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- Sandi asks if anyone has herpes. The thing is most people have had it, but don't know they have. Oral herpes (herpes simplex virus one) is spread by things like kissing, and 67% of people have it. However, it is often mild and you do not have any symptoms. Genital herpes (HSV 2) is in about 13% of people. The name "herpes" comes from the Greek for creeping. If you have herpes, it is treatable, but not curable. It probably originated as a marine virus.

- XL Tangent: Rhod had shingles in his 20s, which developed as a rash that went exactly halfway around his torso. Somebody told him that if the rash goes all away around the body and joins, then you die.

- XL Tangent: The Australian government is considering giving herpes to invasive carp, because the virus kills them quickly. The problem with this ideas however is that about 5% of the carp have an immunity to herpes, so while most of the carp will die the ones that survive will survive and continue to breed more carp that will also be immune.

- XL Tangent: Other illnesses caused by viruses include the cancer that Rhod suffered from, caused by HPV (human papillomavirus). It normally becomes cervical cancer in women, while in men the virus normally attacks the tonsils. Other viral illnesses include rabies, hepatitis, measles, polio, pneumonia and the common cold.

- Tangent: Rhod mentions some Welsh folk remedies for colds, including rubbing garlic on the soles of the feet, putting ginger under the nose, and he "claims" his grandfather swore by dipping private parts into a jar of peanut butter.

- Tangent: Some unusually ways you can stave off a cold include one in Aunt Babette's Cook Book from 1889 that suggested wrapping bacon bandages around the neck.

- Tangent: Viruses were discovered in 1892, there at least 100 million different kinds, and we don't know how many there are in the sea. The first survey of marine viruses took place in 2019, and during the study they discovered almost 200,000 new species. We do not even know if viruses are alive as it were, as they have no cells, bodies or metabolism. However, we do know they kill more living things than any other type of predator. One type of virus, the bacteriophage, are the most prolific killers in nature, eating only bacteria. They kill 40% of all bacteria in the sea every day. Each one weighs only a trillionth of a gram, but if you piled them all up, and you piled all the human beings on Earth all up, both piles would be about the same size. Perhaps either on their own or in combination with antibiotics, they might be used to treat bacterial infection.

- The most sickening thing about Brussels is a statue marking where a Russian tsar vomited. In 1717, Peter the Great sat at the edge of fountain following a heavy night and was heavily sick. In 1854, Russian diplomat Prince Anatoly Demidov commissioned a bust of Peter to mark this. The statue contains an inscription reading: "On the 16th of April 1717, at 3 o'clock in the afternoon, Grand Duke Peter Alekseyevich, Tsar of Moscow, sat on the rim of this fountain and graced its water with the win of which he had partaken."

- Tangent: Peter the Great founded a club called the All-Joking, All-Drunken Synod of Fools and Jesters. The very first rule was: "Members must get drunk every day and must never go sober to bed." They mocked the Russian Orthodox Church, they scattered vodka as if it was holy water, and anybody caught sober was excommunicated. Some parties featured trained bears serving drinks. There was one long binge to celebrate the wedding of Peter's jester Yakov Turgenev, who was the guest of honour, and he got so drunk he died three days later.

- XL Tangent: Baggists are people who collect sick bags from different airlines. Rhod was on a flight where he found a used sick bag.

- The thing you would have to be to eat someone else's vomit is a honeypot ant. During times of plenty, these ants gorge on nectar, but instead of digesting it, they store it in their abdomens and then swell up until they cannot move. They then attach themselves to the ceiling of the nest, and they continue to be fed by other workers. Eventually, if things go bad and the resources dry up, the ants become a living larder, regurgitating the nectar back up on demand, feeding the colony with their nutritious vomit. Once they have vomited everything up, they die. The nectar comes in different shades, so darker ones have more glucose and fructose, while lighter ones have more sucrose. Some just store water, and some store other dead insects. The ants are arranged by the kind of nutrition that they secrete, so the colony can browse. 20%-50% of worker ants in a colony become these storage ants known as replete, but we don't know why.

- Tangent: There are other insects which use vomit to repel predators. The caterpillar of the tussock moth eats cocoa leaves, so their vomit contains cocaine.

- The thing you can do with duct tape, a banana and marigolds is get rid of verrucas. Feet have five layers of skin, and verrucas live in the third layer. Most over-the-counter cures just remove the visible verruca, and then try to improve your immune system to get rid of it. In 2002, Dr. Dean R. Focht III from Tacoma, Washington, discovered that duct tape had an 85% success rate in getting rid of verrucas, compared to 65% for the most common method at the time, which is to freeze the verruca. It is believed by ripping the skin with the tape, you irritate the skin, and thus stimulate the immune system. The method involves taking a little bit of tape, put it on the verruca, leave it on for six days then rip it off. You leave the verruca alone for the seventh day, and then repeat the process for two months. The banana method involves taping a piece of the peel to your verruca for about a fortnight. Marigold flowers have been used in medicine since the Greek and the Romans, and poultices made from them have a 90% success rate in removing verrucas.

- A bear in shoulder pads might give you the slip by using Vaseline. The bear in question would be a member of the Chicago Bears American football team, with shoulder pads being standard part of American football uniform. Players would put Vaseline on themselves so they can slip away. In response, the opposition may put drawing pins in their gloves for extra grip.

- Tangent: Vaseline was invented by English-born American chemist Robert Augustus Chesebrough. Originally he had a sperm whale oil company, but it went out of business. In 1859, a new oil rush began in Pennsylvania. Chesebrough travelled then and noticed that oil workers used gunk that accumulated around drill rods to heal cuts and burns. He then spent ten years perfecting a process to distil it into petroleum jelly, which he trademarked under the name Vaseline in 1872. However, he had trouble selling it, so to promote Vaseline he travelled on road with a horse and cart, selling 1oz jars of it, and demonstrated how it worked by burning patches of his own skin. Eventually, he was selling a jar a minute.

- XL Tangent: Chesebrough also ate a spoonful of Vaseline every day. He was later diagnosed with pleurisy, so he coated himself in Vaseline to help with it. He lived to the age of 96.

- Tangent: Other uses for Vaseline include dabbing it on the cheeks of actresses to simulate tears; using it to get ring marks off furniture; and smearing it on fish-hooks to lure trout. Cyclists in the Tour de France used it so liberally that hotel owners complained that they were wiping it off on the curtains.

- XL: The incurable sickness that can be caught from a camel, a microscope or a Steinway is motion sickness. Motion sickness disturbs the vestibular system, which is the inner ear. Napoleon had a camel corps in his first military campaign in Egypt, but his troops got motion sickness because of lolloping strides of the camels. Microscopes cause motion sickness due to the small vibrations on the table being magnified. The Steinway Tower in New York is the fourth-tallest building in the USA and is the world's skinniest skyscraper at 435m tall but just 8m wide, thus it is nicknamed the Coffee Stirrer. It has a penthouse at the top that costs $66 million. It is also prone to "tall building motion sway". It is called the Steinway Tower because it was home to the original Steinway & Sons piano makers, and there is a grand piano in the foyer.

- XL Tangent: Motion sickness is one of those conditions that we do not yet know how to get rid of, but there have been attempts. Citroen have tried to solve the problem with glasses with hollow frames, and which contain a blue liquid in the rims. The glasses have for "lens", with two in front and one on each side for peripheral vision. The idea is tha the liquid will always go down to the bottom, so it creates an artificial horizon. Women are more likely to get motion sickness than men, and it s believed it may have something to do with body shape. People with larger buttocks are more likely to get motion sickness.

- XL: The thing that is not visible but is as unique as your fingerprints is your microbial cloud. We release microbes like viruses and bacteria into the environment, and they land on everything that we touch. It has about a 3ft radius. We acquire all of this founding culture from our mothers, and cannot be altered. Research at the University of Oregon showed you can identify people who simply sat still in a room from their cloud. You can also identify people via tongue prints, the individual walk of a person, and the way you type on a keyboard. Smartphones have accelerometers which can tell if you are drunk or not, and the vibrations in people's hands can now be used as a type of ID.

General Ignorance

- In a typical mammal, it depends on the species as to whether the male or female is bigger. When looking at the size of mammals, it is mostly skewed towards primates, and in those the males are larger. However, when looking at all mammals, about 48% have males and females about the same size, and 22% have females which are larger.

- Tangent: In other orders of creatures, size varies wildly. For example, in ticks females are particularly large, they then tend to suck blood from huge females of the same species. In Alaska, a male tick was seen sucking the blood from a female, who was sucking blood from a deer, while a second tiny male was mating with the female. Female anglerfish are 500,000 times heavier than the males.

- Tangent: The green spoonworm doesn't have a sex when it is born. It swims around looking for the enormous roving tongue of a female, and if they do not find one they become female. If they do find a female tongue, the spoonworm becomes male, crawls through the female's mouth, into her ovary, and becomes a sperm-producing machine. The male then has to feed through his skin, because his mouth is so busy constantly spewing out sperm.

- XL: When you donate blood in the UK, they take about four-fifths of a pint. In the USA, they do take a pint, but that is because the American pint is smaller than the British pint, so it is about the same amount. (Forfeit: A pint; Very nearly an armful)

- XL Tangent: After blood has been transfused out, the white blood cell count returns to normal in a few days. The body makes two million red blood cells a second, but it takes four to six weeks to replace them. The iron in the blood takes six to 12 weeks to be replaced.

- XL Tangent: People with tattoos can give blood. In the UK, the law is that you have to wait four months after you have had a tattoo in order to give blood. In the US, you can only give blood if the tattoo was done by a licensed tattooist in the country, and there are ten states that don't have any licensed tattooists. Zoe has three tattoos, including a hand-poked vegan tattoo of a hammerhead shark (and yes, she does live in Brighton). Rhod has a tattoo of a Battenberg on one shoulder and a potato on the other one. Ignacio claims Rhod just had a chip on his shoulder. Sandi had a tattoo done in Greenwich Village on her 60th birthday on her wrist, displaying Viking runes of the initials of her children.

- XL Tangent: A single blood donation can save the lives of up to three people.

- XL: Denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance are the five stage of coming to terms with your own death. In 1969, Swiss-American psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross wrote a bestseller on death and dying called Death: The Final Stage of Growth. She worked with lots of terminally ill patients at the University of Chicago, and she said that this stage is denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance is a typical person going through what they go through when they come to terms with their own death. She did not apply her ideas to the fried over the loss of somebody else. It is possibly the film Groundhog Day which is why we mistakenly connect it to grief.

- XL Tangent: Kübler-Ross worked with HIV Aids patients at the time when they were shunned by society, and she lost all her possessions in an arson attack.

- XL Tangent: Groundhog Day is a real festival, taking place in the town of Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, in a location called Gobbler's Knob. They think the name might have come from a hillock where turkeys lived.

- Scotch eggs, Scotch bonnet, Sctoch tape, butterscotch and hopscotch come from various parts of the world - just not Scotland. "To scotch", means to cut, score or scratch. You scotch hopscotch into the ground. None of theories around the origins of Scotch eggs mention Scotland. Fortnum & Masons claim they invented them in 1738. Another idea says they were first called Scotties and were invented in Whitby by Scott & Sons. Scotch bonnet is a particularly hot chilli pepper which gets its name because it is said to resemble a Tam O'Shanter.

- Tangent: Rhod says that he is freaked out by hopscotch. Rhod asks if anyone else has a similar feeling, and one person in the audience does.

- Tangent: Alan once went to India, and in an airport lounge there was a jar of green peppers put out for customers. As he took one, he spotted three women poking their heads around the corner to see what Alan's reaction would be. It was the hottest thing he had ever eaten, and he believes the peppers were clearly put out to trick white people.

- Tangent: One of first things that Rhod did following his cancer treatment was go out for a really hot Madras curry. He used to have them a lot, but following various heart problems he stopped, but following his treatment he decided to have another one as he thought he was well enough to have it. The following day, he took his dog out for a walk, and two hours later he returned naked. When his wife asked him what happened, about halfway through the walk the curry had hit him, so he ran all the way home, but didn't make it into the house. He ended up shitting himself in the garden, then the dog started eating Rhod's shit, Rhod stripped and put his clothes in an outside bin, washed himself down with an ice cold garden hose, and then came back inside the house with the dog on a leash.

Scores

- Zoe Lyons: 4 points
- Rhod Gilbert: -8 points
- Ignacio Lopez: -15 points
- Alan Davies: -17 points