Topics

- Fat Kathy uses her muscles, or rather mussels to test how polluted water is. A waterworks in Warsaw uses eight mussels hooked up to a computer to detect pollution in the water supply. This is a form of bio monitoring, akin to using a canary down a coal mine. Mussels are filter feeders, letting water pass through their open mouths, and then they filter out the things they want to eat. Each mussel has a coil and a magnet glued to its shell and the mussel closes when pollutants are detected. If half of the eight mussels close, the water supply is stopped in order to prevent any potential contamination. Fat Kathy is named after a rotund 18th century well in Warsaw that has been in operation since 1994 (the year Maisie was born). There are about 50 waterworks in Poland.

- XL Tangent: The Queen Mother was given the very first remote control for a TV in the UK. She said: "Oh, isn't that interesting? I still think I'll find it easier to ring." The first person to use a mobile phone in the UK was Ernie Wise, as part of a promotion.

- XL Tangent: The Polish employ around 200 mussels a year, and after three years they are retired to a very nice reservoir. Mussels can live for up to 60-70 years.

- Tangent: Timothy Taylor's, a West Yorkshire brewery, used to count exactly 100 grains of the batch of barley that they were planning to use for the beer and leave them out on top of a cask in the brewery yard. If nearly all the grains were eaten by pigeons, it meant that the barley was a good batch and therefore perfectly OK to use.

- The Middle Ages are such a trying time for animals because many of them were sent to court. In 1545, winemakers in a town near Saint-Julien, southeast France, brought a prosecution against an infestation of weevils ravaging their vineyards, requiring them to be excommunicated. The case went to trial, and it was argued that the weevils had as much right as man to the fruits of God's Earth. The court found some merit in this argument, and it was decided that they needed a stringent programme of public prayer and penitence for the local populace. This seemed to work, as the weevils went away for 42 years. When the weevils returned however, the dispute was revived, and the mayor offered a compromise, giving the weevils a plot of land to live on condition that they never return to the vineyards. Sadly, we don't know what happened in the end as the last two pages of the court documents have been eaten by weevils. Weevils only live for two-to-three months. Courts tended to hold humans and animals to the same moral standards. Pigs were frequently tried for killing or maiming, including one who killed a child, even thought it was a Friday. The panel are show a picture of a trial in 1457 of a sow who was convicted of murder and hanged, but her piglets her left off due to lack of evidence.

- XL Tangent: In 1906, a man named EP Evans wrote a book about animals on trial. It listed over 200 examples. The animals were normally given proper legal representation. 16th century French jurist Bartholomew Chassenee once argued in defence of a group of rats that they could not possibly come to court due to the risk of being eaten by cats on the way. There was a trial of dolphins in Marseille in 1596, the result of which was that the dolphins were executed.

- XL: The panel are asked to: "Spell backwards, forwards." Then they asked: "Divide a vertical line in two equal parts by bisecting it with a curved horizontal line that is only straight at its spot bisection of the vertical." These are examples of questions from literacy tests in Louisiana, which were designed to be marked wrong no matter what the subject wrote. They were introduced in 1964 as an obstacle for black people trying to register to vote. People had ten minutes to answer 30 questions, and you had to get them all right in order to pass. It was part of the Jim Crow laws to enforce segregation in the Southern United States, with white voters having much more of a margin of error, and you could skip the test altogether if your grandfather had been registered to vote. Even college-educated black voters were turned away. Other obstacles included being made to recite the entirety of the US Constitution. In 1965, a professor of law at Duke University sent the questions from the Alabama Literacy Test to all the professors teaching constitutional law in US law schools, and 70% got their answers wrong. In that same year, the Voting Rights Act banned such literacy tests, and black voter turnouts in states such as Mississippi increased by tenfold.

- XL Tangent: Bill Bailey once did a Christmas Day quiz with his friends and relatives, in which all the questions were from the UK government citizenship test. Everyone failed. Questions from the test include: "Which of the following statements is correct? A. The first person to use the title 'Prime Minister' was Sir Robert Walpole. B. The first person to use the title 'Prime Minister' was Sir Christopher Wren." On the test, the correct answer is "A", but actually the test is wrong, as the first person to use the title of 'Prime Minister' was Henry Campbell-Bannerman. Other questions include knowing the location of the UK's first curry house and the height of the London Eye in feet, but the test doesn't ask anything about the NHS. In 2016, the Home Office announced there would be new English language tests for migrants looking to extend their stay in the UK. However, the press release spelled the word "language" incorrectly.

- The thing that smells like a cucumber but doesn't look like one is fake olive oil. Cucumber is one of 16 things that you do not want your olive oil to smell like. The virginity of the oil is taste-tested against a list of 16 negative flavours or aromas, and three positive ones. The positives are that it is fruit, pungent and bitter. Negative traits are that the oil is whiny, and if it smells of cucumber it means the oil has been stored for too long in an airtight container. Olive oil adulteration is a big issue globally. There is an "argomafia" - an agricultural mafia which pushes inferior products. It is estimated that 80% of Italian olive oil sold around the world is faked in some way. For example, virgin oil is mislabelled as extra virgin.

- Tangent: Susan's answer to the quest is her feet as she rubs cucumber moisturiser in them. She says her feet are the best part of her body. Maisie warns her that she should not say this on TV in case people ask her for photos, but Susan replies that he feet are already on a website for foot fetishists. She knows it is her feet (Size 3) because one of her feet has a tattoo on it which reads: "I ♥ Grimsby."

- Each of the panel have a little speaker, and are told to hold it to their ear and say what they can hear. Nothing is actually played, as the test is to see which each they place the speaker to, as that is their dominant ear. 70% of people are right-eared. Another test for dominance is to keep both eyes open and reach out your thumb so it hides something (Sandi's face in the panel's case), then close your eyes one at a time. If the image stays blocked, then that is the dominant eye. If you switch and the image jumps then that is the non-dominant eye. You can test which is your dominant foot by kicking a ball or stepping on a ladder.

- Tangent: Rock ants are right-eyes in general, so when stuck in mazes, they find their way out by hugging the left wall and using the right to look for danger. Hugging a wall is also the standard way for people to get out of mazes, something that Maisie did not know, to which Alan laughs, but this is because the plural of her name, "Maisies", sounds like "mazes".

- The noticeable effect of giving cocaine to a toddler is that you can find out if there is something wrong with their eyes. Cocaine eye drops are still used in ophthalmology to test children under the age of two. It is used for anisocoria, a condition where you get asymmetrical pupils. It is still the gold standard for testing this as it is safe, cheap, less stressful, and a good way to dilate the pupils. Anisocoria is mostly harmless, but is can be a symptom of other conditions. Notable sufferers included David Bowie, but this is not the reason he had difficult coloured eyes. That was the result of a fight he was in. The first person to use cocaine as a sort of local anaesthetic was an Austrian ophthalmologist called Carl Koller, a close friend of Sigmund Freud, who became so well known for his use of cocaine he was nicknamed "Coca Koller". Cocaine was marketed for toothache, cocaine lozenges were used by singers, cocaine became the official remedy of the Hay Fever Association, who said that cocaine dependence was no different to tea or coffee.

- Tangent: Alternative anaesthetics like chloroform and ether were problematic in Victorian operating theatres because they were lit by gas or candlelight, and the flames would interact with the fumes that produced gases that caused explosions.

- XL: The point Chairman Mao was trying to make by giving Joseph Stalin 12 tonnes of radishes was that they were friends. Mao visited the Kremlin for Stalin's birthday, and to celebrate Chinese agriculture and cement friendship between the two nations, Mao gifted 12 tonnes each of radishes, cabbages and onions. However, Mao was furious because he was put in a country house just outside Moscow with nothing to do except, "eat, sleep and shit" for ten days. The reason he was there was because the head of the Secret Police had been ordered to assess Mao's temperament by analysing his stools - i.e. stealing his poo by using special toilets with boxes in them. It all must have worked because the USSR and China went on to sign the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Alliance and Mutual Assistance.

- XL Tangent: Josh jokes that the answer is that you should never trust the substitutions on Ocado. Susan normally ticks the box saying: "please don't replace things" when getting a home delivery, but they ignored it, and replaced her vegetarian sausages with frozen octopus.

- XL Tangent: When Emmanuel Macron went to see Vladimir Putin once, he refused to do a Covid test for fear the Russians were trying to steal his DNA.

- XL Tangent: Kim Jong-un takes his own toilet everywhere with him. One North Korean government website stated that his father, Kim Jong-Il, never needed to urinate or defecate.

General Ignorance

- XL: Walking in a straight line with your eyes closed was originally invented to test for the condition locomotor ataxia. It is an inability to control your body movements. It is part of the Romberg test, designed to test the body's sense of position and movement. Walking heel-to-toe in a straight line is called the WAT - a walk and turn test, is used to test if people are sober by the US Police, but it was not the original reason why it was invented. (Forfeit: Sobriety)

- People have seven tonsils. There are the lingual, the palatine (the ones normally removed when you have tonsillitis), the tubal and the pharyngeal. Tonsils are a front-line immune defence, with seven out of eight childhood tonsillectomies are unnecessary. If they are inflamed, it is good, because it shows you have an ailment, and the tonsils are producing antibodies and white blood cells to fight infections.

- Tangent: Susan had her two tonsils removed when she was 21, but one grew back.

- Tangent: When Sandi was about five, back in 1963, she had her tonsils out. The doctor sat Sandi on his lap, and used a device that looked like a spoon with a sharpened edge and literally scooped them out. He sent Sandi home on the back of her mother's bicycle.

- The best place in the UK to get a degree is to be sure of getting a job is Norland College, which is a specialist nanny-training university based in Bath. They describe their graduates as like Mary Poppins mixed with a little bit of James Bond. The college teaches childcare, but also self-defence, taekwondo and paparazzi avoidance techniques. The graduates tend to look after very rich children and they may have to deal with potential kidnappers. The college boasts a 100% guaranteed employment opportunity if you get a degree. Norland was founded by Emily Ward in the 19th century, and she was ridiculed at first because people thought that no-one would want to train for childcare. Ward was very forward thinking, with Norland having a rule that no student was ever allowed to use physical punishment on a child. (Forfeit: Cambridge)

- Tangent: Maisie had a baby sitter as a kid who did not go to Norland. The baby sitter once got into trouble with Maisie's parents because she used the landline to vote for Steve Brookstein to win The X Factor.

- The panel are show a picture of cabbage, Chinese cabbage, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, kale and cauliflower, and are asked how many species of plant there are in it. The answer is two. All but the Chinese cabbage are all cultivars of the same species of plant, Brassica oleracea. Chinese cabbage is related more to turnips and pak choi. (Forfeit: One)

- XL Tangent: Button, white, chestnut and Portobello mushrooms are all the same species, but at different stages of growth.

Scores

- Maisie Adam: 12 points
- Josh Widdicombe: 10 points
- Susan Calman: -8 points
- Alan Davies: -24 points