No Such Thing As The God of Snooze Buttons

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Check availability at gigaclear.com Hi everyone, welcome to this week's episode of No Six Things as a Fish, where we were joined by our good friend and erstwhile colleague Ann Miller. That's right, Ann 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 it about, Andy? It's about the Cyclops and the worst party ever. It's a telling of the Cyclops myth from the Cyclops' point of view, which is a very funny and good idea. 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 Ann is 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 NoSix Things a Fish quiz night! Yes, if you're a member of Club Fish, or the friend of the podcast here, 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. It's ordered. Is it a beaver 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 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? That's right. 2026. Yep, this year. AD. And it's at 7pm UK time, so go to patreon.com slash clubfish. 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. OK, 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 Hobern. My name is Dan Schreiber. I am sitting here with James Harkin, Andrew Hunter Murray, and Ann Miller. 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, that is Andy. My fact is, the author of Ben Heur 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. Oh no! So this is Lou Wallace, who wrote Ben Heur, which was one of the biggest books of the world in, it was out in about 1880. I think it was the biggest selling novel of the 19th century. It's all gone with the wind, I think. It was massive. And it's a Roman epic that also takes in the birth of Jesus, of the life of Jesus. It's a bit like the life of Brian, but it's serious. It's huge though. For many people, it was the first fiction they'd ever read. It just sold so many millions of copies. It's like the modern version of the Da Vinci Code, 50 Shades of Grey, and Miller's New Book. Yes, it's all of that. Do you have leprosy in your book? No. Oh, that's a bit of a trick there. It always adds 50% to sound. I thought it was a big eye. I should say this was sent in by Amber O'Ran. So thank you very much Amber. It's a terrific fact. Basically, Wallace was married to his wife Susan, and he said, I'm going to dedicate the book to you. What would you like? And she chose the wording, to the wife of my youth. Only my youth. A lot of people read that as, oh, that's so sad. She passed away, you know, some years ago, out of 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. And he got so many, I think he started getting marriage proposals by people saying, hey, he's single. He writes a good book. Yeah. And he said, 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. She lives on in my heart. Not like the world's most famous funeral song as well. Yes. 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 is only doing one little bit. His wife has done the dedication both times and she's messed it up twice. Yeah. Yeah. She had one job. But she's played the long game in terms of PR because now she's on those things of fish. Oh, yeah. Susan Wallace. Is she still alive? Well, she outlived him by a couple of years. She was a writer as well. And I read that she came up with the phrase, the path to little feet in a poem. She said, how did she? That's huge. And people will know that more than Ben Hur. So she is snappier, isn't it? Yeah. That's quicker. It was a big book. I mean, there's no doubt that this was a huge, huge moment in literature. It supposedly was blessed by Pope Leo the 13th. That's a story that goes around. It was one of the first books that was turned into a Braille book. That's a big book. Oh, wow. To be Braille. That is a lot. Yeah. You get tired fingers. Yeah. And it was, it was, what? You would get tired fingers. Yeah. And tired eyeballs from eating it because it is a monster book. Tired ears if you listen to the audio. 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. You could get Ben Hur cars, bicycles, cigars, Ben Hur soup, Ben Hur perfume and Ben Hur flower. As in stuff you make cakes with? Yeah. Wow. Ben Hur and Ben His bathroom towel. Stuff it. Really? Very good. I didn't think they had his and hers stuff in the 1880s. I'm wrong, really. It's the LHUR. I think the merch that I'm talking about came after the movie came out. And so the movie came out in the 50s, didn't it? Wow. Yeah. The Charlton Heston version. The like real colossal famous one. Yeah. But there have been four films. Yeah. Four films. And when was it the first one MGM ever made? Yeah. The first was in 1907, which was 15 minutes long, which at the time was an epic. Oh my God. I'm going to have to go for a wee three times. 15 minutes. And 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. There was only one print left. Then there was a 1925 one, which was very faithful to it and they got the rights. And then yes, the 1959 one is a very famous old Hollywood, you know, swords and sandals, epic. Charlton Heston plays Ben Hur in the movie, Judah. And in Greece, it was not starring Charlton Heston. No, sir, in 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 Charlton Heston, but he was billed as Charlton Easton. And the reason is, is because in modern Greek, Hesto means to shit yourself. Yeah. It's a defecation. It's a defecation thing. You tried driving a chariot there first. That's amazing. That's wild. I read that the film got the 11 Academy Awards, which is like the most anyone had got until Lord of the Rings, the third one that also got 11 and both books, Harper Collins books. Interesting. Oh, what are you trying to say here? This is a woman in publishing, you know? Who could you name any other Harper Collins books? Yeah, theory of everything else by Dan Schreiber. Also Darry's by Anne Miller. That was 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 1925 movie, assistant director, it's called William Weiler. He directed the 1959 film. He worked his way up from assistant chariot race director to overall film director. But the 1959 film is the only Hollywood movie ever to make the Vatican's approved list of films. Really? If you're having a Vatican movie night, Vatican approved movie night, you can only watch one Hollywood film and it's been there. That's the only one. Still until 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? There's Dude Wears My Car 2. Not Dude Wears My Car 1. But that's Hollywood as well, right? I mean, is it like European Scandigramma? It can be a load of boring stuff, won't it? What if it's literally Joss Ben-Harr? He made the Zodiac film on the day. When I was in primary school, we had one video to record. It's every wet play, a round of term. We all watched Mrs. Doubtfire, but only the first 50 minutes. Wow. Why only the first 50? Because Tom Reynolds. Because Tom Reynolds had left along a lesson. I didn't see the second half till I was like 20. They're both the same guy? I'm not kidding. We watched the same 50 minutes every wet break. Presumably you went to school in Scotland, right? Yeah. So for you guys, it would be like a documentary. That was after school childcare. How was the accent for Robin Williams? I liked it. Can we talk a little bit about Lou Wallace? I'm obsessed with Lou Wallace. I knew nothing about him. Very, very interesting fellows. He started writing this book after basically being button-holed on a train by an agnostic for some time. What do you mean by button-holed? Sorry, it's like when someone grabs your lapel and just talks at you for ages about something. Oh, okay. I think button-holed, you know. So he was on a train with another soldier. He was a soldier in the Union Army in the Civil War. Civil War? Yes, in the Civil War. 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 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. Who? President James Garfield. No. Oh, he was a very well-read man. Well, he had time at his house, didn't he? When he was lying around. Did you read about the job he gave him? No. So apparently President James Garfield, while he was president, he loved Ben Hur so much, and this, I wish people empowered this more often, he wanted to read a sequel so much that he gave Louis Wallace the job of Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire based in Constantinople in hope that being there would make him inspire him to write a sequel. Wow. Oh, wow. That's so cool. Isn't it so cool? But he didn't write a sequel. He was probably busy being the, it sounds like a big job. Like Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. That's a huge thing. I imagine Donald Trump's done the same with Eric Karl to try and get him to do a very hungry Catechella 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 Jarls brand writs of his time, because he... Oh my God, I'm gonna love that. No, he did everything. So when 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 and made territorial governor of New Mexico, which is where he wrote Ben Hur. Then he wrote the book and 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 and this had gone south. Sorry, hang on back up. Billy the Kid's 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. 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... How do you shoot 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 did end up having Billy the Kid arrested, 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 bygones be bygones. And maybe you can tell us about some of your accomplices. But then he kind of lost his power a little bit. And the other people who were in charge said, Oh, we're not going to agree with that deal anymore. 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. 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? Yeah. He patented eight inventions. One of them was a retractable reel inside a fishing rod handle. This guy. That's useful. Very useful. I was looking at the website of 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 not Abraham Lincoln? But one of the questions is, did Lou Wallace really invent the snooze button? And the answer is no. It says, I'm not sure how this rumor got started. It sounds frequently asked, is this question really? Well, yeah, I ask it every nine minutes. I feel like with what we've heard about him, that doesn't sound out of place. He invented. He did invent things. Yeah. Not the snooze button. And then there's this lovely quote from him where he said, 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. Paint a picture, write a book, get a patent or try to play a musical instrument. That is the genius of the true America in those four art, literature, invention and music. 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 Hur? He wrote the big biography for Benjamin Harrison while he was running for president. Ben Hur? He should have called it that. Because they wasn't really much like, they wasn't like a TV news circuit you could go on. So to get to know the candidates, they pushed these books. And he wrote Benjamin Harrison. It's such a good job. It was like the book about him for like 70 years, but with the wrong title. Rural Britain, is there any greater value out there than giga-clear full fiber from only 19 pounds a month? It's out of this world, speed and reliability. Vast upload and downloadiness, right here in rural tranquility. Saturn's rings, is that a bull? Gigaclear, faster broadband for rural Britain from only 19 pounds a month. Season C's apply, 18 month contract. Prices may rise during contract. Check availability at gigaclear.com. Stop the podcast. Stop the podcast. Hi everybody, just to let you know this episode of Fish is sponsored by Squarespace. That's right, you know Squarespace. 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 buzz in 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, you know? Yes, yes. And they just provide everything you need, they make it incredibly easy. So all you need to do is head to squarespace.com.slashfish to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. That's right, go to squarespace.com.slashfish, save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain, use the offer code FISH at the checkout. OK, on with the show, on with the Bob Girls. OK, 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 Chaiomites, the god of beans. Yummy. Mm, fantastic. What would be your job as god of beans? Just making sure. Counting them like that. Counting. There's very little known about Chaiomites, 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 get kind of junior, because like in the government, you have the main minister of transport, the main man. But then you'll have the minister of buses, who'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 goddess of archery. I would say yes, but with a lot more having sex with your sister. Well, we don't know what the minister of buses gets up to. That's what the buses is about. There's not much written about this guy, Chaiomites, but Posseanus 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. It's so mysterious, but Andy's kind of right. It kind of is like a government setup. So you have basically, you're like 12 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, Demeter. They also have a child. And then there are his children, so that you've got Athena, Aphrodite, Hermes. But again, with Greek mythology, because the stories were told so often in different places, there's different versions of everybody's parentage. So Aphrodite's one is brilliant because there are one version that she's Zeus's daughter, but not Hera's, so 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. And in that version of the story. Come on out. Not because of what's coming next. And in this version, his testicles were cut off and thrown into the sea. Oh yeah. And Neopaphos in Cyprus, and the resulting foam led to the creation of Aphrodite, and her name comes from the Greek aphros, which means foam. But there are very famous paintings of Aphrodite coming out of the sea and being born, and so that's why I can tell, no testicles in the paintings. Okay. Okay, that's interesting. Is that the same as the birth of Venus, where she's on the shell? Yeah. But before me. Oh yes. I find it all very difficult to keep in my head. You know, 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 to do. It matches together and it changes, and there's different versions. Even the 12 Olympian gods, there's different 12s, depending on who you talk to. They're kind of like Zeus was always there, but some of them vary around a little bit. And it all starts slipping into each other. I don't know what. Aphrodite, we've mentioned, the goddess of love. She just has an interesting entourage of junior gods around her. There's Eros, there's Hermaphroditus, and there's Hyman, the god of marriage. But there are various other, I'd like this kind of very junior level gods. So there's small gods, there's Terry Pratchett, would call us. Yes. Hedilogos, god of sweet talking. Nice. Sweet talking. Yeah. Right. Flirting. Yeah. And chats. Bants. Top but hot bants. 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, like thrashed with a slipper. Oh really? There's a vase from 360 BC, which depicts Aphrodite giving naughty little Eros, as spanking with a slipper, which is obviously that's become, you know, that was a staple of things like the bino. Yeah. Yeah. The slipper. So it feels like, you know, when you have a bad moment, you think, I hope nobody saw me do that. Imagine having it painted on a vase. Have you seen the latest vases? No. We did something ages ago, which was about Pythagoras and his, his death. Yeah. And his fear of beans. Was 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. And they were an offering that you would give if someone had died. And so for that reason, they were obviously important in society. And when something was so important, they might have a God associated with them. Yes. I think that's what the association is. And they also had sort of like deities. They weren't specifically like gods, but they like sort of had special powers for certain areas. So there was Horcust, who personified the curse on those who make a bad oath. You would sort of call to him. And there's somebody, Momus, who's from Mochoree and Satire. There's a whole bunch of like, skills. Momus is the bastard child of night. Momus was thrown out of Olympus eventually for hanging around making unhelpful comments. Sounds like you would be my day. He sounds like your patron saint. I did think, oh, wow. The class clown has it. Yeah, yeah. So I get quite confused about 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, there's probably still people around who believe in it. So I would say 2025. Yeah, I think that's very likely. But to play along with your game, let's say it was... 500 BC. Yeah, 100 BC. Thank you. May 2025. Thank you. This morning. It was in 2025. Oh, that's bad. Damn. Was it? Yeah, it's in the Peloponnes and it was the idea of a doctor called Manolis Heliotis who has 150 acres of land. It's a proper temple. It's marble. Cool. Ionic pillars. Is it for specific gods or for all of them? Do you know, I don't know if it's... Sounds like a tax break to me. It's very... It opened on the 8th of March. Oh. The same birthday as no such thing as a fish. Oh, that's odd. That's the day after this. It is. It was illegal to worship Zeus until 2006. Yes. In fact, any of these lot. If you wanted to do a Chaiomites festival, then that was no can do. But then in 2006, an Athens court decided that you can do this kind of pagan worshiping. 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 2006 reckoned there were 2,000 followers of the ancient Greek religion. Although people who do that, they reckon the number is more like 100,000 who still believe in those gods. Really? I mean, it's in their interest to pump up the numbers. Of course. But it's not like a thing of saying you're a Jedi, which was on a census, a few censuses ago. It's more like being a Wiccan, I would say. Interesting. Or like, you know, sorry to the Wiccans listening because I know people get that wrong a lot as well. But it's worshiping the old gods. Yes. Which definitely there are people in the UK who do that too. Yeah. And the Greek Orthodox Church are very down on this sort of thing. They were very against this temple. Yeah. Yeah, they were very hostile to it. And they said it was a regression to a dark world. Right. Gosh. So Uranus, who you didn't pronounce properly beforehand. So the only planet that we have that is named after a Greek god? So this is where it gets confusing because generally the planet names are the Roman versions of the gods. Right. So Aphrodite becomes Venus. But Neptune is Roman. Yeah. Because Poseidon is the Greek. Yeah. So you're Neptune is Roman. Jupiter is Roman. Saturn is Roman. Yeah. But Uranus is the only one that's slightly... Seems to be both. Pluto is the dog. Yeah. Yeah. Running around barking a lot. Mercury is the lead sacred of Queen. Yeah. Which you like some fun ancient Greek etymology. Yes. So the word tantalising. 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 trees would move. 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 gods? Oh yes. He did three things. Can we guess? You can try. He stole grapes. Yeah, kind of. He stole nectar and ambrosia. That's a pretty wild first hit rate. Next one. Two in three. He smacked the wrong child with a slipper. He had sex with Orsora goddess naked. That often happens. That's 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 he did not like this. How was he serving him? I think in a stew. Oh, that's impossible to tell. A stew. A stew. That's a lot going on. Is this chicken? Is this pension? Is this your son? I don't know. The god of beans is going though. What meat is there sinned with? God, something's up. I said we should all be vegetarian. That's really interesting because Tantalus is, so I was looking at the things we covered at 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 2000 years. You know what I mean? Like Olympian handlings. Yeah, exactly. Like Jupiter investments. Yeah, whatever. You know, all of this stuff. But sorry. It's when the hedge fund is listening, if you want to sponsor an episode, we're very happy to do that. But there's a very niche one. There's this amazing article by Thomas Fedorek who's spotted. There's Yuri Klayer partners. And I'd never heard of Yuri Klayer. And Yuri Klayer 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 the Odyssey Odysseus gets home 20 years later, where have you been? All that. But there are loads of chances living in the house trying to check his wife basically. And she is putting them off and saying, look, my husband's going to be home any minute. But it's been 20 years and it's wearing increasingly thin. 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 site, right? So he can get into the house and suddenly throw off his costume and win the prize and reclaim his wife and all this. One is fooled by the sight of this tramp, except Yuri Klayer, who is an elderly servant living in the house. And she is the one who spots a familiar scar on his thigh and says, you're Odysseus. 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 terrific, like she has the insight based on good market knowledge. I think that is a fantastic name for a financial organization. OK. Do you know what my hedge fund will be called? Yeah. Mine will be called Epimetheus Holdings. OK. Because Epimetheus was the god of afterthought and excuses. And he was the brother of Prometheus. So Prometheus in this story creates humans and Epimetheus creates all the other animals. 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 then. So the humans just get a shitty little human body. Oh. 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 had them. OK. 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. Oh, that's so cool. It's a great name. He's William Blackbeard. This was a guy who really is credited by people within the community of comic books in America as singlehandedly the reason that we have all the original source material from, you know, the thirties onwards. 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 the comic strips and he would log them and so he kept this huge archive and he was having to do it very slowly. And 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. 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 you keep them as like full paper? No, he just kept them out. I don't know if he did that for every single one. Because for every paper, that's... You can't keep the whole paper. 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's something like 2.5 million clippings that he managed to get his hands on. They're still going through the archive. So there's 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 its original. So yeah, a huge, huge hero to this community. I guess people didn't realize what they had. Like you need somebody to... 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. Yeah. He just did it. He just set up his own company. 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. Oh, so he's like resources. Are people like using this resource now? Yeah. It's kind of the main archive that is used for any comic book history. He wrote a lot of books as well off the back of it. Did he? Yeah. He printed the strips, didn't he? So look, here are a load of peanuts. Cartoons. I think he did a lot of... Probably sold it a bit better than that. I think I already did a lot of like consultancy work for people who wanted to know what was in the comics, who would have found out stuff because 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? A lot of medical knowledge in there. A lot of like ancient lost secrets. You get hit by a frying pan twice, then you get your memory back. Yeah, yeah. Just cultural history, you know. It's cultural history, yeah. When do 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, because obviously they became big in the 20th century in a really big way in newspapers. What about hieroglyphs? Well, you've just outgunned my early bed, which was for the biotapestry. Oh yeah. But yes. Comic strip? Is it a comic strip? What about like the cave paintings? I've seen cave paintings where it appears like one thing comes after the other one. Yes. Oh yeah. That's a good one. Cave comics. Arguably, cartoons and comic strips are the oldest medium. There we go. There we go. When were you going to say the beyer? Yeah, tapestry. Yeah, because that is sequential though, isn't it? The beyer tapestry. Yeah, and it's a strip. It is. It's coming here. We're going to 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. This is really cool. I've never heard of Iran's burnt city. Oh, jeez. It's 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. The animation. It's like a zoetrope. The thing you spin round and round and the animation repeats itself. Wow. I've seen that they've rendered it into an animation. So that's like the original flip book as opposed to comic strip. You're right. It is worth that. 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 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 going to do a little scribble on his shredding 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 risible thing because it was a comedy magazine. And then they started using the word cartoon to refer to their political cartoons. Which became big around that time as well. And that's why we use it today. So interesting. I have 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 comic strips. Isn't that beautiful? I think it's pronounced Fumetto. F-U-M-E-T-T-O. Fumetto. But it's the little clouds. It's very beautiful. I was looking into a few of the major comic strip creators of the 1930s onwards in America. When circulation was like, you know, it was getting 34 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. L.Z. Segar, who we've mentioned before, he's the creator of Popeye. This guy died quite young. 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. 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, it 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 these days. But actually, that's cool. 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 the Great Depression, it made spinach consumption go up 33 percent as the American children named it one of the top three favorite foods after ice cream in Turkey. It was spinach. It really rebranded spinach. That's some believable branding for spinach, isn't it? Yeah, that's quite the bronze position on the podium. 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. No one's ever been made depraved by Garfield in the paper. But there were a lot of worries in the 1940s. There were even some comic book burnings that happened. So a lot of editorials, which said they were a national disgrace. One American critic called John Mason Brown described them as the marijuana of the nursery. I know there was a big work in 1954, seduction of the innocent by Frederick Wortham. Yes, he was a child psychologist who did a lot of good in his career, you know, ensured that a lot of poor or mentally unwell people got fair trials, helped fight mental illness in children, but he had a big being as bonnet about comics. He decided they were evil. He decided that Batman and Robin were an item, which was less socially acceptable in the 40s 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 did a bit. He decided Superman was a fascist, very much not the point. And he basically thought they should all be a 15 certificate blanket. No exceptions. So we have slightly mentioned him before. Have we? 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 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. Isn't that cool? That's very cool. Yeah. It led to this thing called the comics code, which had all these rules like if crime is depicted, it should be as assorted 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. Twenty. Twenty. Twenty five. Ruined the game. Is it 200 BC? Thank you, James. It was 2011. Wow. Final members of this code. People gradually like comic book makers gradually fell away from it. But the final members kept going until 2011. 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 to come up and somehow, do you know what I mean? It's quite unsatisfying when you watch it. And people don't get a proper response. Yeah. On you were talking about werewolves and all that kind of stuff. In 1954 in Glasgow, there was a vampire hunt. 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 acts of 1955, which 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 cemeteries attacking people. But people pointed out that actually there were no vampire comics around around that time. No one had read any. 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 7.7, 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. But it did lead to an actual act of parliament. So it's sort of excess Sunday school is what they're saying. That's what it seems to be. And it's reading about such 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 happened at the same time was as a really popular musical song called Dennis the menace from Venice. OK, which I've never heard that before. Dennis the menace. So they may have heard that song and then it was sort of like a catchy name. They developed it. I mean, it's still it's looking about on exactly the same day on both sides of the Atlantic, which is absolutely wild. Insane. Yeah. But not that insane. If two years earlier, there was another character. But the same day. 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. I mean, Dennis the menace, we should say doesn't one. Which one? British one. British black and red, spiky hair, dog called Nashia, all of that. Doesn't, of course, get slippered anymore. Does he not? No, if you buy the Bina these days, it's very rare to have 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 slipper. Your grumpy, mustachio dad would hit you with slipper. Yeah. And that was. That was normal. That was normal. And it never did us any harm. You know, the in Dundee, we have a our big statue in the town centre is desperate down. Is it? Yeah, there's a many that makes an excellent. That's very cool. Because that was the other thing we've mentioned that on the show, the meat pies that he would eat, they got changed into vegan pies for a while as well. Cow pies. Cow pies, sorry. Yeah, yeah, they were changed into veggie. Hang on, this is my son in here. I was an observation test. So. I here's a tiny, tiny fun detail. Scrooge McDuck was invented by a man called Carl Barks. The wrong centre person. Sounds like a cartoon of a socialist dog, doesn't it? Oh, my God. Why don't we all share the bone? So funny. OK, it is time for our final fact of the show. And that is James. OK, my fact 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. But being a naked mole rat and cleaning toilets for a living does feel like you've drawn a bit of a short straw. It's a double one. 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. Such a good point. So this is naked mole rats. I think one of the poster boys of QI over the years, we love naked mole rats. They're hardworking, they're hideous looking. They live in Africa, where we don't. 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 by their colony. OK, there's digging, transporting garbage, cleaning the toilets because they have all these tunnels and some of the tunnels are used for pooing and weeing. 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 naked mole 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 still early days, whether this is completely right because it was quite a short survey, but that's what they think. So they are absolutely hideous looking. Are we talking about the scientists from Kumamoto University? I am. But we should say if you've never if you've never seen a naked mole rat and you're listening to this, do have a little Google, because they just are not classically fit animals. Like they live on the ground. They live on the ground. Parablycite. I know they've got. But so it doesn't matter. So it doesn't matter. Is that what you're saying? How does she look? I have no idea. But they've basically got they've they're naked. They've got they've got this sort of wrinkly nude flesh. They look like a sausage with teeth is what the scientists work on them say. But would you eat that sausage? No. I'd have to have gone a long time without a sausage to. Yeah, I would take that off the barbecue first. But it's actually not these guys. They have such amazing superpowers. So like they don't we think they don't feel pain. They can survive 18 minutes without oxygen, but they can do so many cool things. They are so incredible. I wonder, by the way, if the toilet cleaners are also partial chefs, because they wash their paws. Well, naked mole rats, they eat each other's feces. Oh, and the queens, they have a queen, which is an amazing thing. I mean, queen of the toothed sausages. You know, I think I think queen is putting it a bit strong, actually. That's very unfair. They probably wouldn't find you very attractive. And the actually they'll be like, 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 queen, yeah, she 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 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. Well, actually, she can fire her estrogen out in the poo, they think. 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 more 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 40 and a few hundred workers. But the queen suppresses the sexual instincts of almost everyone else in the colony. Most adults don't even develop genitalia. Yeah, all the females have sealed vaginas, 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 it's like a blood batch. They're just killing each other right until the point where the female mole rat becomes pregnant and then that becomes the queen. And 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. Pups. But then every time they give birth, their body stretches, it's like you've pulled them a bit longer because they're 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. 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 rats. Every time I find the naked mole rat fights, I just think, oh, we've probably done them before. 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. So can they feel with them? I don't know. I don't know if they they can probably sense vibration through them. I 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 forward. Very, very slowly. Is it slowly? I can imagine. I think they can whiz around their tunnels, but they live in these huge colonies, like the area of a football pitch, let's say, but with thousands of meters of tunnels underneath. 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. That's not watching a football match for you, I imagine. 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 items. So as they're running through the tunnel, they have tail hair and they have body hair. So there's a lot for them to sense 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, by oxygen. They're crazy. Yeah, they can, because they're tunneling 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. Is it twenty one percent oxygen? Original full fat air. Original full? 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, which would kill any human. Yeah, that's what David Blaine did about that. You get, you do get those people who can hold their breath for about 20 minutes. What? Do you remember we did an episode and I think we said that well, Dracoff, your breath was like 23 minutes or something. OK, you're right. You guys are right. But I would just say, if unless you've done a lot of training, yeah, 18 minutes of oxygen, it's going to be bad for you. Absolutely. Related to that as well. Did you read that when they sleep, they like to sort of sleep altogether in a big pile or 300 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 paper I read said very clearly, this is only for a naked mole rat. 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. 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 use glucose as energy. And that glucose system in your body requires oxygen to work. But when they have no oxygen, they switch to fructose based system. Right. 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. 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 fossil record between plant and human. Naked and all. And then underground. So like maybe they're just like hanging out with the plants. That's wild. Can I ask the I know you said you didn't understand it, but the idea of them doing a thing that only plants do. 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 that they have this. Everything they do is insane. Yeah. It's 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 Damaraland mole rat. Yeah. There are a few others. But yeah, they're very weird. The Damaraland ones are quite interesting because they have basically two different types of that mole rat. Half of them are really, really hard working 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 they are great. The busy ones do 95 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 the fly? Every one of them is making a massive loss. We should say who first described them scientifically. It's quite interesting. There's a German scientist who was called Edward Ruppel. And he traveled 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 Ruppels Busted, Ruppels Griffin Vulture, Ruppels 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 diseases. No, you're so right. You're so right. Yeah, yeah. God, is that what we're going to 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 mole rat. OK, 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 Shrybland on Instagram, James. I, my hedge funds can all be found on LinkedIn. Come and join me on there. James Harkins, my name. Andy, my Instagram's Andrew Hunter M. Yep. And Anne. My Instagram is at Anne Miller Books. Yeah. And don't forget it says books at the end of her handle because she has just released her kid's book, which is called Monster Diaries. It's a retelling the 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 going to be out very soon. And if you want to get through to us, by the way, podcast at qi.com, we get all your emails there. Andy goes through them. If you're going to 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 of something that's related to something we said in an episode, Andy might pick that out for Drop Us Align, which is our mailbag episode. Now, that's a secret show. You can only listen to that show if you join Club Fish. That's a Patreon thing. So check out patreon.com slash Club Fish. 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 otherwise, why not just come back here next week, because we're going to be back again with another episode and we will see you then. Good bye.