QI

Theme

- This is a general show covering various different topics, all beginning with "T".

Topics

- The panel are given some obscure words beginning with "T" and are asked to put them in a sentence. The words are:

- Twiffler: A plate, intermediate in size between a dessert plate and a dinner plate. It comes from the Dutch "twiffler", meaning to vacillate or to be unsure.

- Throttlebottom: An inept but harmless public official.

- Tangent: Henning says that in English you can take any old word and say: "Oh, he's a right old..." then do a hand gesture and say: "...and I'm not happy with it." For example: "Oh, he's a right old throttlebottom, and I'm not happy with it."

- XL - Testacel: A type of earthworm-eating land slug, with a tiny shell on its back.

- Twattle-basket: A chatterbox. The word dates from 1688 and it is where we get the word "twaddle" from.

- Tootsicum: A term of endearment for a child or a small woman's foot.

- Turdoid: Resembling a thrush.

- XL - Twankle: To play idly on a musical instrument.

- XL Tangent: Sandi goes through some German words beginning with "T" for Henning to verify. "Torschlusspanik" is when you feel the need to join something that is popular, which often turns out to your disadvantage. "Teppischfrescher", literally "carpet eater", is someone who works really hard, the idea being they have already worked so hard they are on the deck, but don't stop. This was a nickname given to Hitler, with one quote being: "Whenever he goes on a rampage, he flings himself to the floor and chews the edges of the carpet." Henning says it sounds like foreign propaganda. Rosie says she doesn't want anything in common with Hitler, but now she does. Ahir replies not to worry, because he is vegetarian and Alan only has one ball.

- Sandi asks the panel about four different teapots and asks what they are about:

- Cricketer's teapot: When a cricketer rests one hand on their hip, as a sign of disapproval at one of your teammates. When a player has both hands on their hips, it is referred to as a double teapot or a sugar bowl.

- Assassin's teapot: A teapot which can pour out two different liquids. Demonstrated be Festival Of The Spoken Nerd's Steve Mould, the pot has an upper and lower chamber containing different liquids, which you can use to poison someone. They work by having holes on the handle, and by covering a hole it stops one particular liquid coming out. It is akin to when you put your thumb over a straw, liquid in the straw does not fall out due to surface tension and atmospheric pressure.

- Bertrand Russell's celestial teapot: A philosophical argument. Russell said that if he claimed there was a tiny teapot somewhere in the asteroid belt, you cannot prove that he was wrong. This is to illustrate the idea that if somebody makes a claim that can't be proved one way or another, e.g. the existence of God, it is up to the person making the claim to prove it.

- Cubic teapot: These were designed by Robert Crawford Johnson in 1917 for Cunard, so the pots could be easily stacked on ships and they won't tip over in rough seas.

- Tangent: As a child, Sandi would travel on Cunard ships. On one occasion, the stabilisers in the ship broke during a hurricane so the boat tipped on its side. The teapots were unbroken, but the chef was upset and kept saying: "I can cook nothing! The kitchen is ruined. I can only do lobster steak, maybe a baked Alaska."

- Sandi takes out a figure of a little man drinking out of a bowl, with his trousers down and penis out, and asks why you would want him at your tea party. The figure is a Chinese pee-pee boy. These date to the Song Dynasty (over 1,000 years ago), and when heated up it urinates hot liquid. It was used to test the temperature of tea by pour liquid onto him, and the further the jet coming from the penis the hotter the tea. It is probably the earliest known thermometer, predating Galileo's thermoscope by about 500 years. There were also versions of the figure as animals, including pigs, toads, elephants and dragons, known as "tea pets".

- Tangent: According to the Whittard tea sellers, the correct etiquette for stirring tea is to go from six to 12 (never circular) two or three times, then rest the teaspoon on the right-end side of the cup.

- XL Tangent: An example of good manners. The King of Denmark was having a dinner party which was attended by the photographer Patrick Lichfield. At the time, people wore a shirt and then had a false front and cuffs. However, he didn't have enough money for a shirt, so he just wore the false front and cuffs. Due to it being an unseasonably warm evening, the King decided that everyone should take their jackets off. Patrick was worried when he took off his jacket to reveal no shirt, but then the King said: "Good idea. Shirts as well", so Patrick was more comfortable.

- XL: The most fun you can have in a Model T Ford is to play auto polo. This was the same as playing polo on horseback, but instead they rode Model T cars. The first game took place in an alfalfa field in Wichita, Kansas in 1912, where 5,000 people turned up to watch. Auto polo was very dangerous, especially as the referee was on foot. It began as a Ford publicity stunt, but it became the most expensive sport in the world. In the 1914 season, 2,000 wheels were smashed off the cars. Auto polo died out in the 1930s, but today there is elephant polo, canoe polo and bicycle polo. (Forfeit: Sex)

- XL: The panel are shown a female Model T driver and are asked what use she had for bananas and elephants. Aloha Wanderwell, born Idris Hall in Winnipeg, was known as the world's most travelled girl. She travelled around the world in a Model T which frequently broke down, and thus she had to improvise solutions. She used crushed banana skins to grease the differential and rendered elephant fat down to use as a lubricant. She began travelling at the age of 16 in 1922. She was a convent school girl who spotted an advert in a French newspaper for a young woman with brains, beauty and britches to join an expedition as a secretary to Captain Walter Wanderwell, a Polish adventurer. Walter wanted to travel the world, take photos, film his adventures, and have a beautiful woman on his arm, to help make money. Aloha was a marketing ploy, and they spent seven years travelling together, driving two modified Model Ts. They went through 43 different countries, Aloha became an honorary colonel in the Siberian Red Army, drove across India, drove from Nile to Cape Town, and was the first woman drive around the world. Aloha and Walter eventually married and had two children, and her grandson Richard Diamond helped the Elves to research this question. At one point, the plane the Wanderwells were on went down in the jungle, and Aloha had to stay in the Amazon while Walter went searched for replacements. While he was away, she filmed the Bororo people of the Amazon, making the earliest recorded footage of these people, the film still being highly regarded by the Smithsonian Institute.

- No-one knows where all the teaspoons have gone, but they do disappear. In 2004, a group of epidemiologists in Melbourne created a study using numbered teaspoons. The spoons were distributed through the institution's tea areas, and they concluded that the half-life of a teaspoon was 81 days - i.e. half the spoons had vanished during that time. This means that 10 million teaspoons had gone missing every year in Melbourne alone, according to their figures. Teaspoons are six times more likely to disappear than forks. There is an economic theory called "the tragedy of the commons", which states that when individuals share property, they tend to exploit it more for themselves at the expense of the group as a whole. In other words, if each individual takes a teaspoon they think it doesn't matter, but if everybody does it, it is actually going to harm the entire group.

- Tangent: When Ahir's grandmother first came to Britain to work in a factory, cutlery kept going missing from the factory. One other worker suggested the she had stolen he cutlery because she was Indian. Ahir then wondered: "Is that a racial stereotype about Indians, that we steal cutlery?" Henning asks if Ahir's grandmother gave the spoons back.

- Tangent: Rosie claims all the teaspoons at her mother's place, because she steals a teaspoon at every restaurant she goes to, and she remembers where she stolen them from. It got to the point where they would go to a nice cafe, and Rosie would say: "Don't" and her mother will reply: "I won't", but when they leave, she will reveal that she has stolen a spoon.

- The Italian scientist who dropped his balls off a leaning tower to see how fast they fell was Giovanni Battista Riccioli. A contemporary of Galileo, Riccioli dropped balls off the Asinelli tower in Bologna, which leans at 1.3 degrees, and was able to time them very precisely. To measure the time, he calibrated a pendulum to swing precisely once per second. Knowing that there are 86,400 seconds in a day, he first measured a day by reference to the movement of the star Arcturus across the Meridian Line. He got a group of nine Jesuit priests to chant in time with a pendulum, count out exactly 86,400 swings. He also used logic to incorrectly conclude that the Earth was at the centre of the universe, believing that if the Earth was travelling through the universe, then you would see birds constantly fighting against the motion. However, German astronomer Johannes Kepler proved that planets have elliptical orbits. To explain how this was, Riccioli claimed that God had come up with a very complicated but of maths that made the planets appear to have elliptical orbits in order to give humans the satisfaction of working that out. (Forfeit: Galileo)

- A way to improve takeaway delivery services in Britain would be to adopt the Mumbai delivery system known as dabbawallas, also known as tiffin wallahs. In this system, lunches are made at home, stored in tins which are marked with a system of symbols, then a team of people using bikes and trains take the meals to workplaces and then bring the tins back. Despite there being hundreds of meals made every day, the accuracy rate is 99.99%, with only about four mistakes per million transactions. The system came about due to India's caste system, meaning people were unlikely to want have food prepared by someone outside their caste, even outside their home. In the 1880s it was decided that it would be good to have people pick up food from peoples home and deliver it. Mahadeo Havaji Bachche hired 100 men in 1890 to start the dabbawalla scheme, and today 5,000 people work for it.

- XL Tangent: In Tokyo, there was once a delivery system called the demae, where individuals could carry up to 100 soba noodle soups at once, while riding bikes. They were a common sight in the 1940s and 1950s, but were banned in 1961 because of the danger from cars. However, today there are soba-delivery bicycle races featuring demae.

- The most attractive thing a man can have printed on a T-shirt is the letter "T". Experimental psychologist Dr. Andrew Dunn at Nottingham Trent University concluded that it put a large "T" on a white T-shirt, it makes men 12% more attractive to heterosexual women. If the "T" is upside-down, it makes them 12% less attractive. The one with the letter placed correctness accentuates the broadness of the shoulders and the slimness of the waist.

- Tangent T-shirts used to be underwear, but they became outerwear. They were originally called "bachelor undershirts", and in the 1890s they were for men who could not sew buttons. They eventually became outerwear in the 1950s where it was depicted in films like A Streetcar Named Desire with Marlon Brando and Rebel Without A Cause with James Dean.

[i]- Tangent: For big sporting events such as the Super Bowl, clothing manufacturers in advance print thousands of T-shirts in the winning strip. As half end up being no good, the ones from the losing side are given to charity and are shipped out to poorer countries. A photo is shown an Arsenal Champions League Winners 2006 shirt. Arsenal lost the final to Barcelona, who came from behind to win 2-1.

- XL Tangent: The record for the most T-shirts worn at once is 260, held by Ted Hastings of Ontario.

- Tangent: Sandi shows a trick for folding a T-shirt. You grab one side of the collar and the middle of the shirt, then bring the collar down to the bottom of the shirt, and then you can easily fold it into a square. However, none of the other panellists can do it.

General Ignorance

- The Scottish city which is the home of golf is Edinburgh. This was where the first formal rules were written in 1744 by The Honourable Company Of Edinburgh Golfers. They held the first official competition there. St Andrews Royal was founded in 1754, but golf has been played in the town since the 12th century. (Forfeit: St Andrews)

- Tangent: Prince Andrew was the captain of the St Andrews Royal and Ancient because he was the son of the Queen, but she was not allowed to join because she was a woman. Women were not allowed to join St Andrews until 2015.

- Tangent: Golf has origins in a Roman game called paganica, a Chinese game called Chui Wan, and a Dutch game called kolven.

- XL Tangent: During WWII, Richmond Golf Club had a rule saying: "A player whose stroke is affected by the simultaneous explosion of a bomb or shell or by machine-gun fire, may play another ball from the same place. Penalty: one stroke."

- The discovery that got Edward Jenner into the Royal Society was his work on showing how baby cuckoos remove rival eggs from the nest. It was thought that adult cuckoos that got rid of babies that were not their own, but Jenner noticed it was the chicks who were murdering their rivals. The chicks were born with a small depression in their backs, which is the perfect size for the eggs of the bird that they parasitized, and the chicks use the dent to push away eggs and rival chicks out of the nest. The dent in the cuckoo goes away after 12 days. The idea was controversial, with anti-vaxxers of the time using this idea to suggest Jenner was a quack. However, illustrator Jemima Blackburn made a drawing of a cuckoo doing this, proving Jenner right. Blackburn was an influence on Beatrix Potter and is almost certainly the person after whom Jemima Puddle-Duck is named after. Protection against smallpox can be found earlier than Jenner's vaccination, where in Asia and Africa people would inhale dried smallpox through the nose.

- When you boil a pan of water, the thing that is inside the larger bubbles is water vapour. When you first boil water, the tiny bubbles contain air that was previously trapped in the liquid. The big bubbles in a rolling boil however are the result of water accumulating enough energy to turn from liquid into gas. (Forfeit: Air)

- "Duck Shit Aroma" is a type of oolong tea that comes from the species camellia sinensis. The panel are asked to name another type of tea plant, but you cannot because all tea comes from one plant. The difference between the various styles of tea are down to oxidation and infused flavours. "Duck Shit Aroma" is harvest from a single bush and its cuttings in the Guangdong province and it sells for 40 times the price of normal tea. The name comes from a farmer who wanted to stop people from stealing it. It is best grown in cold and wet confitions.

Scores

- Alan Davies: 11 points (Alan's 43rd victory)
- Henning Wehn: 10 points
- Ahir Shah: 3 points
- Rosie Jones: -22 points