Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish,
a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden.
My name is Dan Shriver, I'm sitting here with Anna Chazinski, James Harkin, and Andy Murray,
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 you, Chazinski.
My fact this week is that the first trampolines were made of walrus skin,
and this is a thing that's called blanket tossing, and it's been practiced for the...
By teenage boys for thousands of years.
Okay, so blanket tossing is something that's been practiced by the Inupiat Eskimos up in Alaska for...
We don't know exactly how long, but references to it go back to...
On Google Books they go back to the very early 19th century,
and that talks about it as a tradition that's obviously been practiced for a long time,
and it's a game they played where they'd get a walrus hide, and they'd attach it with ropes to four poles,
and then they'd have lots of holes drilled into the walrus hide all around it,
so people could get their hands through the holes and pull on the holes,
so they'd pull on the skin, and then they'd dump somebody in the middle of the skin,
and it's about a waist height, it's suspended, and then when everyone pulls on the holes at the same time,
then obviously the skin flicks upwards, and it throws the person on them up in the air.
Wow.