No Such Thing As A Fish: 478: No Such Thing As An Award-Winning Gecko

Hi everyone, welcome to this week's episode of no such thing as a fish before we get going.

I have some news and that is that we are going to do some live shows.

Now this news will not be news to those of you who are members of Club Fish because

you have already had your priority booking time but to everyone else the tickets will

be available on Friday the 12th of May at 2pm UK time.

That is today if you're listening to the show the day it goes out or it's a Friday in the

past if you're not so the tickets are very likely to be available right now and the way

you get those is to go to no such thing as a fish.com forward slash soho.

The shows will be at the Soho Theatre in London.

They take place from the 17th of July to the 21st of August.

It's going to be a whole lot of fun, loads of facts, loads of dorkiness, loads of special

special guests and as I said if you want tickets for that you can go to no such thing as a

fish.com forward slash soho.

If you're thinking it's in London I can't get to there I live all the way in Belgium

then fear not because we also will be doing one show in Belgium at the Nerdland Festival

that will be with our old friend Leven Skyra and that will take place Zondag the 28th of

May which luckily I mean my I assume that's Flemish is not that good but luckily my diary

tells me it will be on Sunday the 28th of May and tickets for that are available at

nerdlandfestival.be.

So I hope to see lots of you at some of those gigs but as far as today's podcast is concerned

it is a live show and it was one that we did at the British Library with the incredible

comedy actor and genius that is Sally Phillips.

We did this show for the Fantastic Beasts exhibition at the British Library.

They wanted us to do a show all about animals and I'll be honest we stretched that a fair

bit from time to time but we had so much fun I really hope you enjoy this show I'm sure

you will and I guess what else is there to say apart from on with the podcast.

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish a weekly podcast this

week coming to you live from the British Library.

My name is Dan Schreiber I am sitting here with James Harkin Andrew Hunter Murray and

Sally Phillips and once again we yes and once again we have gathered around the microphones

with our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order here

we go.

Starting with fact number one and that is my fact.

My fact this week is that the British Library's Fantastic Beasts collection originally included

accounts of a nine foot dragon terrorizing Essex and an army of horses that teleported

to rural Wales and it was donated by the founder of the British Museum Sir Hans Sloan.

So he was a nutcase.

So here's the thing right he's Hans Sloan if you don't know who he is he was one of

the founders of the British Museum an incredible guy he was a doctor and at the top of being

a doctor he was obsessed with collecting he collected everything and that's what became

the basis of the British Museum's collection.

He was a hoarder.

He was a hoarder yeah I mean he was a serious hoarder.

He had he had like a separate apartment to hoard in because it got too much in his own.

Yeah and how did he die did it all collapse on him.

Yes exactly a museum pillar it took him out.

No he was quite old I think when he died I think he was in his nineties.

He was in ninety three.

Ninety three.

Is this the bringer of chocolate the man I know is the bringer of the hot chocolate to

the United Kingdom.

Controversial.

Controversial.

You see.

He was and I think I think it's been claimed that that was something he nicked it was

ready in place.

Yeah.

I think he was in Jamaica maybe.

He was in Jamaica.

Really.

Yeah.

Okay.

And then it was a practice day sort of a grated cocoa with milk and cinnamon and stuff.

But I think.

Okay.

Sorry to shit on him in his own home.

Well the teleporting horse is better anyway.

It's way better isn't it.

Yeah so this is what I was about to say was is all the collections I'd got handed over

after he passed away in his will to be the basis of the British Museum's collection

eventually became the British Library's collection as well and there was lots of papers there

was lots of physical objects and a part of it was a collection of things called strange

news.

He was obsessed with strange news stories that would come out from France and Scotland

and Wales of odd things that you know like.

Well like dragons.

Like dragons.

Yeah.

Appearing horses in the middle of Wales.

It was the artifact version of no such thing as a fish.

Yes.

Well he's the yeah he's the old me I guess.

You have fewer links to the slave trade we should say Dan.

Fewer.

Fewer.

Yeah so this this big dragon that arrived in Essex it was in a place called Hennem which

is just north of Stanstead.

It's about two miles north of Stanstead and so what I like to imagine is actually there

was like a time travel portal that came in and it was actually an easy jet flight.

Maybe I don't know.

But there's loads of other things that he he claimed and the thing is he went out to

collect things from around the world but the reason he did that is because he thought

it would help people to better understand God's design of the world.

And so when he was finding this strange news a lot of things he didn't believe in but there

were some things that he did.

So he found a story from France where fist sized hailstones came down and kind of batted

everything and hurt a lot of people and killed a lot of crops.

But the only thing that was saved was a Protestant church.

Yeah.

He thought that this was proof that you know God was saving them.

Yeah this one's amazing there was a story this is from Scotland.

There was a guy who died and he was in his home they would laid him to in state is in

state.

What is it when you lay someone?

Sure.

Yeah.

So he's laid in the house.

He's in a coffin for people to come and see.

Oh like an open coffin.

Like a way.

Yeah.

At state is pretty fancy.

It's pretty queen-ish isn't it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You just said this guy was this.

King of Scotland.

No no no.

How long was the queue is what was happening.

It was just a guy and it was a town of Dumfries.

Okay.

So apparently people went to visit him and then it came the time where okay let's bury

him now and they tried to lift him and no one could lift him.

He was really heavy.

They just they tried everything so they brought cattle in and they tied ropes around him and

tried to pull him and he didn't move.

And then the house burnt down and he remained as the only thing that was still there.

Wow.

He's like Arthur's sword in the stone.

He's the guy in the house.

Yeah the corpse in the house.

Sorry.

He collected the story if he didn't collect the guy.

No.

You can't collect the guy as the point of the story.

So he had str- were these kept in diary form or like what kind of evidence were they?

These were like weird pamphlets that used to get produced and so people would go and

buy them on the street and it would just say strange news from Scotland.

So he's 1660s.

Yeah.

Yes he was really early.

Oh yeah.

Yeah.

We should say that.

I know we don't need to say it.

None of the stuff is true that we're described.

But then we keep saying apparently and then describing things which people thought it was

some people thought it was true.

Yeah.

That's true.

I'm just saying if in like 400 years they're discussing a copy of the Daily Star and saying

apparently there was a-

There is an infinitely heavy man.

I think I remember that headline.

Yeah.

I did.

I actually weirdly I found a star headline in the course of it because I was researching

animals which are not proven to exist.

Yes.

And there was a headline in the Daily Star in 2008, Loch Ness Monster dies aged three

million.

That's a shame.

I know.

Oh yeah.

That's completely brilliant.

Global warming.

Very sad.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's interesting the whole thing of fictional creatures and cryptids.

I did Italian.

Dante.

There were a lot of fictional creatures.

The phoenixes in Dante.

Oh yeah.

At only incense and cardamom pods in heaven.

Cardamom pods.

What's that?

That's a bit of a curry that you see and you're like, oh, they've left it in.

Oh wow.

No, it's the thing in the jazz version of a cinnamon bun.

Right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

There were three types of phoenixes, three types of yetis.

Yeah.

You found a yeti that I've never heard of.

Yeah.

Which is, what was it called?

Yeah.

There's three types.

The Nielmo which is black, has black fur and is the largest in the fetus which is 15

foot tall.

The Chuti which is eight feet tall and lives 8,000 to 10,000 feet above sea level.

And the Rangshin Bombo which is only three to five feet tall.

And I think must have been just the mistaken, it's an orangutan or some kind of a boon.

Yeah.

The first one sounds like a gorilla.

Rangshin Bombo.

Yeah, it does a bit.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The first one you're describing is a black fur, quite tall.

Yeah.

It's interesting.

The abominable snowman.

I mean, they had some fur, didn't they?

They kept, various times over history, they would analyse the DNA of and occasionally find

it to be a horse or a bear or a...

But they now think it is a kind of bear hybrid thing, don't they?

How do they?

I think so.

That's interesting.

Yeah.

Also, I've studied this a lot actually, Sally.

I'm trying to find the thing you haven't studied a lot.

That's everything else.

I can't believe we've had on the one thing I've studied.

This is the dream come true.

But Brian Blessed, who is a very...

Yeti.

Yeti.

That's what he would say.

He would go for the Yeti, looking for the Yeti, and then the locals that he would meet

in the Himalayas would say, oh, it's a Yeti, and he realised that all the stories are

him.

It's him.

I read about quite recently in Nepal, they had these, I think they were models or badges

or some kind of publicity of the Yeti, and they sent them out, and then all the locals

were like, well, the Yeti looks nothing like that.

What are you doing?

Because he didn't have any fur on.

And the guy who did it said, well, no one knows what it looks like anyway, so that's

one thing.

And number two, fur is actually really difficult to draw.

So King Kong, for example, not a cryptid, I know a fictional character, a crowbar is

what you're attempting.

No, we're talking about large hairy fellas, and King Kong is all of these three things.

But King Kong was originally based on a lizard.

Was it?

Oh, Godzilla?

No.

I think Godzilla's a bit later.

King Kong was based on the Komodo dragon.

Really?

Yeah.

So the filmmaker behind King Kong was Marion C. Cooper, and he was friends with an explorer

called William Burden, who had got permission to collect some Komodo dragons from the Dutch

East Indies, as they were then, now Indonesia.

Until 1910, nobody from the West had seen a Komodo dragon, so they were cryptids.

They weren't believed in.

They had not been sighted, spotted, hunted, brought back, or no specimens.

And one was brought back by William Burden to the USA.

And in the course of the expedition, his wife was nearly eaten by a Komodo dragon.

What?

Really?

And yeah, she finished setting a photography, like a photo trap up or something for it,

one was going back and came face to face with one and, you know, had a lucky escape.

Wow.

And so that image of this kind of glamorous woman faced with a terrifying beast, when

William Burden brought back the sample that he got of a Komodo dragon, Marion C. Cooper

saw it and thought, what if it was a monkey?

And that, I mean, because gorillas were also new in the USA at the time.

How old was his wife?

Oh, I don't know.

Because there is a thing when you sort of hit menopause, your maternal instinct goes

really into overdrive and you start wanting to mother beautiful primates and, yeah, lots

of women get into trouble that way.

Animals and show business is a marriage made in hell.

We had an animal agent who came on to smack the pony quite a lot, Jackie, she had quite

a lot of, represented a lot of animals that would come occasionally with need.

And she had a Vietnamese potbellied pig on her business card and went, oh, he's so cute.

And Perry Menopause is starting so cute.

And do you still have him?

She went, no, he won't bring it in any work, so we hurt him.

Wow.

I hope she said that in ear shots of all the other animals.

You better do your job.

Yeah, it was terrible.

Apparently, the hardest animals to train are owls.

They just don't get it, apparently.

It's really interesting that you think that an owl would be smart, but no, dumb.

Ravens are the dogs of the sky.

Penguins are aggressive, a bit of a nightmare.

And they have explosive poo.

Do you know this?

Who?

Penguins.

The poo explodes.

Oh.

So very difficult to pick up.

No, no, no, no.

As you mean, the poo shoots out.

It doesn't, they don't lay it and then it just explodes.

Imagine if dogs did that.

Yeah.

Every time you'd be walking through the park it would be like walking through World

War One, wouldn't it?

It'd be like the end of Blackadder.

Don't take your foot off it.

Don't take your foot off it.

Yeah.

They have lots of animals, obviously, playing each part.

The Kestrel in Cares was played, do you know this?

You prove it.

Played by three different Kestrels called Freeman, Hardy and Willis after the shoe shop.

That's amazing.

Yeah.

I presented the Palm Dog Award for best, came I...

The Palm Dog.

The Palm Dog.

There is, you know, in Cannes, the Cannes Film Festival.

Some British journalist 22 years ago now set up the Palm Dog rather than the Palm

Door for the best canine performance.

And I was lucky enough to present the award with Ronnie Ancona to Quentin Tarantino on

behalf of the dog in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, which is played by three dogs, two male dogs

and one female dog.

Crosby stills.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So the dogs don't get to come to the ceremony or...?

Well, they didn't...

The dog didn't come to the...

No, they found a similar breed and they brought that dog in.

The dog didn't know what was happening.

Oh, God.

They ate the first dog in May.

Quentin urinated on the carpet.

It was fine.

But, yeah, yeah.

So you have several.

Wow.

And they used different animals.

So he was saying...

Quent...

My Quentin.

Quent.

Quenty.

Quent.

Tar.

My brother tried to license his image to be on lunchboxes.

I don't know why.

But anyway...

What?

Well, hang on.

Wait a minute.

But he says they have three different dogs, one girl and two boys.

And on the day, he thought the two male dogs were better, but then turned out the female dog

was actually...

When he got into the edit, he realized she was a much better actress.

Sorry.

Your brother tried to...

tried to license Quentin Tarantino's image, famously, a man who makes 18 certificate films

for lunchboxes.

For children's lunchboxes.

What was he thinking, the market?

I didn't ask.

It was only, like, a long time after he told me that, that I realized that that was mad.

Tarantino's up there.

He's accepting an award as a dog.

It's like a brand, you know, that image of him, like the Che Guevara Tarantino picture.

I think they were putting that on stuff.

Oh, okay.

Was that a famous picture, the Che Guevara Tarantino?

But do you know the one I mean, though?

No.

Don't you?

Okay.

So I feel like there's a very sort of known...

I don't know if you remember, Dan knows everything about yetis.

There's nothing about anything else.

Do you know, just going back to mythological creatures a second.

The, speaking of penguins exploding poo out their buns, there's a mythological creature

called...

Smooth, by the way.

Smooth.

Thank you.

There's a thing called the bonacan.

You heard of the bonacan?

Bonacan's like a...

It's like this beast, which is like a half-horse.

It's got curved horns.

And the way that it would, if it was being hunted by humans, the way that it would deter the

animals is to fire poisonous shit out of its bum, right?

But it can make a distance.

And this is what's most impressive about this thing that doesn't exist.

Is it can shoot at three acres.

That's a unit of area.

Area, not distance, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So does he cover the entire, like, one and a half football pitch?

I think it does cover three.

I've also read about the bonacan.

Interestingly, Brian Blessed told me...

He could do that.

He could do that.

When he was on Everest, he said...

Four acres.

Yeah.

He said he had a bout of diarrhea on Everest, and the poo shot out, and it...

He said...

His thing he often says is, don't camp under the French, because the fuckers will shit on

you.

That's his like...

That's like a T-shirt quote from him.

But again, who's buying these obscene T-shirts and lunchboxes?

Yeah, I need to meet your brother, actually.

Anyway, the bonacan is a terrifying creature with three-acre poisonous poo.

Yeah.

And everyone that's depicted trying to hunt it all faces the other way, basically

facing as ready to run, because they want to escape the firing line.

Poison's poo.

Yeah.

It's like fighting Medusa.

Have you come across, I'm sure you have, the fictitious creatures of lumberjack culture?

No.

No.

That sounds amazing.

No.

Guys, settle in.

There are a number of books called things like fearsome critters about fictional creatures

in lumberjack lore.

Yeah.

And they're things like...

Well, my favorite one, let me take my favorite one.

There's a splinter cat.

It's a regular cat, but with no logic.

Who's an indiscriminate destroyer of hollow trees, which was their explanation for lightning

strikes.

Oh, wow.

It was one that was the lumberjack hunter that hides behind trees so you can't see it,

but can only be deterred by loads of alcohol.

So the lumberjacks must be drunk to keep safe.

That's good.

That's kind of fun.

That's good logic.

We're going to have to move on.

We've run way over.

Oh, no.

I was reading some stuff by Alien, the Roman writer and orator.

What?

Alien.

I was going to call him Alien.

Alien.

Alien.

And he's got loads of amazing creatures.

He has the buprestis, which he believed existed, which is a creature which, if swallowed by

a cow, causes the cow to swell and burst.

He had a smooth lobster where if you saw it on the beach and then you marked where it

was and you drove it to anywhere in the world, when you got back to where it was, it would

be back there.

Whoa.

You sure it wasn't teleporting.

Yeah.

And he said also that if a snake is eating something that's a little bit too big for it to swallow

and it kind of gets it into the mouth and can't go any further, it will stand straight

on its tail and jiggle itself so the food will go down into its stomach.

Amazing.

Have you seen those videos of people hunting anacondas?

No.

No.

They put a leather trouser on and stick their entire leg into the snake's hole.

Yeah, they get swallowed.

Why would you do that?

Because then they have to catch a snake to, I guess, eat it.

You're the worm for fishing.

You're the worm.

I don't like this.

And then they haul you out and then kill the snake.

And the leather thing is so that the snake doesn't digest, so all the juices doesn't digest

the human body.

And maybe the teeth can't go through it or something?

Yeah, I think that as well.

It's just awful.

Did you see the guy?

I think this is right.

He was attempting to be swallowed by a snake as well and it was going to be like a world

record.

I think I'm right in saying this.

Again, this don't even accept heaviest cat anymore.

I think, unfortunately...

Didn't they?

No.

They've had an infinitely heavy one in Dumfries today.

But this guy, it was big, it was big.

It was set up.

It was like a Nat Geo kind of thing.

The snake started swallowing on the wrong end, so he went head first.

And he wasn't ready for it and so they had to pull him out and cancel the...

They did not have his big leather hat.

They do it.

I mean, they catch fish like that sometimes in America, don't they?

It's catfish and they'll get the cat to grab hold of their fist.

And then when it's bitten, they pull it out.

Really?

It's called catfisting.

Is it?

It is, yeah.

I'd rather it be catfished, if anything.

It is time for fact number two and that is James.

Okay, my fact this week is that in real life, the very hungry caterpillar

would have gone around headbutting his mates.

So these days, you know, all of these children's books are getting rewritten,

aren't they, like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and whatever.

And I'm calling for the very hungry caterpillar to be rewritten

to be more factually accurate.

Because according to the people at Florida Atlantic University,

whenever caterpillars get really, really hungry and they don't have enough food,

they'll go around looking for other caterpillars and then they'll attack them,

knock them off where they're eating and then they'll go in and eat their leaf.

No way.

Yeah, and so that's what Eric Carl really should have been writing about.

It's a tough one.

They don't eat ice cream.

They don't eat lollipops.

They don't eat salami.

They tend to only eat one kind of leaf.

Any caterpillar, whatever caterpillar you get.

This is going to sell big, James.

On Monday, he got in one fight and he ate one of the same kind of leaf

that he's going to eat for the rest of the week.

They do occasionally, they occasionally get a species which will eat fruit.

So you might get one that would eat an apple, but it would only eat apple

and it would only eat the same apple and it would live inside the apple it was eating

until it was ready to eat.

I actually would really enjoy that book.

My partner Ian pointed out on the way here that Eric Carl was conscripted into,

yeah, he fought on the Siegfried line.

I think it was.

Yeah, he was an American born with a German mind.

Yeah, age 15, he was conscripted and he had to dig the trenches.

In my head, that's a bit like a caterpillar to caterpillars, dig.

That's what gave him the idea.

He was born in Germany, the family moved to America really soon

or his early years were in America, certainly.

Then the family moved back to Germany in 1935 when he was about six years old.

So at the end of the war, he was conscripted to dig trenches and he was fired at.

He was 15 as well.

He was 15 years old.

Yeah.

And then after the war, obviously he had a horrible time.

His father was in a prison camp and had an awful time.

Then the family moved, he certainly moved back to America

and then he was conscripted a second time to go to join the US Army

and to go back to Germany again where he was involved in filling in the holes that he dug.

I actually feel quite bad that I'm shitting on his book now.

No, no, no, no, no.

Well, I mean, is it any wonder that the follow-up book was called The Very Grumpy Ladybird?

And there's another called Polar Bear, What Do You Hear, I think.

Well, he wrote a lot.

What do you see? What do you hear? Yeah, because, yes.

He's a great artist.

Also, an amazing scheme off the back of this book

because there was an Eric Carle Museum that you can go to in America

and in the museum, everything has a hole in it.

Oh, sorry.

Well, no, not everything's edible. That would be amazing.

So, like, if you go to the canteen, you buy a cookie

and the cookie has a massive hole in it.

Brilliant.

So this guy is saving so much money in his...

Like, I remember reading that the New York Times,

when they removed the dot at the end of New York Times,

that little on the headline, they were saving $600 a year.

That little bit of ink cost them so much.

Imagine how much that bit of cookie that's missing is saving the music.

What do they do with those little bits of cookie, though?

They sell their cookies.

But imagine how you could ruin that museum

by having Eric Carle's experience of warfare, like a room.

Yeah, that's not the kind of room to go in.

A trench digging.

A trench room.

Yeah.

So I went onto his website because there is another problem in this book.

That is that towards the end, the caterpillar goes into a cocoon

and becomes a butterfly, but butterflies don't go into cocoons.

Butterflies go into chrysalises.

Caterpillars.

Caterpillars don't go into anything.

No, they come from chrysalises, yeah.

And so some kids have written into him and said,

well, why have you got a cocoon in your book?

And he replied saying, well, there is a rare genus

that lives in Siberia, North Korea, and the northern islands of Japan

called Parnassian, which does pupate in a cocoon.

So he was hugely relieved when he found out.

What's the difference, sorry?

What's the difference between a chrysalis and a cocoon?

So a cocoon is made out of silk and a chrysalis isn't.

A chrysalis is made out of nylon.

But you get quite a lot of moths that make cocoons.

Another insects, but butterflies don't.

But he did then say, actually, you know, caterpillars don't eat lollipops either.

This was just a special caterpillar.

It's allowed to do what it wants.

It's children's book, grow up.

And then another kid wrote in saying caterpillars don't have noses.

Oh, get stuffed.

Just, I mean, just, you know.

And he said, I know it has a nose on its face,

but this feature grew out of my imagination.

I don't have shoes either, caterpillars.

I read an anecdote about him,

which I'm only bringing up because I didn't understand it.

So I'm hoping that maybe you guys will.

So he said that his, he wrote all these books, as you were saying,

where it was sort of like the next kind of, so the very busy spider,

the very quiet cricket.

And in an interview, he says that he found himself in the changing rooms after swimming,

and a satirical young fan suggested a book entitled The Very Slow Penis

to the author's great amusement.

And I can't work out what's funny about that.

What's a slow penis?

Ask your wife.

Does it also have a hole going through it, this book?

I just can't work out what a slow penis is.

Yeah.

Anyway, there's a slow loris.

Well, you've stuffed us all down.

Thank you.

You had no such thing on Twitter if you want to let us know.

Well, it got their hairs right anyway.

Butterflies and moths, I discovered, have nearly 10 billion hairs on them.

No.

10 billion, because these scientists have spent over a decade

studying the surface area of animals.

Counting.

Counting, yeah.

No, the surface area of animals.

I mean, that's such a funny thing, I think.

Yeah.

So a cat's surface area is actually like a ping-pong table.

When you cover your ping-pong table in cat, the bowl doesn't bounce nearly as well.

Sea otter has the surface area of a professional hockey rink.

Because they've got, is it the hairs?

Yeah, so many hairs.

So many different hairs.

That's brilliant.

And a honeybee has the same number of hairs as a squirrel.

Really?

What?

I know.

Yeah, the Georgia Institute of Technology, just astonishing.

That's amazing.

What do we do with that?

Yeah, they were running calculations to find the true surface area of animals

because they were trying to work out ways of keeping things clean.

So dogs, obviously, shake.

Every animal has a different way of keeping clean.

Sometimes the fur helps them to stay clean.

Sometimes it doesn't.

It's why you must never shave a dog.

I'm sure you haven't, but don't shave a dog, even a really furry one.

It's not good for it.

Are yous have a challenge to stop it?

They don't get a number one.

Yeah, you shouldn't shave your dog.

You shouldn't do that.

That's bad.

That's what doodles it.

I'm told the chow chow needs to go and have a number one.

Did you go down to the hairdressers and say, short as you can, mate?

Yeah.

And watch out for the number twos.

They will explode.

On the idea of James, this whole thing that you have about the incorrect facts about children's books,

here's one thing that I've, this feels like a very QI thing.

So I'm sure a lot of people already know this.

I didn't, though.

There's a lot of kids' books when there's a whale, let's say a blue whale or any kind of whale that's surfacing.

There's always this beautiful spout of water that's coming out and there's...

They don't do that.

What?

I feel like I've seen that in real life.

Ah, you have.

What?

Go on, go on.

Ah, the riddler.

But his horse was called Thursday.

The doctor was his mum.

If you see any kind of thing where it's a whale with a huge, like, yeah, the water coming out.

Spout of water.

Spout of water.

That is basically, according to experts, that's what would happen if a whale is drowning.

They don't spout water out of their blowhole.

That's their nostril.

That's their breathing.

They don't put water out through.

So they breathe.

When you see that, the breathing is moist air that's just collected inside and that's what's coming out.

So if you ever see a whale where there's spouts of water coming down, it is drowning.

So what I've seen...

I've not seen the drowning whale.

I've seen, like, a water vapor whale.

Yeah, exactly.

You're seeing water vapor and it gives that misty kind of look.

Like a kettle.

Like a kettle.

Exactly.

But if you see a fountain, you're going to save that whale.

Wow.

Yeah.

So basically what it means is every drawing of a whale in a child's book...

It's dying.

...is a dying whale.

That's how.

Very upsetting.

It is time for fact number three and that is Andy.

My fact is that the false gecko, which has the Latin name pseudo gecko, is a gecko.

There are ten species of false gecko.

They're all geckos.

One of them is not a gecko.

It's just a name.

It's just a really, really bad name.

I couldn't find why they're called false geckos.

I think maybe they were found and assumed to be something different.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, but geckos are wonderful.

There are geckos that don't have legs.

They look like snakes.

I would have thought that would have been the false gecko.

Oh, cool.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, there are six families of geckos with no legs.

They're all endemic to Australia and New Guinea.

Right.

Brilliant.

They've got vestigial hind limbs, apparently.

They look a tiny bit like flaps.

Yeah, you can see these little bumps that come out,

and that means it's a lizard.

No eyelids, either.

No eyelids.

Almost every gecko has no eyelids.

There are 1500 species of gecko,

and all bar 43 have no eyelids.

And the eublifaridae,

which literally means good eyelids in ancient Greek,

they have eyelids.

But even they also lick their eyes,

like all the other geckos do, to moisten them,

despite having eyelids.

Right.

Amazing.

That's cool.

That's a fuck you lizard.

No, this is a lizard,

which it's not its official name.

That's not the scientific name.

But it was a lizard that,

when Americans were over in Vietnam during the war,

they kept noticing that they just kept hearing a little voice going,

fuck you.

And they're like, who, what is going on?

And they'd be walking up, fuck you.

And so they all discovered that it's just this lizard

that just makes a noise.

Fuck you.

And so it became known as, yeah, the fuck you lizard.

Why do we not all have one of those?

Yeah.

The noises, I was surprised that the gecko noises, though,

that they bark.

Well, they're the only lizard that makes a noise, geckos.

Oh, are they?

Yeah, that's, because if you think what noises a lizard make...

You wouldn't have thought it was...

But that sort of, it sounds more like a sort of electric buzzer ring,

doesn't it?

Sally, do you think a gecko could ever win the palm dog?

No.

No?

Fuck you!

But we covered a few years ago.

I think we covered the hero dog of the year.

And a few years ago, it was won by a cat.

That's true.

Really?

Yeah.

I presented hero dog of the year.

No.

I don't know, was it last year or the year before?

No, not this year, but anyway, quite recently.

And this is going to sound a bit mean now.

But one of the finalist dogs.

Okay, this is just my problem.

And it wasn't a Chihuahua, but it was similar.

It was very, very small.

And his owner slash mummy, whatever you prefer to call it,

said that the dog had saved her partner's life

by giving him CPR.

She's got home and her husband is kissing the dog.

The dog was very, very small.

Very small.

I don't know why the dog was trained in CPR.

It's all a bit of a problem for me having to silence

the questions in my brain that kept coming.

Well, because there's so many stages.

You've got to lay the head back a bit.

You've got to...

You just want to go, you're shitting me, right?

Yeah.

Was that one of the finalist?

It did win, didn't win, didn't win.

Well, who the fuck did that?

You have that as a dog.

The winners were amazing.

There were these water dogs that...

Who did open heart surgery.

Yeah, yeah.

It's a dog with SpaceX in mission control.

Hey, animals have done some amazing things.

They have, yeah.

Before we move on from geckos, though,

did you know that in January last year,

German Hans Kurt Kubus was caught

at Christchurch Airport, New Zealand,

with 44 geckos concealed in his pants?

They were doing a small incision and...

He's just walking through immigration.

He's...

Fuck you! Fuck you!

There's a massive market in gecko smuggling.

Really? That's amazing.

And New Zealand's gecko, because they're diurnal.

Like, most geckos are nocturnal.

New Zealand gecko is diurnal and very, very pretty,

and they can go for about $22,000.

What's diurnal? Sorry, diurnal.

Oh, I've got... Is that the wrong word?

No, no, no, it is.

They awake in the daytime.

Awake of the day.

You're diurnal.

I'm diurnal.

Yeah.

Is that the right word?

Yeah, yeah.

Don't question yourself, Sally.

Question, yeah.

I'm sorry.

You'll get used to this.

Yet, tell me more about Yeti's...

My ignorance questions.

Oh, no.

Dad, do you want to know a cool...

So diurnal, awake in the day.

Yeah.

Nocturnal, awake at night.

Yeah.

Crepuscular.

Dusky!

Yeah.

I know that.

Dawn and dusk.

What happened to the turnal bit of the word?

Why did they lose that?

I don't know.

Latin, innit?

Speaking of Latin,

I was reading about alien, the Roman writer and artist.

Oh.

He said...

Yeah.

He said that if a dead gecko lands in your wine,

then it's fine.

But if it lands in your olive oil,

it will taste terrible,

and when you eat it,

it will immediately give you lice.

Wow.

Oh, okay.

Right, they've got lots of symbolic...

There's lots of superstition around geckos and lizards, aren't there?

If you find a lizard tail in your left shoe,

it is very lucky.

Do not take it out.

Is that real?

That's a real one.

That's a current day one.

Just the tail.

Just the tail, yeah.

Because obviously their tails come off,

and they can regrow them.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Do you know starfish, though,

can regrow...

If you take its leg off,

it can regrow a whole starfish from the leg.

That's nuts.

Like, that's crazy, though.

What do they have...

Do they have...

They store all the nutrients in the leg

until they can grow a mouse.

Does it have a brain or intelligence or any kind of thing?

I don't know.

I probably doesn't know it's a starfish, is the truth.

But they, you know, they have neurons.

Yeah, yeah.

I tell you about a guy called Ben Barr.

He was looking for a particular gecko

called the Capola gecko,

which was spotted for the first time in 1968,

and then once again in 2007,

and that was it.

Yeah.

No specimen had ever been observed

or collected apart from those two occasions.

No one knew if it was still existing,

you know, or alive or...

Or if it was a teleporting horse.

Exactly, yeah.

And he led three trips to search for it,

and basically the process of searching for this Capola gecko

is just to turn over rocks.

He spent two years turning over rocks.

Leaving no stone unturned.

He left no stone unturned.

He didn't even know for sure what it looked like.

Because...

Not exactly, not exactly.

And no scientist had ever held one in the hand.

And after two years and three expeditions,

he found one.

Yay!

He said... He was so excited.

He said it was very similar to having a baby,

the euphoria.

And if you bought the movie rice.

It's just lovely, yeah.

And he found four.

He found four on the same expedition.

Oh, that's cool.

I imagine under the same rock.

But still, it's just... Yeah.

Imagine that determination to keep on.

It's like your surface area measuring scientists.

Yeah, you do admire it.

Yeah.

I got addicted to watching conservation TV at one point,

like the presentations of all the scientists,

because it's all the conservation scientists,

zoologists, I guess they're called.

Because it was so funny,

like the Argentinian wolf man.

He had long, long hair.

And he really appeared to be having an affair

with the British cheetah lady.

And there was this really adorable couple,

I think, from Chile, from Chile,

who had been looking for the Andean Wildcat.

He spent...

And they said,

I've never seen the Andean Wildcat.

They spent five years.

And they showed all these photos of Landrave

in different places where they had looked

for the Andean Wildcat and not seen it.

And they were so charming and like,

oh, well, it's been interesting to me.

But we think that is Wildcat.

We think this is a Wildcat poo poo,

whatever they say.

It's stool.

And then they went off.

And then this really arrogant tool,

American, thin American guy came in

from the rare Wildcat Conservation Society.

And he went, Wildcat, Wildcat.

And he just had 50 slides of Wildcat.

That's amazing.

Wait, were you presenting him with an award?

No, I just...

I was just depressed.

I was in bed watching them on YouTube.

You know.

I became very interested in the women

who run sloth sanctuaries.

Oh, yeah.

Because they seem to have absolutely no

theological training whatsoever.

And know nothing about sloths.

So there's this one woman who goes,

sloth orphanage in Costa Rica.

She's gone on a cruise with her husband.

And a baby sloth had fallen out of a tree

and she'd known right then

she needed to abandon her life in the States

and started sloth orphanage.

Which she did.

And the problem is she has to stop them

having sex with each other.

She doesn't have room for any more.

And people get bringing them.

So they were kept strictly segregated.

And...

That's a slow penis.

That is a slow penis.

There we go.

Yes.

Very nice.

That is a slow penis.

But one of them got manged

and she just shaved it.

And she didn't know whether this was right.

She just shaved them.

So can you shave a sloth?

She didn't shave a sloth, I'm sure.

No.

There was a PhD student.

I ended up watching the

documentary series about them.

And getting absolutely obsessed.

There was a PhD student there

called Becky.

Do you remember the one?

I think we've mentioned Becky on the podcast.

Have you?

Excitably.

No, she hasn't been...

We can get her.

No, but I mean...

It was really...

I think...

I feel she was Northern.

I feel she was Northern.

She was quite lethargic herself.

Okay.

And she said,

I couldn't decide what to do

for my PhD.

And I went to see my tutor

and I said,

I can't decide

between Jaguar's

and sloth's.

And he said,

what about sloth's?

So here I am.

And then a cheetah lady went past

and went,

that is really great!

Have you seen the video

where a sloth

mistaken its own arm for a tree branch?

And then

can't do anything about it

because it's so slow,

it just falls

from the tree.

They can be quite fast,

they can't they?

The ones that can swim are quite fast.

They swim really fast.

They swim really fast.

If you put them in a fast current,

I think they...

They're just drugged, aren't they?

Those leaves,

that's just drugs,

isn't it for them?

They only eat one...

I did think about

writing a film

about this sloth sanctuary,

which is why...

And obviously,

you can get this sloth's

out of Costa Rica.

Their agents will never get back to you.

That's the problem with a sloth.

You can't transport them.

I was reading about a woman

who runs a hospital

for Hawaiian monk seals.

I read about her.

This is amazing, isn't it?

Yeah, amazing!

Yeah, so she runs this monk seal place

and she was out

and she was, you know,

getting lunch or something like that

and she gets a missed call

or like she gets a call on her phone,

she picks it up,

no one's there,

what's going on?

It happens nine times

while she's out

and she's called

like the phone people,

she's like,

is there like anything wrong

with the line?

It looks all fine.

She gets back to the hospital

and she looks

and on the phone is a little gecko

just pressing its finger

on the call button

and it's calling her

and that was it.

She was getting...

They've been calling loads of other people as well.

Yeah, it called...

It made a...

The newspaper said

a Brazilian phone.

Yeah.

That was the official number.

Yeah.

Yeah, just little gecko feet.

Can I do a quick quiz

before we move on?

Yes, we do need to move on.

Yes.

So this was a weirdly named

animal pseudo gecko.

Is it a gecko?

Is it not?

I've got some more like this.

So the coffin fish.

Can the coffin fish cough?

Ah.

Is it a quiz?

Or are you tricking us with pronunciation?

Does it live...

I'd say it does float.

It does float.

It does float.

It's coffin fish,

like a coffin,

but can it cough?

I'll say no, it can't.

I don't think fish can.

Well, you're wrong.

Oh!

Fish can expel air

through their gills

if things get stuck in there

and we call that coughing.

That's a cough.

Can the swallowtail butterfly

swallow its own tail?

Yes.

No.

No, obviously not.

But the only fact I know about it

is it has an eye on its penis

so it can see where it's going.

Crumbs.

Really?

That is not true.

It is true.

The swallowtail...

Butterfly.

Oh, butterfly.

Oh, yes.

Butterfly.

You've read the very hungry caterpillar.

That's the final scene.

And finally,

does the bloody nose beetle

often have a bloody nose?

I'll say yes.

Andy, I've told you,

insects don't have a bloody nose.

I've told you, insects don't have noses.

Oh!

Will you please listen?

Oh, I fell right into it.

No, it expels blood from its mouth.

That's why it's called that.

It expels blood from its mouth.

We're going to need to move on

to our final fact of the show.

Can't bear it.

The show?

Oh, no, no.

Right with you.

I feel...

I want to talk about the penguin

who got a knighthood

and I want to talk about the Welsh corgi.

He's got a PhD.

OK, it is time for our final fact of the show,

and that is Sally.

The band, the super furry animals,

do you see what I did there,

wore Yeti costumes for a year,

and they said it really changed their personalities,

becoming much hairier,

changed how they performed.

What was the surface area when they were...

LAUGHTER

So, I don't know much about the super furry animals.

Well, you know, to be honest,

I wasn't told yesterday.

LAUGHTER

But the Welsh?

Welsh.

Wrongers?

No, the Welsh are the centrepiece

of the cool, comery Welsh resurgence

with Gorky's psychotic minky.

I'm going to say that wrong, isn't it?

You're a super fan, aren't you?

I am a super fan.

You're a super furry fan.

I love Gorky's psychotic minky as well.

You're wearing a t-shirt right now.

They are very, very cool.

They did loads of...

Yeah, they did loads of crazy stuff.

Like, costumes and all that kind of stuff.

Yeah, they bought a tank

and drove it into the Nationalist Steadford.

Oh, wow.

They bought it for £10,000

from a one-eyed arms dealer with a limp.

And then they sold it on to Don Henley from the Eagles.

Really?

It was like a real...

Arms dealing band circuit.

It wasn't the only contact they had with arms dealers either.

They sampled lots of sounds,

and they got some real guns.

What's with the Yeti thing?

So, the Yeti thing, they...

Well, they'd experimented on their album before.

They had some snow monsters on stage in Glastonbury

during the Northern Lights song.

They were members of Mogwai.

Do you know all of this?

Mogwai, yeah.

No, a bit.

And unfortunately, Mogwai had just dropped an E

before putting the very hot suits on.

And it became quite dangerous.

So, they had to have people running around

giving them water,

but they were really into different kinds of creatures.

And then they came across a sculptor called Peter Gray

who made loads of sculptures out of hair.

And he suggested just making these Yeti costumes for them

for a video, for the video for Golden Retriever.

And they thought this was brilliant.

And Peter Gray said,

I'll tell you where it needs to be.

You need to shoot this on a glacier in Iceland

next to a giant fire,

which all the Yetis are worshiping.

But they'd recently signed with Sony

who said that was an uninsurable concept.

So, they did it in a studio in North London.

It looks like the Yetis are playing inside a cardboard box

which is being sniffed at and then urinated on by a dog.

But it's really, really cool.

So, how did it change the personality?

It changed the personality.

So, they're none of them exhibitionists, really.

They're quite political and love music,

very creative and non-conformist and the rest of it.

They released an entirely Welsh language LP

and then only told it in America and Australia, for example.

It went into the top 20.

It went into the top 20, yeah.

But they said that it was like being transformed.

They said none of them were exhibitionists in reality.

It's an actual quote.

But we were able to put these costumes on

and become 70s rock monsters.

And it drove the audience nuts.

So, it's kind of interesting the impact of hairiness or hairlessness.

No, I think it's...

Has incredible power.

I think it's a costume fit.

So, my son's fifth birthday was last year, late last year

and I dressed up as Mr Potato Head and I honestly felt...

Did you buy that or make it?

I bought it from...

You bought it.

Yeah, I bought it online.

It's really cool.

I saw it.

It was...

Did it inflate itself?

Was it one of those?

It was like a brown big piece of fabric

and then you could stick on the eyes and the ears

and stuff like that.

Do you know what?

It was a hit, Andy, despite you...

I'm saying it was good.

We've lent it out to multiple parents ever since

for their birthday parties.

Have you?

Yeah, we haven't even got it at the moment.

But here's the thing, the confidence it gave me

because it was...

With the audience of five-year-olds

who would have worshipped you anyway...

No, I honestly...

Really?

Yeah, really, I felt like a superhero.

It was amazing.

That's interesting.

And I went up because it was...

School had just started.

My son was going to a new school.

We knew no one.

So, I went up to all the parents.

I would never do that.

I went up to all of them.

Hey, what's up?

So, you went to school?

I went to school, guys.

This is a...

No, no, this is the party.

Oh, right, okay.

I missed a potato.

What I'm just trying to say is

I don't think it's the hair necessarily.

I think you must know this as an actor.

When you have a different persona

that suddenly comes over you,

there's a weird confidence

that makes you a bit unstoppable in a way.

It can go both ways.

I'm thinking very vivid memories of it

going the other way.

Okay.

I mean, I suppose one...

Yes, I do know what you mean.

It's weird.

When you play a bride in a film,

people on set treat you as if you're getting married.

Even though they know your actor.

Really?

We all know your actor.

But you get treated, people open doors

and they smile at you and go,

oh, it's interesting, isn't it?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

There is a thing with autistic kids

where if you put them in a mask,

you can...

Not all of them.

You can't generalise.

But lots of people have found that theatre

can really help people

who are very introverted to speak.

Well, that's really interesting.

Well, interestingly, just on topic,

so what they were doing there,

they were dressing as yetis.

It's not being a furry,

but that's...

A lot of people dress up as furries, right?

I think we should say what a furry is for those...

I mean, yeah, so a furry is someone

who feels more comfortable

when they're wearing a costume

that has been designed where it's an animal...

No, I think a furry is just someone

who's a fan of the culture of, you know,

anthropomorphic animals.

And some of them do like to wear costumes.

Exactly, sorry.

Yeah, they're very keen.

They feel like they get a bad press

and over 60% of furries feel that they are bullied

and get negative...

It's weird things.

Only around 25% of all furries own a suit.

Really?

Yeah.

So I don't know how you classify yourself

as a furry if you...

Well, I guess you go to the cons

and you like reading in your home clothes.

Yeah, you're not in a suit.

I thought it was all about the suit.

So did I, but we're wrong.

Maybe you can't afford it,

but on the point of autism,

there was one of these cons

that had an autism panel with furries

and there was a lady there who said that

it really helps if you're autistic.

So she said,

for three days, I am not autistic.

For three days,

I am a giant anthropomorphic version of the Titanic.

And she feels...

It helps break the ice.

Oh, God.

There we go.

The first furry convention...

The first furry convention

was almost all people in normal clothes

or in human clothes.

And you can still see videos of it online.

It was in Holiday Inn in California.

And there's basically only one person

who dresses up in a costume.

It was a guy called Robert Hill

who came dressed as a giant S&M deer

called Hilda the Bambioid.

Righty.

I know.

Yeah.

But it's amazing.

And they chose that place

because it's so close to Disneyland.

And they thought that everyone

who's kind of into anthropomorphic animals

would also be into Disneyland.

And they went there.

And if you go online,

you can see the history of all these conferences

that they've had called Conference.

And the first time they had a problem with the hotel

was in 1994.

And the problem was the hotel.

Too many, too many.

All the bathrooms got clogged drains.

That was the problem.

That was the only problem.

Yeah, yeah.

And the breakfast buffet was no...

Apparently, it was too big the hotel,

so they couldn't fill it up with just their people.

So there was a lot of other people there as well.

OK.

And, you know, they weren't so understanding

and there was lots of complaints.

And then a maid found a costume in a room

by a person who had a costume

of veteran of the psychotic wars.

And it was a unicorn

who carried a big sort of cartoon cherry bomb.

So they would have, like, this big sort of black bomb shape.

Like, you would have a...

With, like, the wick coming out.

Yeah, exactly.

What is going on?

They found this...

The maid found this costume in the room.

Right.

And they called the bomb squad

because there was a bomb in the room.

But a cartoon bomb.

A cartoon bomb.

Although what's the best place to hide a bomb?

I guess so.

Can I see a bomb?

But the bomb squad didn't see it the right way

and they fined the hotel for making a prank call.

So when the bomb squad came

and they saw it was just cherry bomb

and there was a unicorn costume next to us,

they're like, you're wasting our time

and they fined them

and they never were allowed to go back to that hotel again.

OK.

I don't think anyone's favourite reason to be there.

What?

What about this guy?

He's just got a costume.

It's not his fault.

Yeah, I guess.

It did amuse me that quote

in the article we've probably both read

where they said,

most furries, it's not an erotic thing,

it just gets too hot.

Yeah.

Right, the other astonishing fact

was that there's 10,000 people in the UK

who live as dogs.

Er...

Er...

LAUGHTER

That's what it said on Google.

Living as dogs is a...

Maybe not living as dogs,

maybe like wanting to be...

Dogs have a very broad spectrum of...

People that seem to be referred to

or dress up as dogs or have handlers

and that seem to be a different kind of outfit.

10,000 is a lot.

That seems to be a kind of...

It's a lot.

It seems to be a kind of white unitard

with little spots.

Right.

It feels like you might have read

Live on the Isle of Dogs.

LAUGHTER

I go for a walk every day.

Yeah, well, you know...

Am I one of your 10,000s?

LAUGHTER

Just so people would spectrum of dogs, though.

Like, some dogs live in the house,

some dogs might live in a kennel,

some dogs are pampered house dogs,

it's a BDSM thing of pups being a pup.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, you've got...

You say, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I did not know that.

I did not know that.

I said, yeah, yeah, yeah,

to kind of cross over it

rather than to fully endorse.

But you know, dogs divide into

hound, pooch and mutt, don't they?

Those are the three...

Do they?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Those are the three broad categories of dog...

Is this the broad category of dog

that you can choose to dress up as?

No, it's not.

But like, if you see a dog,

normally you'll know within a second

whether it's a hound, a pooch or a mutt,

unless it's a Labrador,

in which case it's just a dog.

The Labrador is the kind of classic dog.

Does no one else play hound, pooch or mutt?

No.

Strawnery.

Can you get Andy an introduction

to Hero Dog of the Year?

I think I could qualify.

I do.

I do.

Just on dressing up as animals.

So a lot...

People who have to dress as animals a lot

and not sort of for relaxation,

for their work are zookeepers.

There's a brilliant photo from 2004

of some...

There's a Japanese party of school children

they're all about, I'd say, four or five years old.

And they are being approached by a life-size rhinoceros,

which is a pantomime rhinoceros

with two zookeepers in it, front and back,

which are basically charging the school children.

The teachers have to get the children away from the rhino.

It looks genuinely terrifying.

But how realistic is the costume?

It's pretty good.

Is it?

If I was five, I would be very nervous.

You'd be good.

Well, I don't think so,

because I once did a kid's show.

I mean, a long time ago, I did a kid's show

with Sue Perkins, in fact,

and called Lucy and the Dinosaurs.

And a friend of ours was playing a Tyrannosaurus rex.

And Ben Moore, do you know Ben Moore?

Yeah, yeah.

Ben Moore was a Tyrannosaurus rex. He had a big costume.

And Sue Perkins very irresponsibly said to the kids,

hey, let's beat up Tyrannosaurus rex.

And the stage was stormed with upwards of 55-year-olds

just kicking the living daylights out of Ben Moore,

who looks, you know, like an early Mr. Muscle.

Mr. Muscle's got muscly recently, have you noticed that?

But anyway, Mr. Muscle used to be in the advert, but anyway.

And Ben was just in the recovery position,

sort of crying, shaking.

He'd get them off.

Well, I've been beaten up in a chicken costume

by Alan Davis on QI.

You have?

Yeah, yeah.

Beaten up by who?

By Alan Davis.

Oh, yeah.

And he properly...

I think he was taken out of a lot of frustration

from the previous ten years.

But yeah, I was in a costume,

and he decided as a joke, I think.

Was this during the show or you guys in a hotel room?

It was for a Christmas special of QI.

And the thing is, because the kind of slot

that you look through is quite small,

and it's a big sort of costume, the one that I had,

and I assume it was the same,

it very easily goes in the wrong place,

and suddenly you can't see anything.

And it's boiling hot, you're sweating and everything.

And all you can do is go fetal.

It's, like, literally the only thing.

And you did...

On set.

That was, like, while filming.

It was incredibly...

People had to talk you down.

I once got asked if I wanted to be an alien in a film.

Was that the Roman orator?

LAUGHTER

Yeah.

I've got the look.

No, it was a...

I was playing, basically,

that I would have been playing the beast

that sort of landed in a meteorite,

and then had crashed, and then...

But the guy, my friend who was casting the film,

said, you will just have to lie

in a field in a rubber suit for a week.

And I said, no, and I regret it now.

I bet.

I wish I'd done it now.

What was the movie?

I don't know.

LAUGHTER

Apparently, just going back to Furry's,

the conventions are a nightmare

for exactly the reason that you were saying about...

Everyone's too hot.

Yeah, everyone's too hot.

They can't see anything.

So anyone who's in a costume

is just bumping into each other.

The article says,

inevitably you're going to smack a child in the head

because your arms are just, you know,

wapping about.

You can't see them at the level that you need to.

Sorry? Got a big tail, maybe?

Oh, yeah.

LAUGHTER

Why not?

I was just trying to help.

I was trying to contribute to the...

Was it going that badly?

LAUGHTER

Hey, by the way,

we are going to have to wrap up really soon.

And we've gone really far over the whole...

Have we?

Oh, no.

I've only just started.

Can I give you some Furry vocab

and see if you can guess what they mean?

Oh, cool, yeah.

So what do you think is a Furry tan?

Furry tan?

F-U-R-I-T-A-N Furry tan.

Oh, a Puritan.

It's like a Puritan.

It's someone who only wears the costume.

It's a Furry fan who is not interested

in any sexual content.

Oh, that's really good.

That's very nice.

Yeah, yeah.

Puritan, yeah.

To scratch.

Do you know what to scratch means?

Oh, you can't scratch yourself through the fur.

Oh, that's good.

So what do you do?

I don't know.

It's not that,

it's just to do a scratching.

It's to scratch someone gently,

often as a friendly gesture or greeting.

Should I just do a little?

Don't do that.

Oh, no.

Can you guess what a fur pile is?

Is that when they all...

Is that like a fun...

Oh, a bundle.

Yeah, a bundle.

They all just...

A carpet is like a...

A carpet, you would say, has a shag pile.

So is it broadly similar?

It's pretty much that.

It's a gathering of fully costume participants

who roll around on the floor

scratching each other.

Scratching got quite sexy all of a sudden.

The other thing is that Andy mentioned tails earlier,

and there could be an idea in the future

that maybe we give old people tails.

For balance.

For balance.

You're good at this game.

Yeah, the idea is you get like these sort of mechanical tails

and you put them on old people

and they can tell if an old person is...

With their consent and support.

Of course.

Just stop them falling over, is it?

Yeah, so the tail can tell

when they're about to fall over

and it can move itself

so it'll give them more balance.

It'll stop people from falling over.

I think that's brilliant.

Turn older, older than Dr Octopus.

Yeah.

It's just completely terrifying.

I think we should give them gecko feet instead.

Because gecko feet...

You don't want to come around.

That's not what you're doing up there.

It's one of the reasons

that such a trade in geckos apparently

is they're being studied for the space program.

Did you read that?

What?

Yeah, because they're feet.

Because they're feet.

Because they're so...

Feet can stick to anything

except Teflon.

Isn't that weird?

Oh.

Can you see?

Gecko feet will stick to absolutely anything at all

except dry Teflon.

It's all right if it's wet, but...

Is it in Teflon

what we largely use in space, though?

Yeah.

So it's a problem.

No.

No.

Yeah.

Because the clingability...

Great news.

We've made you exactly as good as a gecko.

Now get onto that space station.

Whoa!

Yeah.

Sorry.

Yeah, well, they did this experiment

where they got a load of geckos

and they stuck them on stuff

and then they euthanized them all.

And then they put them back up

and they stayed exactly the same.

Stuck, dead as alive.

So...

Wow.

On that note, Dan...

Yep!

Always good to go out in a big laugh.

That is it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

If you'd like to get in contact

with any of us about the things that we've said

over the course of this podcast,

we can be found on our Twitter accounts.

I'm on at Shriverland.

Andy.

At Andrew Hunter M.

James.

At James Harkin.

And Sally.

I've just given it up.

I know.

Yeah, but you're on Instagram, though.

I am on Instagram.

I think I'm Sally Smack on Instagram.

Sally Smack.

Okay.

Smack the pony.

And, yeah, we are also on Twitter

as a group, as No Such Thing.

Or you can email us at podcast.qi.com

or go to our website,

nosuchthingasafish.com.

All of our previous episodes are up there.

Thank you so much for joining us tonight.

Sally, thank you so much for being here.

It's been so much happening.

It's been awesome.

And we'll see everyone...

Okay, all right.

Yeah.

Thanks.

Goodbye.

Bye.

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.