QI

Sandi Toksvig hosts an 'upsadaisy' episode of QI and is joined by Justin Moorhouse, Emmanuel Sonubi, Holly Walsh and Alan Davies.

Topics

- The Pope cannot put his own umbrella up because he is dead. There is a symbolic red and gold striped umbrella associated with his office called the umbraculum. It is displayed in the Vatican after the Pope dies or abdicates, and before the next Pope is elected. The tradition dates back to at least the 13th century. The Pope used to have an umbrella to shield himself from the sun, and it represents protection and authority. In the period between Popes, it is meant to be a reassuring sign of continuity or stability. The umbraculum is displayed on the Holy See's coat of arms and is on special stamps and coins. These umbrellas are also given to churches when they are being upgraded to the status of a basilica, a royal palace. It is always displayed slightly open until the Pope visits, and then they open it fully.

- Tangent: The panel are shown some famous people and are asked what unusual uses they had for umbrellas.

- Nicolas Sarkozy - He has a Kevlar-coated umbrella carried by a member of his security team, to protect him when people throw things at him.

- Queen Victoria - She had an armoured parasol, thought to have been designed by Prince Albert. She survived an assassination attempt in May 1842, and the couple were so determined to capture the attempted assassin John Francis that they went out on exactly the same route the next night. Francis indeed tried again and was caught. He was sentenced to be hanged, but eventually was transported to Australia. The parasol was made out of green silk, had close-linked chainmail, and weighed about 3.5lb.

- Marguerite Vigny, aka Miss Sanderson - The finest swordswoman in Edwardian England, she developed an umbrella-based martial art. She was married to a self-defence expert called Pierre Vigny, and she used his techniques and her parasol as a combination of a rapier and a short spear. The Idler magazine in 1908 said that in extreme cases her parasol could be used as, "an instrument of torture to seriously disarrange the ordinary sequence of the attacker's features."

[i]- Tangent: Earlier examples of female martial artists include Wing Chun, who created the whole style of martial arts that was adopted by Bruce Lee. It was originally taught as a danced, and was based on speed over power.

- Tangent: Holly claims that the trick to fend off attackers to say that you know each other, and for a brief moment you have time to escape.

- Major Allison Digby Tatham-Warter - During the Second World War, he carried an umbrella at all times. A German armoured car came towards him, and he was able to throw his umbrella into a visor slit to attack the driver. He ended up being captured by the Germans, but he managed to escape because the buttons in his coat contained a compass.

- The Duke of Wellington - He was very irritated by the number of British soldiers who carried umbrellas into battle. It was such a problem that he set out standing orders during the Waterloo campaign that said: "Umbrellas will not be opened in the presence of the enemy."

- The best way to juggle more than one child is with your feet. This is a circus act known as "doing a Risley", which involves lying on your back and juggling two small children with your feet. It is named after 1840s American acrobat Richard Risley Carlisle, who popularised this technique with two six-year-old apprentices. He was nicknamed "Professor Risley", and was also the first person in the world to sell ice cream in Japan. Foot jugglers are sometimes called "antipodists". Risley is first recorded as doing his trick in 1844, but the British Museum has a sixth century carving of a Mesopotamian foot juggler, and probably the longest history of foot juggling is in Mexico, with the Aztecs having a juggling ritual called "xocuahpatollin"- "the game with timber on the feet". This was so extraordinary that Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortes brought some of these performers from Mexico to Europe in 1528.

- Tangent: The panel try to juggle with their hands using normal juggling balls. Only Holly is capable of doing it. The proper name for the balls is "thuds", because that's the sound they make when you fail to catch them.

- XL: The ruler who offered his kingdom for three turkeys was King Nezahualpilli of Texcoco. He bet his entire country on a single ballgame called ulama. He was challenged by the Emperor Montezuma to a solo match, and Nezahualpilli was so confident that he made an outrageously unequal bet, say that if he won he would receive three turkeys, and if he lost he would hand over his entire kingdom. Nezahualpilli won, with Montezuma taking his defeat as a bad omen, and he was later assassinated.

- XL Tanngent: Ulama is the world's oldest continuously played sport. It was first played almost 4,000 years ago, and involves playing with a ball weighing about 4kg (9lb), but you can only hit it with your hip. Sandi gets out a ball which is not one used in ulama, but is of the same weight. Emmanuel is the only one who can lift the ball up with ease, and does hit with his hip when Holly just about manages to throw it to him. When Sandi tried to roll the ball to Alan, it just stands still. The object of the game was to be the first to hit the ball through a stone ring that was on the wall. Ulama was used to sort out social conflicts, but the losing would end up being executed. The game was played all over Mesoamerica, we known of about 1,500 ancient ball courts that were specially designed for it, with one of the best preserved at Uxmal in Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, dating from 906 AD. The game continues today with a World Cup held every two years, with three of the last four tournaments won by Belize.

- The thing that looks like one elephant and weighs as much as 100 elephants is a cloud. Gavin Pretor-Pinney, founder of the Cloud Appreciation Society, noticed that there were more photos of clouds that looked like elephants than any other animal. They just happen to be more clouds of this shape naturally. Cumulus clouds form in thermal updrafts, when water droplets collect around an upward current of air and then accumulate outward, making the shape of a trunk. These clouds may be why ancient Hindus believed that cumulus clouds were created by elephants. The legends say that sky god Indra rides a giant white elephant, and that after the dry season the elephant uses the trunk to draw water from the underworld into the cloud, so Indra can make rain again.

- Tangent: In 1514, the King of Portugal gave a white elephant to Pope Leo X, called Hanno, which paraded through the streets of Rome, trumpeted three times and sprayed the Pope with water. In 1516, Hanno became constipated, and to cure Hanno they gave him a suppository of gold, which almost certainly killed him.

- XL: There is a use for being useless. Zhuangzi, a Chinese Taoist philosopher who lived in the 4th century BC, was fond of the idea that there is a usefulness in uselessness. He told a story of a carpenter with a very gnarled old tree, who said: "This tree is useless. Make a boat from it and it would sink. Make a coffin and it would rot. Make some furniture and it would fall to pieces. Make a door and it would be covered in sap. Make a pillar and it would be worm-eaten." The tree than appears to the carpenter in a dream and says: "I have perfected the art of uselessness, and this is very useful to me. If I had been of use, could I have grown so vast?" Nietzsche had the concept of the Ubermensch, the idea that humans should strive to extend themselves as much as possible, and he was what Nietzsche would have called a Letzter Mensch, somebody who just sits around all day.

- XL Tangent: Alan has a friend who cannot do anything, and if he says he is going to do something, he doesn't do it. No-one has asked him to do anything for 20 years. Holly asks how long Alan's friend has been in government.

- If you are under orders against the USSR and take unintentional uppers, who go on an insane bender. There were many soldiers on speed during the Second World War, because armies had to keep their soldiers going, so troops were commonly given methamphetamine. However, one Finnish soldier, Aimo Koivunen, was fighting against the Russians in 1944. He was given charge of his troop's entire supply of methamphetamine, but he didn't approve of it, and spoke out against it. However, he realised he was not going to keep up with everyone else unless he took some. It was very cold, he wore heavy mittens, and he didn't want anybody else to see him take the pills, so he put the pill bottle up to his mouth to conceal it, resulting in him downing 30 pills in one go. At first, he skied better than he had ever done before, but soon he was hallucinating, and eventually found himself alone, with no ammunition, and he skied straight into the Russian camp thinking they were allies. The Russians were so surprised that they just moved their snow boots to let him get through. Aimo fought an imaginary wolverine, discovered an abandoned cabin where he started a fire in the middle of the room resulting in the entire cabin catching fire, stepped on a mine that blew up his foot, and killed a jay with his ski pole and ate it raw. By the time he was found and taken to hospital he weighed 6.5 stone and his heart rate was 200 beats per minute. He had been gone for two weeks and skied 400km.

- The upper of choice for the first undertakings under down under was cocaine. Both Scott and Shackleton's missions to Antarcitca took cocaine pills, in the form of "Forced March" which was mixed with caffeine. This may have contributed to the heart failures that killed Scott and his team, alongside the cold, starvation diet and frostbite. They used cocaine eye drops to prevent snow blindness.

- Tangent: The panel suggest giving soldiers drugs that might help them calm down. Alan says they should have given Hitler some hash browns, which confuses Sandi as she thinks those are potato items. Alan actually meant to say "hash cake".

- XL: MPs spend so much time discussing the upholstery because of the leather benches in the House of Commons. In 1925, the green benches were re-upholstered with Swiss and Scandinavian goat skin, causing an outrage because they did not use British leather. It was re-upholstered again after the Blitz, and since then the hide has been provided by a company in Weybridge, Surrey.

- XL Tangent: The Woolsack in the House of Lords, used as the seat for the Speaker, was originally introduced in the 1300s. Wool was a huge symbol of the wealth of the nation at the time. In 1938, they discovered that the Woolsack was actually made out of horsehair, so they decided to replace this with wool, but in fact horsehair is the thing that keeps the Woolsack in one place. If you sit on just wool, it would collapse.

General Ignorance

- XL: The scientific name for the funny bone is the ulnar nerve. The "funny bone" is not a bone at all. The ulnar nerve's main function is to provide sensation in your fingertips. It is generally insulated by muscle, fat and bone, but there is one spot at the back of your elbow which can be hit. The bone known as the humerus was named as a kind of pun in 1826. (Forfeit: Humerus)

- XL Tangent: Holly has a metal elbow because she broke her original elbow in her left arm.

- The part of a pig that pork butt comes from is the top half of the torso, below the neck. This comes from how Americans divide pig joints, and butt is good for pulled pork. It is called a butt because they thought it looked like the butt of a gun. (Forfeit: Bum)

- Tangent: The difference between ham and pork is that pork is any bit that comes from a pig, whereas ham is most specifically the pig's hind leg. The word "ham" originally meant the back of the knee, hence the term "hamstrings".

- Tangent: Spanish ham-making company Cinco Jotas employs six professional pork-sniffers. The head sniffer is a woman called Cristina Sanchez Blanco, who says she has such a good sense of smell that if her husband buys her a present he has to wrap it up in four layers of paper or she knows immediately what it is.

- The panel are shown an image featuring an apple, a pear, a raspberry and a flower, and are asked how many roses are visible. There are three, because the flower is not a rose. Apples apricots, blackberries, cherries, nectarines, peaches, pears, plums, quinces, raspberries and strawberries are all members of the rose family. The flower in the picture is a lisianthus, which looks like a rose, but isn't. The flowers we call a rose is in a wider rose family, and it is a highly edible group of plants. There are 150 members of the rosa genus and are all good to eat. (Forfeit: One; Four; None)

- XL Tangent: The Vietnamese farm roses, and during the winter they are protect by covering all the buds by hand. In the 1800s, the biggest rose collect in Europe was Josephine Bonaparte, and when Britain and France were at war, she was able to pull rank, because she was so obsessed with her rose that she was buying from England that she had them issued with a special passport which allowed them safe passage through naval blockades.

Scores

- Holly Walsh: 5 points
- Emmanuel Sonubi: -2 points
- Justin Moorhouse: -6 points
- Alan Davies: -32 points