got I know. A lot of their brain apparently is devoted to their teeth. Yeah. Because it's one of the main ways they experience the world is through their teeth. Because their teeth are right out in front . They're digging a lot. And that's why they close their lips. I don't know. I don't know if they they can probably sense vibration through them. I'd think so. They are really good diggers. One quarter of their muscle mass is in their jaws to close their jaws while they're digging. They can run backwards as fast as they can run forwards. Very, very slowly. Is it slowly? Totally I think they can whiz around their tunnels. But they they live in these huge colonies like the area of a football pitch, let's say, but with thousands of meters of tunnels underneath. Uh just imagine looking down on a football pitch from underneath and seeing these sausages firing themselves around through the soil in all these zigzag patterns. Better than watching a football match for you and the match . One of the things they do by the way when they're running backwards and I guess forwards as well, is they use their hair. So we call them naked mole rats, but they do have hair and they're kind of like whiskers. They're very they're very soft, very thin, but they're kind of like how cats use their whiskers as sensory uh items. So as they're running through the tunnel, they have tail hair and they have body hair that's allowed for them to sense uh where they're going. Can we talk a bit about them and air? So Anne briefly mentioned that they don't really need air in the same way that we do. Yeah. They're crazy. Yeah. They can because they're tunnelling it underground all the time, they can go for ages and ages in a tunnel which is let's say five percent oxygen. Normal air is what is it, twenty-one percent oxygen. Above ground air. Classic air. Original full fat air. Original full fat But they can live underground in these tunnels which have very low oxygen content and they're fine. They've been experimented on they can live for 18 minutes with no oxygen. Yeah. Which would kill any human. You get you do get those um people who can hold their breath for about 20 minutes, don't you? Do you remember we did an episode? And I think we said that world record for holding your breath was like twenty three minutes or something. Okay, you're right. You guys are right, but I would just say if if unless you've done a lot of training eighteen minutes without oxygen it's gonna be bad for you. Absolutely. But related to that as well, did you read that when they sleep, they like to sort of sleep all together in a big pile on all three hundred of them. And they think that because they're all breathing out, they basically kind of like blanket themselves in carbon dioxide, which has the effect of reducing seizures. And the the paper I read said very clearly this is only for naked mole rats, no one else is to try this as a treatment. But there's some reason that they think it sort of like slows down their brains and it sort of protects them. And even if you give them a big space, they will clump together. And they described as it's like building a luxury resort and having all of your guests choose to sleep in the same broom closet. Yeah. Naked as well. I've got a few whiskers. I'm not really naked. The you were talking about the oxygen and how they survive with little oxygen. So I don't really quite understand this, but the way it works is our bodies um use glucose as energy and that glucose system in your body requires oxygen to work, but when they uh have no oxygen, they switch to fructose based system. Right. Um I don't really understand this, but apparently fructose doesn't require oxygen. So you can still get the energy going around your system, but you don't need the oxygen as well. Uh and that's how plants work. That's how plants get energy around them. But no other mammal has ever been found that uses this system. Like the plant system. They are very cool. It's the missing link. It's the in the fossil record between plant and human. Nick and Mulro. Under the underground. So like maybe they just like hang out with the plants on the clock. That's world. Can I I ask the know you said you didn't understand it, but the idea of them doing a thing that only plants do. Yes. Is that one of the most interesting biological things that we've ever noticed? Like is this the great mystery of I don't know. I didn't get a massively good response in this room. Oh, you kidding? It's insane. It's insane. It's insane that they have everything they do is insane they have two operating systems, one for backup, which no one else has. There are other naked mole rats, I think. There's the what is it, the Damarland mole rat. Yeah. There are a few others. Um, but yeah. They're very weird. The Damara Land ones are quite interesting because they have basically two different types of that mole rat . Half of them are really, really hardworking and industrious, and the other half are fat and they don't really do any work. But those are the ones that do the mating, apparently. So the oh great the busy ones do ninety-five percent of the work, but the lazy ones do almost all of the reproduction. Do they? That's so unfair. I know that's life, isn't it? All I say is it's exactly what happens in naked mole rat holdings. How do you have time to make this show when you have so many businesses on fire? Every one of them is making a massive loss. Um we should say who first described them scientifically. It's quite interesting. It was there's a German scientist who was called Eduard Ruppel and um he travelled around a lot sending samples and animals and specimens back to Frankfurt, which is where he was based. Various things are named after him. There's Rupples Bustard, Rupples Griffin Vulture, Rupples Rass, the fish, you know. Anyway, when he found the naked mole rat, he thought this is so hideous. This must be a diseased or a mutated individual from another species. The main thing cannot look like this. Ironically, it doesn't really get dise ases. No, you're so right. You're so right. Yeah, yeah. God, is that what we're gonna look like if we're truly healthy? That's true actually. If you get all these squillionaires who are like trying to make themselves live forever, they all do end up looking a bit like a naked world . 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 have said over the course of this podcast, we can all be found online . I'm on at Shriberland on Instagram. James. I my hedge funds uh can all be found on LinkedIn. Come and join me on there. James Harkin is my name. Andy. Uh my Instagram's Andrew Hunter M. Yep. And Anne. My Instagram is at Ann MillerBooks. Yeah, and don't forget it says books at the end of her handle because she has just released her kids' book which is called Monster Diaries. It's a retelling the uh Greek myths from the monsters point of view. This one's the Cyclops. Yeah so it's called Monster Diaries, the Cyclops and the Worst Party Ever. It's part of a trilogy, so there's two more coming out. So get it now. It's gonna be out very soon. And uh, if you want to get through to us, by the way, uh podcast at qi.com. We get all your emails there. Andy goes through them. If you're gonna send us an interesting fact, that might make its way to our bonus episode that comes out every Monday called Little Fish. If you want to send us an interesting experience or something that's related to something we said in an episode, Andy might pick that out for drop us a line, which is our mailbag episode. Now that's a secret show. You can only listen to that show if you join Clubfish. That's a Patreon thing. So check out patreon.com slash clubfish. There's so many fun things going on there. It's turned into a real amazing community. So go see if you want to join that and uh otherwise why not just come back here next week because we're gonna be back again with another episode and we will see you then goodbye