Pod Insights No Such Thing As A Fish Little Fish: Gary Scrabble About this episode Dan, James and Andy discuss YOUR facts, including Sisyphus, Slovenia and Southern Comfort. We also learn what Kenny G thought when he met Dan. And we name eight more Friend of the Podcast fact custodians.
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Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 ChatGPT for Teens is designed to help teens learn, think critically, and grow their skills. ChatGPT for Teens supports active learning by breaking concepts down rather than giving teens the answer. Study mode helps teens work through problems, and interactive quizzes test their knowledge and provide immediate feedback. Safety protections are on by default, and parental controls offer families additional options like setting study hours and quiet hours. Visit chatgpt.comPARENTS to learn more.
0:40 Speaker 01 Hi everyone, welcome to another episode of Little Fish, the show where we look at your amazing facts that you've been sending to [email protected] , and the has whittled them away to the very, very cream of the crop, and then we pick out the plums, mix all our metaphors, and just chat about facts. So who's got a fact?
1:00 Speaker 02 I've got one to kick off. This is a fun one. This comes from Daniel Hamer, and it's about the island of Kiribati.
1:07 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:08 Speaker 02 Oh yeah. Island or islands?
1:10 Speaker 01 It's islands.
1:11 Speaker 02 The islands. Apologies. It's starting with an apology now. I'm sorry to the people on the other islands of Kiribati apart from the big one, which is the one I was thinking of. Daniel's fact is, the word for dog in Kiribati is camia, right?
1:26 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:27 Speaker 02 And that is because it's a bastardization of English derived from the time dogs were introduced to the English, and locals heard the English calling to the dogs, "Camia, camia."
1:36 Speaker 01 Really? Come off it.
1:38 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:39 Speaker 01 Is that true?
1:40 Speaker 02 Camia.
1:41 Speaker 01 That's a different breed.
1:43 Speaker 02 Well, I just, I looked up the language a little bit, and it's called Gilbertese as well.
1:48 Speaker 01 Yeah, because it's the Gilbert Islands, but it's... Kiribati is how you write Gilbert.
1:53 Speaker 02 It's so strange. Yeah, they were called les îles Gilbert and Kiribati kind of derived from Gilbert, Kiribati. So you can sort of see how it happens. But previously, they were known to Western visitors as the Kingsmill Islands.
2:07 Speaker 01 After the bread.
2:08 Speaker 02 After the bread.
2:09 Speaker 01 Oh, wow.
2:09 Speaker 02 Yeah, there you go.
2:10 Speaker 03 Very nice. I got one here.
2:12 Speaker 01 Go on, Dan.
2:13 Speaker 03 This was sent in by Art Wallopot, who has added in brackets an internet name. Thank you for the clarification, Art Wallopot, who says that there is a species of Chinese ground spider whose technical name is Hot Wheels Sisyphus.
2:29 Speaker 01 Okay, so Hot Wheels as in the little toy cars?
2:33 Speaker 03 Yeah.
2:34 Speaker 01 Is it?
2:34 Speaker 03 Yeah, and Sisyphus as in the-
2:37 Speaker 01 The Greek guy who pushed the boulder up the hill.
2:38 Speaker 03 Exactly, yeah. And yeah, it was discovered in China and just the nature of how the spider moved reminded them of Hot Wheels, basically. And so they gave them this name.
2:49 Speaker 02 I wonder which will stand the test of time for longer. The story of Sisyphus, the ancient 2,000-year-old tale of the guy being punished for all eternity, or the Hot Wheels brand?
2:59 Speaker 01 Are Hot Wheels the ones where you pull them backwards 10 times and then let go and they go really fast?
3:04 Speaker 02 Maybe. I don't know.
3:05 Speaker 03 Yeah, I'm not sure. They probably are within the Hot Wheels world. They are also just small cars and you get those big plastic loops that you can send them around and-
3:13 Speaker 01 Loop the Loops.
3:14 Speaker 03 Yeah, exactly.
3:15 Speaker 01 Imagine if Sisyphus had to push his boulder around the Loop the Loop.
3:17 Speaker 02 Nightmare, nightmare.
3:19 Speaker 03 That was probably level two, if he ever got to it, which he never did.
3:21 Speaker 01 Because I think that's worse in a way, because when you get to the top of the Loop the Loop, you have this amazingly satisfying moment where you can roll all the way back down the other side.
3:29 Speaker 02 Yeah.
3:29 Speaker 01 But if he never quite reached there, it's even worse. And I've been to the hill where he allegedly pushed the boulder.
3:35 Speaker 03 Have you?
3:36 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's in Greece.
3:37 Speaker 03 And what do you think? Could you have done it?
3:40 Speaker 01 No, I couldn't. It's not that, it's not that high. It's just outside of a city whose name I can't remember, near the Peloponnese.
3:49 Speaker 02 Okay.
3:50 Speaker 01 And it's, as you're in the town, you can see this big hill and the locals say that's where he pushed it.
3:56 Speaker 03 Did you say allegedly because Sisyphus is famously litigious?
4:02 Speaker 02 He'll see you and then tomorrow he'll see you again.
4:06 Speaker 01 I suppose I didn't mean allegedly, I meant according to legend.
4:09 Speaker 03 According to legendary, yeah. Um, hey, this is interesting. Hot Wheels. Do you know who invented Hot Wheels?
4:15 Speaker 01 Someone who's famous for making maxi sized cars.
4:19 Speaker 03 No, someone who's famous for toys.
4:22 Speaker 02 Oh, okay, okay. We can get this. A toy, a famous toy person.
4:25 Speaker 01 Erno Rubik.
4:27 Speaker 02 Lovely.
4:28 Speaker 03 I love, I'm excited to know that you know who the inventor of Rubik cubes are as your first go to.
4:35 Speaker 01 Well, how many other toy makers?
4:36 Speaker 03 I don't know, I don't know.
4:37 Speaker 02 Sir Edward Yo-Yo. What's that?
4:40 Speaker 03 Gary Scrabble.
4:41 Speaker 01 What's her name?
4:44 Speaker 01 Melissa, who did Barbie?
4:46 Speaker 03 There we go. There we go. She was called Ruth Handler.
4:49 Speaker 01 Oh, Ruth Handler.
4:50 Speaker 03 Hot Wheels is invented by her husband, Isidore Elliot Handler. He created Hot Wheels, he created creepy crawlers, he created Chatty Cathy. These were all massive in their day.
4:59 Speaker 01 Sure.
4:59 Speaker 03 Yeah, they were.
5:00 Speaker 02 Absolutely.
5:01 Speaker 03 And I'm sure someone is right now strip mining the intellectual property to try and desperately turn out another Barbie level movie.
5:08 Speaker 02 On Chatty Cathy. It's happening.
5:12 Speaker 03 Chatty Cathy was one of the pioneers of pulling back a string and having a voice come out.
5:16 Speaker 02 Yeah.
5:17 Speaker 03 Just like the doll being a pirate. It's a funny idea, that's all.
5:20 Speaker 02 Right.
5:20 Speaker 03 Very cool history.
5:21 Speaker 01 Okay, I've got a fact here from Mira Brown. Mira wrote in from Canada and they said that Jack Daniels has become a bellwether of Canada-US relations. Okay, so there have been, if you've been following the news, Donald Trump has been calling Canada the 51st state and been putting lots of tariffs on. And so there's been a lot of boycotts in Canada of American goods and especially of alcohol and especially of Jack Daniels. And I want you to guess what the percentage drop in sales in Canada of Jack Daniels has been in the last month or so.
6:01 Speaker 01 And because I know you two are going to mess up this quiz, like you always do, and bet like a billion percent or something. I'm going to put a prize on the line. So I've been to the shop and bought some whiskey.
6:11 Speaker 03 Oh, oh, wow.
6:12 Speaker 01 So the winner.
6:13 Speaker 03 Proper whiskey or Jack Daniels?
6:15 Speaker 01 Proper good whiskey.
6:17 Speaker 02 I'm really excited. And also, I'm so annoyed because I do the emails and I did not pay any attention to this one. God damn it.
6:25 Speaker 01 So what percentage of sales down since Trump and Canada got into beef?
6:30 Speaker 02 By the way, James, this is an amazing incentive structure you've put on the table here. It's fantastic. I should know this because I have been to the Jack Daniels distillery, as I've probably mentioned before.
6:37 Speaker 01 Have you?
6:37 Speaker 02 I've been to Tennessee.
6:38 Speaker 03 In the last month?
6:39 Speaker 02 No, during like geopolitically calmer times I went.
6:43 Speaker 03 But they call you up when there's been a change in sales numbers?
6:46 Speaker 02 In 2008. I'm probably on the mailing list, Phil.
6:50 Speaker 03 All right, who's gonna go first?
6:51 Speaker 02 Okay, I will say 72%. Drop. Drop. Okay, I'm gonna say...
6:58 Speaker 01 There's whisky on the line.
6:59 Speaker 02 0.5%, not even 1%, 0.5%. Wow.
7:04 Speaker 01 Oh, well, you don't like whisky then, I suppose.
7:06 Speaker 02 Well, I still could be closer to Andy's end. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you're anything under, what, 36%? Yeah.
7:13 Speaker 01 I'm afraid, Dan, the answer is 62%.
7:16 Speaker 02 Oh!
7:17 Speaker 01 So, Andy, there you are. You get your whisky.
7:20 Speaker 02 Are you serious?
7:20 Speaker 01 There you go.
7:21 Speaker 02 Very nice.
7:22 Speaker 01 Now...
7:23 Speaker 02 Oh my god, this is lovely!
7:24 Speaker 01 It's really nice, isn't it? Open it up.
7:26 Speaker 02 Yeah. What is it?
7:27 Speaker 01 It is to do with my facts that I'm about to tell you.
7:31 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah. This is like inception. This is amazing. It's called Uncle Nearest.
7:36 Speaker 01 Uncle Nearest.
7:37 Speaker 02 1984. Oh, and it's from Tennessee. Lovely.
7:39 Speaker 01 Yes, so it is named after Nearest Green. And Nearest Green was born into slavery and emancipated after civil war. And he was the guy who taught distilling to Jack Daniel, of Jack Daniel's fame. And the company Uncle Nearest Incorporated created this whisky. We're not advertised by these guys. I just went to the shop and got it. They created this whisky in his honour. And Uncle Nearest whisky, their master blender is Victoria Edie Butler, a descendant of Nearest Green, and the first known African-American female whisky master blender.
8:16 Speaker 02 Cool. That's terrific.
8:18 Speaker 01 There you go.
8:19 Speaker 02 Thank you very much, James.
8:20 Speaker 01 Beautiful.
8:20 Speaker 02 I'm actually getting to the end of a bottle of American whisky right now.
8:24 Speaker 01 Yeah?
8:24 Speaker 02 Yeah.
8:25 Speaker 03 I currently don't drink, so this is fine.
8:27 Speaker 01 Well, that's perfect.
8:27 Speaker 02 Yeah. Um, James, you've just given me a prize and I'm afraid I'm about to not return the favour because this is a fact you won't like, basically. But it's that, and this fact comes from Jay Bagley. The majority of the world's citric acid, which is added to so much of our food, is derived from industrial vats of black mould in China.
8:45 Speaker 01 Mmm.
8:46 Speaker 02 Oh, gosh. I know, James, you're not a fungus person.
8:48 Speaker 01 I'm allergic to black mould.
8:50 Speaker 02 Oh.
8:50 Speaker 01 As in, I did an allergy test and there was like two or three things and that was one of the main ones. I think everyone's, I don't think it's good for them.
8:56 Speaker 02 Yeah, I don't think it's good for anyone. I thrive on it. Okay, well, this, this stuff is safe. So I'm sure you guys have heard of citric acid.
9:03 Speaker 01 Yeah.
9:04 Speaker 02 It's in.
9:05 Speaker 01 It's in lemons.
9:05 Speaker 02 It's in lemons. It's often eight percent of the dry weight of a citrus fruit, just to give you an idea of what's going on inside your lemons.
9:13 Speaker 01 Hmm.
9:13 Speaker 02 Um, but the citric acid is incredibly useful for all sorts of purposes and all sorts of foods. And it's in so much stuff. It's in ketchup, it's in fizzy drinks, it's in, uh, chewable vitamins. It cleans your cattle sometimes. If you, you know, there's lime scale things you drop in your kettle, they can be, they can be citric acid. Um, it's used to improve the solubility of brown heroin.
9:35 Speaker 02 I knew I knew it from somewhere. You are off the drink at the moment, but unfortunately.
9:40 Speaker 01 And if you can guess the percentage of citric acid.
9:45 Speaker 02 And basically, so you can get it in fruit, but it's a real pain to extract it from fruit and you, and the world makes two million tonnes of it.
9:51 Speaker 01 Does, does that mean heroin contains vitamin C?
9:54 Speaker 02 Yes, I think it probably does, as I keep telling my doctor.
9:59 Speaker 01 How much would you have to take to get your recommended daily allowance?
10:04 Speaker 02 Well, the good thing is it's moorish. So, you know, even if you only have a little bit, you know, um, you'll be, you would be at your level soon enough. But basically there's this fungus called Aspergillus nigere, which causes black mould on grapes and apricots. And that is the mould that you can synthesise and use to grow and create citric acid. And it's really safe. It's approved and everything. But genuinely, two million tonnes a year, if every person, if we were sharing it equally between us. Yeah. That's 250 grams, give or take, per person per year, uh, that we're getting through.
10:33 Speaker 01 Is that a lot?
10:34 Speaker 02 Um, it would probably be a lot all in one go.
10:36 Speaker 01 Yeah.
10:37 Speaker 02 There's probably a reason we don't do that.
10:39 Speaker 01 What percentage is it in a citrus fruit, did you say?
10:42 Speaker 02 About eight.
10:43 Speaker 01 Okay, and it was 250 grams?
10:45 Speaker 02 Yeah.
10:45 Speaker 01 So multiplied by 12 and a half times of that would be about three kilograms, just over three kilograms each of dried citrus fruit.
10:54 Speaker 02 Of dried citrus fruits. That's very important. You've got to leave those lemons in the sun. Yeah.
11:00 Speaker 01 Very good.
11:00 Speaker 03 Very good. Nice. I got one here from John McCombe, who writes that Disney has a now closed airport where the runway plays When You Wish Upon a Star when a plane lands and goes over it at 45 miles an hour.
11:14 Speaker 01 That's incredible. Which Disney?
11:16 Speaker 03 We're talking Florida here.
11:18 Speaker 01 Florida.
11:18 Speaker 03 Yeah. So this was built in 1970 or 1971. No one's actually too sure. And the idea would be.
11:26 Speaker 01 Probably. They just did it in December, January.
11:28 Speaker 03 That's probably a spillover month to the new year. That's true. So yeah, so this was, this was built and it was largely used for the official Disney plane called Mickey Mouse One. When Walt Disney was alive, he had Mickey Mouse One, the original plane and.
11:44 Speaker 02 Like Air Force One?
11:45 Speaker 03 Like Air Force One. And it was so that he could go scouting for locations for possible future Disneyland properties. It was so that he could continue his meetings.
11:55 Speaker 02 Okay, just quick pitch.
11:56 Speaker 03 Yeah.
11:56 Speaker 02 Quick pitch. The president is visiting Disneyland, right?
12:00 Speaker 01 Yeah.
12:00 Speaker 02 But then there's some kind of attack, some baddie's attack, and the president has to flee on Mickey Mouse One.
12:05 Speaker 03 Yes.
12:06 Speaker 01 Yeah.
12:06 Speaker 02 Yeah?
12:07 Speaker 01 And what then, like a load of Walt Disney characters in all of their outfits accidentally get into Air Force One?
12:15 Speaker 02 That's it. That's it. That's it. And they've got the nuclear football and all of that. Yes. And Goofy's, Goofy's trying to work it out.
12:23 Speaker 03 And you had some foreign president going, who's running this country? Mickey Mouse? Which is a famous thing you would say.
12:28 Speaker 02 That's a good. Yeah, we'll have a script edit, of course.
12:31 Speaker 03 Of course.
12:32 Speaker 02 You've done all the main work, I feel. So anyway, yeah, so it's not used. It's not used largely because they've built stuff too near to it. There's a monorail that means that if a plane did come in, it would possibly crash into it. So it's largely used as a parking area now. So it's still there and the strip with the music is still there. So if cars go over it, you can still get when you wish upon a star. Because I thought from the email that it was in a whole abandoned Disney park that just wasn't in use anymore and had kind of been overgrown. I was getting a bit sort of excited about that concept.
13:00 Speaker 01 Interesting.
13:01 Speaker 02 Cool fact, though.
13:02 Speaker 01 Here is a fact. This one is from Maxine Iglich. And Maxine says that Slovenia harnesses the power of ASMR to attract tourists. So Maxine was on the Slovenia official website for visa information, and they stumbled upon this page called The Sounds of Slovenia. And it's amazing. It's just a load of like embedded audio clips of the sounds of Slovenia.
13:30 Speaker 02 Right.
13:30 Speaker 01 They have bobbin lace making, Bigfoot, Dan.
13:35 Speaker 02 I love it.
13:35 Speaker 01 Trains, Andy.
13:37 Speaker 02 Great.
13:38 Speaker 01 Yeah. No golf, unfortunately. But yeah, it's just a place where you can hear what Slovenia is like.
13:43 Speaker 02 That's great. I've actually been to Slovenia. I've not heard, I didn't hear a single bobbin lace being made.
13:48 Speaker 01 No, I too have been there and I didn't see a single Bigfoot.
13:52 Speaker 02 No.
13:53 Speaker 01 And as far as I can see, Bigfoot isn't a thing that's associated with Slovenia.
13:57 Speaker 02 No. I'm not trying to think of what my Sound of Slovenia was, and I think it was the crunch as the hire car we had rented scraped along the side of an underground parking garage and what would turn out to be an incredibly expensive moment for me.
14:11 Speaker 01 They, they do have that. It just says crunch, crunch.
14:14 Speaker 02 Oh, for God's sake! This is gonna be 600 euros.
14:18 Speaker 01 So I was looking at Bigfoot in Slovenia.
14:22 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah.
14:23 Speaker 01 To see what they're talking about. And it doesn't seem to exist, but there is a thing.
14:26 Speaker 02 As in so many places. Imagine James solved Bigfoot. There he is. No, actually, that's the one place you'd hide if you were Bigfoot. You'd go to a country which didn't have a Bigfoot myth. That's perfect!
14:37 Speaker 01 Yeah. They have a thing called Ljesi, which is like Slavic in general, but they have it in Slovenia. And I was reading the Wikipedia of this sort of Bigfoot-like thing that lives in Slovenia. And apparently it has green eyes, or white eyes, or blue eyes. It's some, it has no eyebrows, although sometimes in some stories it has eyebrows. In some stories, it's described like a giant, but some stories, it's described as a small person and sometimes he's of average height and he wears a wide brimmed hat or a pointed cap or has no headwear.
15:11 Speaker 02 Hmm, this Dan is nodding along like, it's as I thought.
15:14 Speaker 03 Well, there's more, I mean, there are species, it's not just one of them. So they're gonna have different fashions, you know, some will suit a hat, some won't, you know?
15:21 Speaker 01 You know, when I went to Slovenia last, one thing that was quite interesting is we stayed in a like a hotel in a village. I was with my wife and the bed had a bundling board in it.
15:34 Speaker 02 What's a bundling board?
15:35 Speaker 01 Incredible. Yeah. Oh, Dan, you won't know these, but with the, not with your number of children, but it's a board you put down the middle of a bed to prevent any, um. Hanky panky. Yeah, between a man and a woman sharing a bed. So the idea is like in rural America, they would like allow a couple to sleep together before they were married, but to make sure that they didn't do anything naughty, they would put this board in between. And I went to this hotel and it had a board in the bed.
15:59 Speaker 02 Did you, did you ring down for the afternoon? Could we borrow a drill, please?
16:03 Speaker 03 No, small bit is fine, but.
16:10 Speaker 00 Chat GPT for teens is designed to help teens learn, think critically and grow their skills. Chat GPT for teens supports active learning by breaking concepts down. Rather than giving teens the answer, study mode helps teens work through problems and interactive quizzes test their knowledge and provide immediate feedback. Safety protections are on by default and parental controls offer families additional options like setting study hours and quiet hours. Visit chatgpt.com slash parents to learn more.
16:40 Speaker 02 This is a great one. It's from Nathan Shear and it's that the Duke of Wellington was two hours late to his own funeral.
16:47 Speaker 01 Okay.
16:47 Speaker 02 This is a thing you say about people sometimes, isn't it?
16:49 Speaker 01 He'd be late to his own funeral.
16:51 Speaker 03 Yeah, we did. We did a fact. Elizabeth Taylor actively organised to be late to her own funeral.
16:55 Speaker 01 Yeah. And she wore two or three different outfits or something.
16:58 Speaker 03 Did she? What? On the day? Yeah, so.
17:00 Speaker 02 Really? Forgotten that. Anyway, basically, 1852, this was the last, I'd say, mega funeral for many years until probably, I don't know, Queen Victoria, 1901, or maybe Winston Churchill, 1965. It was a big deal because he was obviously a big deal. And basically, they made this mad steampunk carriage to transport him through the city. It was modelled after ancient descriptions of Alexander the Great's funeral carriage.
17:28 Speaker 01 Right.
17:28 Speaker 02 I know. It was eight metres long, five metres high. It weighed 12 tonnes. It took six iron foundries to make this thing, like, weeks and weeks, a dozen horses to pull. Unfortunately, what this all meant was that when it got stuck, it was a complete bastard to free. It took 60 policemen when one wheel got stuck to lift this thing up and get it back on the road. And like, the horses were absolutely exhausted. A group of sailors had to help give it a push at one point.
17:58 Speaker 01 What were they doing there?
17:59 Speaker 02 I suppose, what were they doing there?
18:01 Speaker 01 They were just watching.
18:02 Speaker 02 There were reps of all the armed forces there, and so I suppose you'd have a team of sailors following the thing. But there were 1.5 million people on the route, the funeral route.
18:10 Speaker 01 Wow.
18:10 Speaker 02 It was just one, and think of the year, 1852, like, the population was way lower at the time.
18:15 Speaker 01 Do you know what the biggest funeral of all time was?
18:18 Speaker 02 Um, Gandhi?
18:20 Speaker 01 Very close.
18:21 Speaker 02 Jesus?
18:22 Speaker 03 Nehru?
18:24 Speaker 01 Uh, probably closer than Gandhi, I think.
18:27 Speaker 02 Mao?
18:28 Speaker 01 Unfortunately, it's someone you've never heard of, so that's a problem. It's Anna. And Anna.
18:33 Speaker 02 Anna Tijinsky?
18:34 Speaker 01 Not Anna Tijinsky.
18:35 Speaker 02 I'm gutted. I'm still wondering where she's gone. I thought she hadn't, I mean, she never takes back, so I thought it was normal.
18:41 Speaker 01 You've been on three dots for six months. It's Anna. I've forgotten her name. Basically, it's an Indian politician. I think he might have been deputy prime minister or something like that.
18:51 Speaker 02 I met someone recently. She's Indian, and she had, at her wedding, 50,000 people.
18:58 Speaker 01 What?
18:59 Speaker 02 Hmm.
19:00 Speaker 03 Catered?
19:01 Speaker 02 It was catered, yeah.
19:03 Speaker 01 And you were only invited to the evening, weren't you, Andy?
19:06 Speaker 02 Oh, sorry, 50,001.
19:10 Speaker 03 Can I have a, no, oh, no plus one? That's no problem. That's no problem. I've come along. It's fine. Um, yes, I think she, she had political connections and, um, or her, her family were in politics. And when you have a big politicians, even their children get married, it's traditional that basically you invite everyone from the province or whatever it is.
19:28 Speaker 01 Yes, right. I'm just, I just Googled the biggest funeral and it was C N Anadurai in 1969 and 15 million people attended. Goodness.
19:40 Speaker 03 Oh, wow.
19:40 Speaker 01 He was the chief minister of Tamil Nadu.
19:43 Speaker 03 Blimey.
19:43 Speaker 01 There you go. Did you know him well? No, no, me neither. No.
19:50 Speaker 01 Okay, that is enough of your facts, as great as they are. And they were great.
19:54 Speaker 03 They were brilliant.
19:55 Speaker 01 Really enjoyed them. It is time to give custodianship over to some of our facts. So anyone who is a member of our Patreon at the top level, which is friend of the podcast, becomes a custodian of a fact. And so, Dan, why don't you kick us off with a new custodian?
20:11 Speaker 03 Yeah, okay. This is for Paul Kingham. Paul, we're on episode 29 of the podcast and you are now the custodian of the fact that in the 19th century, you could be committed to an asylum for novel reading.
20:27 Speaker 03 Very good. So this was, uh, this was records from West Virginia asylum and Pennsylvania state lunatic hospital. And other reasons we were told about in that episode for admission included being kicked in the head by a horse, bad whiskey, and
20:43 Speaker 03 and, um, uh, imaginary female trouble, uh, was another one.
20:47 Speaker 01 Imaginary female trouble.
20:48 Speaker 03 I can't remember what that was.
20:49 Speaker 01 Is it imaginary trouble from females? Or is it imaginary females causing the trouble?
20:53 Speaker 03 Very good. Probably both, I would imagine.
20:55 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah. Either of them's gonna get you locked up.
20:56 Speaker 03 Yeah.
20:58 Speaker 01 I can't hear the phrase kicked in the head by a horse without thinking of Brian Blessed.
21:04 Speaker 02 Do you know this, Andy?
21:06 Speaker 03 It was the first time that I met Brian.
21:08 Speaker 01 First time I met him as well.
21:09 Speaker 03 And James met him as well. He arrived to do Museum of Curiosity and we went to pick him up in the main reception. And he was sitting there with a giant blue head, like the whole front of his face, nose.
21:21 Speaker 01 It was his own head. He didn't have a giant blue head by his side.
21:24 Speaker 03 It was his own blue head and he could see us clearly looking a bit worried. He said, "Don't be alarmed, old boy. Got kicked in the face by a horse." And it had happened that morning.
21:34 Speaker 02 Wow.
21:34 Speaker 03 Yeah, he was in his field, got kicked in the face by a horse and then thought, "Better go do Museum of Curiosity", and came along.
21:39 Speaker 02 And was he impaired?
21:41 Speaker 03 I think.
21:42 Speaker 01 It was hard to tell.
21:45 Speaker 01 The horse's foot never recovered.
21:50 Speaker 02 Oh, fantastic. So good.
21:51 Speaker 01 Okay, go on, Andy, give us another one.
21:53 Speaker 02 This one goes out to Hannah Wilson. Congratulations, Hannah, because your fact, this is, I'd say, a Hall of Famer, is that the Greenland shark lives in cold water and can only swim at one mile an hour. Its main prey, seals, swim at two miles an hour.
22:08 Speaker 03 That was one of mine. I remember reading that and trying to calculate the speed at which the prey could escape.
22:15 Speaker 02 Does it sneak up on them?
22:16 Speaker 03 Yeah, it has to wait till they're sleeping, basically.
22:18 Speaker 01 Okay, here's another one. This one goes out to Ian Wolfe, an old friend of the podcast himself. And his fact is now that the head of the International Chess Federation believes that chess was brought to Earth by aliens.
22:34 Speaker 03 That's right.
22:35 Speaker 02 This sounds like a damn fact, but it's not.
22:37 Speaker 01 No, it was mine. Like, obviously I'm a big chess fan. Not a big aliens fan, but I love, I love my chess.
22:44 Speaker 03 He said that the aliens gave us two things: chess and sweet corn. With a gun to my head, I don't know which I would give up.
22:52 Speaker 02 Hmm.
22:53 Speaker 01 Do you?
22:54 Speaker 03 Neither has played, neither plays a massive role in my life.
22:56 Speaker 01 I'm teaching my daughter how to play chess at the moment, or trying. Basically, she takes the horses and plays Rapunzel with them.
23:07 Speaker 02 You've got a tower for her to be up with the rook.
23:10 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's true.
23:11 Speaker 02 Yeah.
23:12 Speaker 03 You just need to work a bishop into the Rapunzel story.
23:14 Speaker 01 Yeah, because we have the king and queen, King Frederick and Queen Ariana.
23:18 Speaker 02 Perfect.
23:19 Speaker 01 I'm not sure where the pawns come in.
23:23 Speaker 01 Okay, Dan, another one?
23:24 Speaker 03 Yep, this is a fact going out to Monique Julia. To attract new members, the Japanese Yakuza Crime Syndicate has its own website and theme tune. I want to say I'm a big fan of the Yakuza.
23:38 Speaker 02 Well, we've talked about them a lot, haven't we, over the years?
23:39 Speaker 03 Friends of the podcast?
23:40 Speaker 01 No.
23:41 Speaker 03 Okay.
23:44 Speaker 02 They feature a fair bit. We've done their tattoos and their pinky thing as well. Where you have to lose half a little finger.
23:49 Speaker 03 And Halloween, they're very active during Halloween with kids and giving out sweets and so on.
23:54 Speaker 01 Yeah. But they can't do the Addams Family theme tune because they can't click their fingers.
23:59 Speaker 03 Well, they've got a theme tune chain, so they don't need to.
24:01 Speaker 02 Very strong.
24:04 Speaker 01 I don't even know what that means.
24:06 Speaker 02 Here's another one. This goes out to Kate Matthews. Congratulations, Kate. Your fact for now and forever is that the first BBC radio presenter with a northern accent was given the job to make it more difficult for the Nazis to impersonate newsreaders.
24:20 Speaker 01 Brilliant.
24:20 Speaker 03 I remember exactly where we were when you said that fact. We were doing a Soho gig. I think it was one of our first Soho gigs.
24:26 Speaker 01 No, I think it was, was it not Aces?
24:29 Speaker 02 Aces and Aces?
24:30 Speaker 03 You're right. It was Aces and Aces. That's right. It was a live show regardless.
24:35 Speaker 01 I think it was our first live show.
24:36 Speaker 03 Our first live show, really?
24:37 Speaker 01 I think it must be, episode 30.
24:39 Speaker 03 Wow, yes.
24:40 Speaker 02 He was called Wilfred Pickles, wasn't he?
24:41 Speaker 01 That's right.
24:42 Speaker 02 And the British authorities knew the crossover between Nazis and Northerners is zero. The Venn diagrams are completely, the circles are completely separate.
24:50 Speaker 01 Well, let's see how that Norton by-election goes next week.
24:56 Speaker 02 But.
24:57 Speaker 01 Interesting, yeah. And that's why no Nazis have ever been able to replicate this podcast.
25:02 Speaker 03 That's right.
25:03 Speaker 01 They managed to get you three to a T, but.
25:08 Speaker 01 Okay, here is one that is now under the custodianship of Kerry Harvey. And Kerry, your fact is, in China, if you want to empty a building of people, you just have to play the song "Going Home" by Kenny G.
25:23 Speaker 03 Yeah, it's because it's just the song they play when it's home time.
25:26 Speaker 01 People know it, and so if you're in a shopping centre or something, they start playing it. You hear it, you're like, oh, there must be time to close.
25:32 Speaker 03 Yeah, they play it if a train has reached its terminating point in the underground. So, you know, to get off at schools, they play it at the end of the day.
25:41 Speaker 02 I hope they still do it, because this was 10 years ago, obviously.
25:43 Speaker 03 It was 10 years ago.
25:43 Speaker 02 I hope Kenny G still has the cultural cachet that he did then.
25:47 Speaker 03 I met Kenny G as a kid in Hong Kong.
25:49 Speaker 02 Whoa.
25:49 Speaker 01 Did you?
25:50 Speaker 03 Yeah.
25:51 Speaker 02 That's big.
25:51 Speaker 03 He was hitting on someone, and so I wasn't a welcome presence in the moment.
25:57 Speaker 01 How old were you?
25:58 Speaker 03 I was in a health club. I was about nine.
26:00 Speaker 01 Did you get an autograph or anything?
26:01 Speaker 03 I did, yeah. Please fuck off. I'm trying to hit on this lady.
26:09 Speaker 03 Go home.
26:11 Speaker 03 He just whipped out his sax and played a few bars to you. Scram, kid.
26:18 Speaker 02 That's so funny, Dan.
26:20 Speaker 01 Dan, give us one more.
26:21 Speaker 03 Okay, this one goes out to Lindy Stevens. The two leading paleontologists of the 19th century used to destroy their fossil sites after excavating them so that their rivals couldn't excavate them.
26:33 Speaker 02 This was the Bone Wars.
26:35 Speaker 03 Basically, they hated each other so much that they just wanted to stop any other finds being discovered on turf they'd been over.
26:44 Speaker 02 And there was a big scandal when one of them got a stegosaurus the wrong way around, wasn't it?
26:48 Speaker 01 What, put the plates on the inside?
26:52 Speaker 02 It's incredible. This thing could live at all.
26:56 Speaker 02 I might be getting that wrong. Maybe it's a diplodocus that had it, that got the wrong way around.
27:00 Speaker 03 I think there was a famous incident at one point. I think it was associated with one of these guys.
27:04 Speaker 02 Yes.
27:04 Speaker 03 Anyway.
27:05 Speaker 02 That's a great start.
27:06 Speaker 03 Great, ah, those are amazing.
27:07 Speaker 01 Episode number 30, if you want to go back and listen to it.
27:09 Speaker 03 Yeah.
27:09 Speaker 01 Find out more. Andy, give us one last one.
27:12 Speaker 03 All right, this one goes out to Henry Smith, and it's the fact that, in the Fuller language...
27:16 Speaker 02 Language, a computer crash is a hooky, which means a cow falling over but not dying.
27:23 Speaker 01 Wow.
27:23 Speaker 02 Okay.
27:24 Speaker 01 That's right.
27:25 Speaker 02 This was about Mozilla Firefox and translating into lots of languages. So there are small languages where you need to come up with new metaphors for what's just happened to your computer. Because they've got to translate it into all these languages, you know, so they need to say what has happened.
27:40 Speaker 01 Where is the fuller language, do you know?
27:41 Speaker 02 I think it stretches across lots of different countries in West and Central Africa. So it's a bit of everywhere. So, yeah, yeah. And there are a couple of other ones which are a timeout, which is your fish has gone away.
27:57 Speaker 01 It's a timeout.
27:58 Speaker 02 Like when your request is timed out, you haven't connected for whatever reason, your fish has gone away. And an aspect ratio is a rebuke from elders when a fishing net is wrongly woven. Things we can all relate to.
28:10 Speaker 01 Okay. Well, Henry, hope you enjoy that fact and hope you enjoy them too. Lindy, Kerry, Kate, Monique, Ian, Hannah and Paul. You have gotten your facts and if you too are a member of the top tier of Patreon, friend of the podcast, then listen out in the next few weeks because your name might be mentioned as well. If you would like to become a friend of the podcast, then go to patreon.com slash no such thing as a fish. And you can find information about all of our different tiers up there. In fact, you can even sign up for free and you'll get some stuff.
28:43 Speaker 02 Some little bonusy bits that we're working on. Yeah.
28:45 Speaker 01 Yeah. So go there and sign up no matter what, even if you don't want to pay. That's absolutely fine. But we hope you come back here next week. We will be having a big fish on Friday. We'll be back here for a little fish next Monday. So goodbye from me, goodbye from Andy, bye, goodbye from Dan.
29:05 Speaker 02 Goodbye.
29:16 Speaker 04 She's been thinking about this sleepover all week, but I think about her food allergies all the time. Fortunately, her doctor prescribed Zolair, omalizumab. It's proven to significantly reduce allergic reactions if a food allergy accident happens.
29:30 Speaker 05 Zolair 150mg is a prescription medication used to treat food allergy in people one year of age and older to reduce allergic reactions due to accidental exposure to one or more foods. While taking Zolair, you should continue to avoid all foods to which you are allergic. Don't use if you are allergic to Zolair. Zolair may cause a severe, life-threatening allergic reaction called anaphylaxis. Tell your doctor if you ever had anaphylaxis. Get help right away if you have trouble breathing or if you have swelling of your throat or tongue. Zolair should not be used for the emergency treatment of allergic reactions, including anaphylaxis. Zolair is for maintenance use to reduce allergic reactions, including anaphylaxis, while avoiding food allergens. Serious side effects such as cancer, fever, muscle aches and rash, parasitic infection, or heart and circulation problems have been reported. Please see zolair.com for full prescribing information. Ask an allergist about Zolair. This is an advertisement for Zolair
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30:16 Speaker 00 ChatGPT for Teens is designed to help teens learn, think critically, and grow their skills. ChatGPT for Teens supports active learning by breaking concepts down. Rather than giving teens the answer, study mode helps teens work through problems and interactive quizzes test their knowledge and provide immediate feedback. Safety protections are on by default and parental controls offer families additional options like setting study hours and quiet hours. Visit chatgpt.com/parents to learn more.
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