Pod Insights No Such Thing As A Fish Little Fish: I am Dorkus, Queen of the Dorks About this episode Dan, James and Andy discuss YOUR facts, including underground trains and underground roots. We find out what James did at Andy's wedding that was so distracting. And we name eight more Friend of the Podcast fact custodians.
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0:43 Speaker 01 Hey, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Little Fish. This is the episode where we put down our facts and we go through the podcast at qi.com inbox and we pick out the best facts that you have sent in for us to read out. So my name is Dan Schreiber. I'm sitting here with Andrew Hunter-Murray and James Harkin. We have now got your best facts from the last seven days. Let's go. Andy, do you want to start?
1:07 Speaker 02 Yes. This is a good one. It's from Kev Osman and it's that the Chancellor of the Exchequer between 1606 and 1614 was Julius Caesar.
1:22 Speaker 03 Um, okay.
1:24 Speaker 02 Just a guy named Julius Caesar.
1:26 Speaker 03 Oh, was it?
1:26 Speaker 02 Really? I think Kev was going through a list of Chancellors of the Exchequer from history.
1:31 Speaker 03 Wow. And thought, this is a typo.
1:32 Speaker 02 Okay, yeah.
1:34 Speaker 03 Is it, um, is it his full name or was he called Julius Caesar Johnson or something?
1:39 Speaker 02 He had another name, which is sometimes referred to as in the records, but it's not very clear. It was either Julius Caesar sometimes or something else Caesar on other occasions. But anyway, basically, he was, he was a very interesting guy. He was born in Tottenham and he became very kind of eminent. He had three wives, the first of whom was called Dorcas, which is just a name I love.
1:59 Speaker 01 Wow.
2:00 Speaker 02 Such a good name, Dorcas.
2:01 Speaker 03 Oh, I can't believe I'm not planning to have any more children.
2:04 Speaker 01 I know. I think it's absolutely ripe for a comeback. Like, all the easy, old-fashioned names have been absolutely stripped mine, you know?
2:10 Speaker 03 Yeah, they always do. But I honestly, oh, I might have to go back and speak to my wife today because I think this is almost a reason for having a second child.
2:18 Speaker 01 Oh, I thought you were going to say change your current child's name.
2:23 Speaker 01 She's still young, she won't know, she'll adjust.
2:26 Speaker 03 Yeah, she doesn't really know what her real name is because we all call her by her nickname.
2:30 Speaker 02 Exactly, just tell her your real name's Dorcas.
2:34 Speaker 02 But Francis Bacon was his third wife's uncle, this guy, Julius Caesar.
2:38 Speaker 01 His third wife's uncle, okay.
2:40 Speaker 02 Yep.
2:42 Speaker 03 Probably they didn't see each other that much.
2:44 Speaker 02 Guys, I've done a lot of homework about Julius Caesar and you're gonna have to hear it now, I'm sorry.
2:48 Speaker 01 No, no, please, yeah.
2:49 Speaker 02 And we should say for overseas listeners, the Chancellor of the Extracur is a big deal in British politics.
2:53 Speaker 01 Yes, and Julius Caesar was a big deal in.
2:56 Speaker 03 In America, it'd be like the equivalent of the Secretary of State for the Treasury or something.
3:01 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah, exactly. And the one other fact I found out was that Julius Caesar's son was also called Julius Caesar and died by being stabbed to death.
3:14 Speaker 01 You're kidding?
3:14 Speaker 02 Nope.
3:15 Speaker 03 Wow.
3:16 Speaker 02 He had been fencing.
3:18 Speaker 01 Yeah.
3:19 Speaker 02 And he'd been slightly wounded during a fencing match.
3:21 Speaker 01 Yeah.
3:21 Speaker 03 Gosh.
3:22 Speaker 02 He wanted revenge on the, his opponent. Lay in wait with a pistol. When the opponent came into view, Julius Caesar Junior fired, missed, and was then run through with a sword and killed.
3:35 Speaker 03 So. I mean, he has to shoulder some of the blame there.
3:39 Speaker 02 Absolutely, I think he's even more culpable for his Julius Caesar-ing than Julius Caesar was.
3:45 Speaker 01 What month did he die?
3:47 Speaker 02 I don't know if it was in March, mid-March, I don't know.
3:52 Speaker 03 Amazing.
3:53 Speaker 02 Yeah, there you go.
3:53 Speaker 01 Great find. Yes, thank you, Kev, terrific fact.
3:57 Speaker 02 Yes.
3:57 Speaker 03 One of my favourite Julius Caesar facts is the actual real more famous Julius Caesar. He had like two or three sisters and they were all called Julia, Julius Caesar.
4:06 Speaker 01 You're kidding?
4:08 Speaker 03 And that's just the way it worked in those days, like you would have like Julia Minor, Julia Major, Julia something else.
4:15 Speaker 02 It was kind of the family name, wasn't it?
4:17 Speaker 01 Yeah.
4:18 Speaker 02 And then you, you had.
4:19 Speaker 01 Oh, like George Foreman calling all his kids.
4:22 Speaker 03 Kind of, but then if, if he, if his like sons were called Big George, Little George.
4:27 Speaker 01 Hmm.
4:28 Speaker 03 Carbox George, like.
4:32 Speaker 03 Okay, this fact is from Michael Luna and Michael says, I'm from Edinburgh, Texas. Um, I assume it's not a typo and there's a place called Edinburgh without the H in Texas.
4:46 Speaker 02 Oh, Edinburgh.
4:47 Speaker 03 Edinburgh, yeah.
4:48 Speaker 02 That's great.
4:49 Speaker 03 It's in the southern tip of Texas, just north of the border with Mexico. And Michael says that an hour east of me is a town called Brownsville, Texas, that has the very first 3D printed Starbucks.
5:03 Speaker 02 Okay.
5:04 Speaker 03 Uh, and the exciting thing is that Michael knows about it. It opened in April 2025 and Michael was hired to take photos of it because he is an aerial photographer.
5:14 Speaker 02 That's cool.
5:15 Speaker 03 Hmm. I feel sad when someone tells me they're an aerial photographer because it feels like drones are just going to kick you right out of the market.
5:22 Speaker 02 Unless he means he photographs aerials in interesting ways.
5:26 Speaker 03 Interesting. And this 3D printed Starbucks has a really interesting aerial.
5:31 Speaker 02 Yeah, yes.
5:32 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah. Maybe he got confused because their logo is a mermaid and the mermaid's called Ariel, of course. You rocked up going, where is it?
5:43 Speaker 03 Another thing that's been recently 3D printed.
5:45 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah.
5:46 Speaker 03 Robert Louis Stevenson.
5:47 Speaker 02 He's back.
5:49 Speaker 03 That's good. This was the University of Leeds and they had a statue that had been decapitated at some stage and they didn't know who it was of. Uh, and so a team sort of realized who it had been sculpted by because the signature was on there and they looked at all the different, um, things that have been sculpted by this person. Uh, and they found a similar bronze in the Kelvin Grove Art Gallery in Glasgow and realized that this statue must be the same as the bronze. And so then they scanned the bronze head and then 3D printed the top of the statue.
6:24 Speaker 02 That is such cool detective work.
6:26 Speaker 03 RLS.
6:27 Speaker 01 That's amazing.
6:28 Speaker 02 Brilliant. Had it been decapitated ages ago. It was a cold case.
6:31 Speaker 03 We didn't know who it was at that stage.
6:33 Speaker 02 That's amazing. That's such a cool use of technology.
6:36 Speaker 01 Yeah.
6:37 Speaker 02 Also, he died at about 40, so he needs a comeback, you know?
6:40 Speaker 03 He took a lot of cocaine, didn't he?
6:42 Speaker 02 Did he?
6:42 Speaker 03 I think.
6:43 Speaker 02 Stevenson.
6:43 Speaker 03 I think, did he? He wrote Dodger Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, right? I think it was on like a 14 day cocaine binge that he wrote it.
6:50 Speaker 02 Yes, he famously wrote it in almost no time at all, but I didn't know that missing piece of information that helps me put it together. Understood.
6:55 Speaker 03 I bet it's amazing, but guys, it's amazing. It's gonna be brilliant. It's gonna be brilliant.
6:59 Speaker 01 Um, okay, I got a little quickie one here. This one is from Luke McLaughlin, and it is that I found out that the former CEO of Food for the Poor, which is a relief organisation, uh, the former CEO is called Robin Mahfood.
7:15 Speaker 03 Oh, yeah.
7:17 Speaker 01 I definitely feel I've heard that in the past.
7:19 Speaker 03 I feel like I've seen interviews with him where his name comes up on the screen.
7:23 Speaker 01 Yeah, so his surname is spelled M A H F double O D. We love a nominative determinism moment on the show.
7:30 Speaker 03 We do.
7:31 Speaker 01 Yeah, I was looking into a few others. Someone that was in the news recently is the gynecologist, Dr. Vaj, who is now, uh, an internet star.
7:41 Speaker 03 D N Vaj, isn't it?
7:42 Speaker 01 Yes, that's right.
7:44 Speaker 03 Sorry, as to confuse, I don't know how many Dr. Vaj is a gynecologist. Because we've had that recently, that Vaj has another meaning. In Australia, yes. It means someone who's been detained under the Vagrancy Act. That's right. In a very specific place and time in Australia.
7:59 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah.
8:00 Speaker 03 What else does it mean? I don't understand.
8:02 Speaker 01 No, that's why it's funny.
8:06 Speaker 03 Is it my turn?
8:06 Speaker 01 It is indeed.
8:07 Speaker 03 Bard and Fiona Green tell me about the wild fig ficus psychomorus, uh, which has been recorded to have roots of up to 393 feet deep.
8:19 Speaker 01 Wow.
8:20 Speaker 03 And it's 66 feet above ground height. It's pretty tall anyway. So if you go from tip to top, it's a total of 459 feet. Whereas the highest redwood, Hyperion, which is supposed to be the tallest tree, is only 379.7 feet, and it has quite shallow roots because they're quite wide and shallow.
8:42 Speaker 01 Right.
8:42 Speaker 03 So actually, if you measure the tallest tree from the bottom of the roots, which I think you should.
8:47 Speaker 01 Yes.
8:48 Speaker 03 Then the fig is the biggest.
8:51 Speaker 01 It's not as simple as measuring from the tip to where it meets the main. You've got to take the roots and go, the roots are stunning.
8:57 Speaker 03 Yeah.
8:58 Speaker 01 The roots are much bigger than anyone else's roots.
9:03 Speaker 03 How long is your penis? Six foot one, if you include all of it.
9:12 Speaker 03 So yeah.
9:13 Speaker 02 Great, great fact.
9:14 Speaker 03 Hyperion could be a bit taller. I don't know if we've said this on, if we've discussed this on the show these-
9:19 Speaker 02 Is that the tallest individual redwood tree?
9:21 Speaker 03 There was a family of woodpeckers who lived at the top and they kept pecking at the top of it so it couldn't get any taller.
9:27 Speaker 02 Right.
9:27 Speaker 03 Otherwise it might have been a few inches taller as well.
9:30 Speaker 02 That's very funny.
9:31 Speaker 01 What's the, what's the tallest tree you guys have been up?
9:33 Speaker 03 Been up?
9:34 Speaker 01 Yeah.
9:35 Speaker 03 Um, well, I've been to like some tree houses.
9:38 Speaker 01 Yeah.
9:39 Speaker 03 Is that the kind, cause I remember you said that you went to a lookout tree once.
9:42 Speaker 01 In Australia, yeah, there's a, there's a whole bit of Oz and I can't remember what it's called. And I feel like it was called like Valley of the Kings or something like that. But that might have been Egypt.
9:50 Speaker 03 Lot of Termites around, yeah.
9:51 Speaker 01 Yeah.
9:52 Speaker 03 Was it the Valley of the Dorks?
9:55 Speaker 02 I am Dorcas, Queen of the Dorks.
10:00 Speaker 03 Yeah.
10:01 Speaker 01 Yeah, it was a, it was, we had to climb pegs around. So it sort of went around like a spiral staircase and you get to the top.
10:07 Speaker 03 Yeah, I remember you told us, cause we did this when, who was the guy, oh my God, William Burroughs, was it? Who works as a lookout?
10:14 Speaker 02 Did he?
10:14 Speaker 03 Or one of those Beach Generation workers.
10:15 Speaker 01 Like Jack Kerouac or something?
10:17 Speaker 03 Oh, it was Kerouac, it was Kerouac, yeah, yeah, yeah. But yeah, we, we discussed it and you said that when you went up, someone was coming down or something?
10:23 Speaker 01 There was, there was a little hut at the top and there was a woman sort of crouched and too afraid to move. And I get it. I think if I was an adult, as a kid, you have less fear, I feel with that kind of stuff. She could still be there. I have no idea. Cause we just went back down. Cause what am I going to do?
10:37 Speaker 03 Last time I properly did some tree climbing was at Andy's wedding.
10:41 Speaker 02 Yes.
10:42 Speaker 03 Climbing up the trees.
10:43 Speaker 02 That's right.
10:44 Speaker 03 Cause it was in a beautiful building with lots of grounds.
10:46 Speaker 01 It was a bit distracting as they were doing their vows. In the distance, there was this man.
10:50 Speaker 02 Yeah, it was okay. I didn't mind.
10:53 Speaker 01 Swinging through the tree.
10:54 Speaker 03 Someone had to look out for wildfires.
10:57 Speaker 02 I do wish you hadn't been shouting, oh.
11:05 Speaker 03 Have you seen the roots on this one?
11:11 Speaker 02 You're absolutely right, James. It was Kerouac. I forgot that.
11:13 Speaker 03 Yeah, in fairness, it was Dan who said that and I just agreed with him.
11:16 Speaker 01 I just headed in a beautiful assist.
11:19 Speaker 02 Well done, James, for agreeing with Dan there.
11:20 Speaker 01 Yeah. All right, here's another one. Let's go another. This is from Dennis Walker, who says, "I always like facts about things being in unexpected timeframes. So the classic thing of the Incas were around while Oxford University was around. The idea that woolly mammoths would have been walking while the pharaohs were still at the same time."
11:38 Speaker 02 The Australian pharaohs?
11:40 Speaker 01 The Australian pharaohs? What are they?
11:42 Speaker 02 You were in the Valley of the Kings in Australia. Doesn't matter.
11:47 Speaker 01 Those ones. Absolutely.
11:50 Speaker 03 It's so funny, listener. We literally just had a little break for like, maybe like 20 seconds where we just sorted something out. In that time, I'd completely forgotten about that conversation.
12:01 Speaker 01 Me too.
12:01 Speaker 02 I pressed the button on both of the backs of your necks for three seconds and that just did a hard reset.
12:07 Speaker 01 Well, anyway, what Dennis Walker is trying to tell us is that, he says, "My favorite one of these is that Jack the Ripper could have taken the London Tube to Whitechapel because they cross over in time." So the London Underground Metropolitan Railway opened in 1863. Whitechapel became part of the East London Railway in 1876. This was then joined to the original Metropolitan Line in 1884 and the murders happened in 1888. So it's quite possible that... And it is, the London Underground and the people who would have crossed over with it is pretty fascinating. We know Mark Twain, enemy of the podcast, took the London Underground.
12:44 Speaker 02 Of course he did.
12:45 Speaker 01 In theory...
12:48 Speaker 02 So him. Look at me. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Maybe he was Jack the Ripper.
12:54 Speaker 01 Yeah.
12:55 Speaker 02 Yeah, that's my new theory.
12:56 Speaker 01 Yes, if he was a time traveller, because he was here in 1900 and the murders happened 12 years before. But it's really interesting if you look at who was alive, who could have potentially gone on the London Underground at that point.
13:05 Speaker 02 Games like this.
13:06 Speaker 03 Hit us with some.
13:07 Speaker 01 Well, Charles Darwin.
13:09 Speaker 03 Oh, yeah.
13:09 Speaker 01 And Charles Darwin was coming in and out of London in the period where there was a line. I don't think it was as, you know...
13:16 Speaker 02 Tell you what, survival of the fittest. I know that feeling, getting up, going on the escalators at Holborn. Carry on.
13:24 Speaker 03 More like climbing up the steps at Covent Garden.
13:27 Speaker 02 That's good too, that's good too.
13:29 Speaker 03 You don't need to be fit to go on the escalators.
13:30 Speaker 02 Do you know what? The joke's evolved. It's undergone a slow process of improvement. You set him up, Dan, we'll knock him down between us.
13:38 Speaker 01 Bram Stoker would have been alive, Oscar Wilde would have been alive.
13:41 Speaker 02 Brilliant.
13:42 Speaker 01 Arthur Conan Doyle was alive, and Arthur Conan Doyle was one of the people who actively had a theory of who Jack the Ripper was.
13:51 Speaker 03 And actually Baker Street was one of the first to be open, wasn't it?
13:54 Speaker 02 That's brilliant.
13:55 Speaker 01 So that is, that is handy if you were going to be doing that. He had a theory that it was a woman, and it led to the Jill the Ripper theory.
14:04 Speaker 03 Oh, yeah.
14:05 Speaker 01 And quite a few famous names of the day who are not so famous now, like Madame Blavatsky, who was an occultist, was suggested as a, as a possibility.
14:15 Speaker 02 Tell you what, you, you need to be as clever as Sherlock Holmes, understanding some of that crazy tube map, don't you? Oh, it's so complicated.
14:22 Speaker 01 Back then it would have been really simple because it was basically one line.
14:25 Speaker 02 Yep. James, pull my nuts out of the fire, quick.
14:29 Speaker 03 No, no, no, I want to hear more.
14:33 Speaker 02 I think that's quite a good idea for some kind of show or something, is it's an underground carriage in 1890, and it's Bram Stoker, Charles Darwin, who else did you say? Conan Doyle?
14:44 Speaker 01 Conan Doyle, Oscar Wilde, I guess.
14:45 Speaker 02 Queen Victoria?
14:46 Speaker 01 Yeah.
14:47 Speaker 02 She's on there?
14:48 Speaker 03 She wouldn't have been on there.
14:49 Speaker 02 I guess not, but maybe it's.
14:51 Speaker 03 Like, how many of these toffs would have actually used it? I know, like, the first few times they brought, like, really important people to go on the underground, and I remember there was one MP who refused because he said he was, like, in his 70s, and at that age he wanted to spend as much time overground as possible.
15:06 Speaker 02 Very nice.
15:07 Speaker 01 That's nice. I tried to see whether Darwin had actually gone on it, and no one knows, but the suggestion is you can't say he definitely didn't, because it was such a novelty and such a new thing, that curiosity might have got the better of anyone to just at least experience it once.
15:21 Speaker 03 Did they have first class in those days?
15:22 Speaker 02 They did, yeah. They had first and they had third as well, actually.
15:25 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah.
15:26 Speaker 02 So that's a good pitch for, if anyone wants to write that sitcom with me.
15:29 Speaker 03 Has anyone ever gotten back in touch with you for any of your other 200,000 sitcoms that you've mentioned on this show?
15:36 Speaker 02 I think the important thing is to look forward. It's like, what matters is getting one commission, not having 200,000 failed ideas.
15:42 Speaker 03 The good thing is, like, when you get this one commission eventually, you have a lot of ideas for your second series.
15:47 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah, we're gonna have to move a few things around. Like, okay, it's not under a good carriage, we're in space, but it'll be fine.
15:54 Speaker 01 And everyone's got a Guinness World Record.
16:00 Speaker 04 Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.
16:14 Speaker 05 People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic, in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.
16:25 Speaker 04 And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone.
16:31 Speaker 06 One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.
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16:58 Speaker 01 All right, well, listen, why don't I move us on to the final section of our Little Fish show, which is every week we like to award custodianship to one of the facts from our long 12-year history of Fish to someone who is part of the highest tier friend of the podcast as part of Club Fish on Patreon. If you want to join that, by the way, patreon.com/clubfish. You get a bunch of fun things, and one of those things is one of our facts. And we'll send you a digital certificate to commemorate it, as well as a shout out here, and we're gonna do some now. So why don't we start with you, James?
17:32 Speaker 03 Okay, this fact is now under the custodianship of Kiara. Kiara, your fact is that William Morton, the father of anesthesia, first experimented on himself but kept falling asleep before he could describe the results.
17:49 Speaker 02 I wonder what like tiny little alterations he made going this time I won't fall asleep. Like, because it sounds like you did it in the morning.
17:55 Speaker 02 This time I'll make it not work. What do you do? How could you? Yeah.
18:00 Speaker 03 Yeah, the success is a failure, right?
18:03 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah, yeah. So almost the opposite of your sitcom situation.
18:07 Speaker 03 Okay, okay.
18:11 Speaker 02 Well, that's very cool. William Morton. Wonderful fact. Let's do another one. Andy? Yes, this one goes out to Gitweng. It's the fact that, I love this one, is that Chessington World of Adventures, which is one of Britain's great, great entertainment sites. Yeah. Ban animal onesies to stop the animals there from getting confused. Interesting.
18:34 Speaker 03 Wow.
18:35 Speaker 02 Because it's a, it's a huge theme park. They've got a zoo as well attached and lots of animals there. Yeah. And this was at the time when we did this fact, it was 2014. Onesies were a very big deal. Onesies were the rage.
18:46 Speaker 03 Do you know that Chessington World of Adventures is so old that Mary Somerville could have lived there?
18:54 Speaker 03 Beautiful, beautiful.
18:57 Speaker 02 I've never been to, to it.
18:59 Speaker 03 Me neither.
19:01 Speaker 02 We have to do a group trip.
19:03 Speaker 03 Where is it?
19:03 Speaker 02 Podcast recording.
19:04 Speaker 03 It's in south, isn't it? Is it in the south of London though?
19:06 Speaker 02 Yeah, like southwest.
19:07 Speaker 03 Yeah, so.
19:08 Speaker 02 It's a few stops further out from like Kingston.
19:11 Speaker 03 Like, I would never really go in that direction.
19:13 Speaker 02 No.
19:14 Speaker 03 Oh my goodness.
19:14 Speaker 02 Have you gone to the zoo and, and other stuff? Yeah, the zoo is a relatively minor bit of it. I mean, the, the most important thing is the amazing rides and the entertainment and just the all round good family day out. It's just a great place. I went there a lot. I went there a lot as a child.
19:27 Speaker 03 Have you ever been to Alton Towers?
19:28 Speaker 02 I've been once.
19:29 Speaker 03 Yeah.
19:29 Speaker 02 I loved it.
19:30 Speaker 03 It's built on an old ground where there was a massive bloodbath of a battle in like the 8th century or something.
19:36 Speaker 02 Really? Wow.
19:38 Speaker 03 Yeah.
19:38 Speaker 02 And still you can hear the screams to this day if you go there.
19:40 Speaker 03 Exactly, yeah.
19:44 Speaker 02 I went to Alton Towers and then I went to the restaurant where your food gets a roller coaster to you. Have you been, have you done that one?
19:49 Speaker 03 Yo Sushi.
19:53 Speaker 01 It's more of a lazy river.
19:54 Speaker 02 No, there's a, there's an amazing restaurant there. Have you been down?
19:57 Speaker 01 I haven't, no.
19:57 Speaker 02 Oh my god. It's right, you go there and you order a, it's a burger and chips normally. And you look up and there's this, the kitchens are up there, right up in the ceiling. And it comes out, your food comes out and it, then there's this crazy array of rails. And your food tray goes on a roller coaster and it loops the loop and it swirls around the room. And it eventually lands down at the thing and then you go and pick it up.
20:20 Speaker 01 Do you get to buy a picture of your food at the end when you're walking out?
20:24 Speaker 02 And it says, don't, don't get that one. Don't get, I don't look good. I don't look nice. It's amazing. Like it's genuinely so exciting.
20:30 Speaker 01 Okay.
20:31 Speaker 03 Yeah. Wow. Cool.
20:32 Speaker 02 As someone who likes transport infrastructure and lunch, it's the perfect place to go.
20:36 Speaker 03 You take all your business lunches there that you're eating.
20:40 Speaker 02 Right. So this sitcom, okay.
20:43 Speaker 01 All right. Uh, let's move on to another one. This is now a fact for Jared Rate. And that is if you got into an argument in 18th century Abyssinia, you could resolve it by blaming everything on the camel.
20:56 Speaker 02 It's scapegoating.
20:57 Speaker 03 Yeah, exactly that. Yeah.
20:58 Speaker 01 Yeah.
20:59 Speaker 03 And it was a way that everyone could get out with integrity intact. Cause like both sides, no one wants to back down, but you blame the camel.
21:07 Speaker 01 Right.
21:07 Speaker 03 Unfortunately, I don't think it ever ended well for the camel.
21:10 Speaker 01 Oh.
21:12 Speaker 03 I feel like it might've been oft, yeah.
21:14 Speaker 01 No.
21:14 Speaker 03 Uh, but it was just a way that making sure that no one had to hunt with you.
21:19 Speaker 02 Very nice.
21:19 Speaker 03 Lovely, lovely. I, I assume we made that joke at the time.
21:23 Speaker 01 It'd be quite fun to go back and see if we did.
21:27 Speaker 03 What episode was it?
21:28 Speaker 01 That is episode 36.
21:30 Speaker 03 Wow.
21:31 Speaker 01 Yeah.
21:32 Speaker 03 I think we'd already evolved past those kind of jokes by that stage.
21:36 Speaker 02 What?
21:37 Speaker 01 Um, it's a sort of modern day, the dog farted, right?
21:41 Speaker 03 Um, only if you and Andy got into a huge argument where there might be death because you're arguing over who farted. And you're like, no, no, it was the dog. And Andy goes, okay, yeah, fine. It was the dog then.
21:52 Speaker 01 Yeah.
21:53 Speaker 03 And then you kind of go your separate ways and no one gets injured.
21:56 Speaker 02 But we have to kill the dog?
21:57 Speaker 03 Yeah.
21:58 Speaker 01 Oh boy.
21:58 Speaker 03 Okay. Here is another one. This is now under the custodianship of Laura Luthu. And Laura, your fact is very simple. The ancient Greeks played with yo-yos.
22:12 Speaker 02 Beautiful fact.
22:13 Speaker 01 This was one of those facts where I saw it in the picture. So it was on pottery. This is old ancient Greek pottery.
22:21 Speaker 02 Crazy.
22:21 Speaker 01 With kids laying out a yo-yo. And I remember going, that can't be a yo-yo, surely? And then it is, and they had yo-yos. It just, as we're talking about with facts, sort of Jack the Ripper in the London Underground. The ancient Greeks played with yo-yos? Come on.
22:37 Speaker 02 Ancient geeks, did you say?
22:38 Speaker 01 I did accidentally say that.
22:39 Speaker 02 In the Valley of the Dorks. Good.
22:43 Speaker 03 I think, we don't know for sure that they were yo-yos in the modern sense that you could
22:48 Speaker 02 Walk the dog.
22:48 Speaker 03 Come up and down and walk the dog and do tricks. Like, it could have been just a stone on the end of a piece of string, right?
22:55 Speaker 02 Oh, I see. Like, do we have the technology? Because the technology to spin it down and make it stay down there for a bit, that feels like advanced tech.
23:03 Speaker 01 Yeah.
23:03 Speaker 02 Yeah, to me.
23:05 Speaker 01 No, it is, I agree.
23:07 Speaker 03 I think you need to know how to make a little loop on the end of your string, which feels tough.
23:12 Speaker 02 As I say, advanced tech.
23:14 Speaker 01 Yep.
23:17 Speaker 02 No, that's a beautiful fact. I really like that one. Here's another one. This goes out to Luisa Primo. It's that most honeybee hives in the USA live on flatbed trucks.
23:27 Speaker 03 Oh, yeah.
23:28 Speaker 02 Great fact.
23:29 Speaker 01 Transport and infrastructure and?
23:31 Speaker 03 Bees!
23:32 Speaker 01 Food.
23:32 Speaker 02 And food, sorry.
23:33 Speaker 01 All three. No wonder this is an Andy Murray fact.
23:35 Speaker 03 And also, do you know why they do it? It's so that they can pollinate almonds.
23:41 Speaker 02 Yes.
23:42 Speaker 03 Which I believe in the last episode of Little Fish had quite a prominent position.
23:46 Speaker 02 We busted a myth about almond extract being made of almonds.
23:50 Speaker 03 Yeah.
23:50 Speaker 02 It was mostly made of peaches. Yes, and this is about all the bees that are driven around. And I think, did we work out the cost? It costs one cent to hire one bee for one day or something? I think we did a bit of math about it at the time. Yeah, no, it's a crazy fact.
24:05 Speaker 03 Okay, here's another one. This one is now under the custodianship of Monty. Loved your work in North Africa, Monty. And your fact this week is that the Sacramento Police Department's got at least one call a week from people stuck in the world's largest corn maze.
24:23 Speaker 02 Amazing.
24:24 Speaker 01 That's so funny. I wonder if they eventually installed phones in there, emergency phones, because it was happening at such a rate.
24:32 Speaker 02 If you're lost in the corn maze, though, you might not.
24:34 Speaker 03 Yeah, what are you gonna say? What can you say? Well, I can see corn on my left, corn on my right, corn in front of me. We'll go backwards then.
24:42 Speaker 01 This also assumes you can find your way to the phone. I mean, the problem is that you're lost in the middle of the maze.
24:46 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah, but that's.
24:47 Speaker 01 Unless you've got a phone every 10 metres in this maze.
24:50 Speaker 03 There is a great thing, though, of course. Now we all have phones all the time.
24:54 Speaker 02 I prefer Dan's method of installing static infrastructure throughout the corn maze.
24:58 Speaker 01 You guys don't leave your phones at the entrance of a corn maze before going in for the real experience?
25:03 Speaker 02 It makes it, yeah, yeah, you're doing it properly.
25:05 Speaker 03 I didn't know you were doing it on hard mode.
25:08 Speaker 01 Real dog in it. Right, here is another one, and this one is going out to Natalia O'Keefe. And that is, in 1874, there was a plan to transport dead bodies from all over Europe to Mount Vesuvius and dump them in. So the, like, nature's crematorium, right? It's a...
25:28 Speaker 02 Was that it?
25:29 Speaker 01 It was basically.
25:30 Speaker 03 I think that was it. And I think they were gonna make, like, a rail track that went all the way to the top or something.
25:36 Speaker 02 Wow. I think it never happened.
25:37 Speaker 03 No. They all went to Wettner, didn't they?
25:41 Speaker 02 That's right, yeah, yeah. Eighteen seventy-four. Those services, it was a diversion, yeah.
25:46 Speaker 01 In theory, Jack the Ripper could have got on that train as well. If he needed. All right, all right, let's get a, let's get one more. Andy?
25:53 Speaker 02 The last one of today goes out to Charlie, and it's the fact that in 2010, an abandoned water treatment plant in Baltimore was found to be home to 107 million spiders.
26:06 Speaker 03 Oh, my god.
26:07 Speaker 02 I know. Because a water treatment plant sounds quite big, doesn't it? You can probably fit a lot of spiders in there. It was 35,176 per cubic metre, and that really is a lot of spiders.
26:19 Speaker 03 I feel like they've recently found the most spiders in one place. I might have even mentioned it on here.
26:23 Speaker 02 Really?
26:24 Speaker 03 It's on a cave between maybe Greece and Macedonia or somewhere, like, somewhere in Europe.
26:29 Speaker 02 Wow.
26:30 Speaker 03 And in order to go through the whole cave, you go through this area of spiders that is just...
26:35 Speaker 02 Oh.
26:36 Speaker 03 It's just webs, and they're everywhere. You would think, if you've got that many spiders, they must be eating something.
26:42 Speaker 02 Yes.
26:43 Speaker 03 So there must be even more flies.
26:46 Speaker 02 Yes. What a good point.
26:47 Speaker 01 Yes, food source must, unless they're cannibalistic.
26:50 Speaker 02 Spiders eat each other, don't they?
26:51 Speaker 03 They can do.
26:52 Speaker 02 Have you guys heard of the book Web?
26:55 Speaker 01 Charlotte's?
26:55 Speaker 02 No. It's by John Wyndham, it's one of his last books.
26:58 Speaker 03 Oh.
26:59 Speaker 02 Day of the Triffids. Day of the Triffids author, and basically, they go, they're trying to set up this new civilization on a very, very remote island in the Pacific. And they get there, and it's really weird, there's nothing living there. And it turns out that basically, due to something, spiders have learned how to communicate with each other, and they've teamed up together, rather than just being selfish and eating each other.
27:18 Speaker 01 Yeah.
27:18 Speaker 02 And basically, it turns out that when spiders work together, they can defeat humans. And it's such a great book.
27:23 Speaker 03 I love John Wyndham's stuff, it's like, uh, due to something, all of the plants can kill you. Or, due to something, now people in the future can see what's happening here.
27:33 Speaker 02 Yeah.
27:33 Speaker 03 And he does explain it, but the explanation is never that important.
27:36 Speaker 02 No, absolutely, it's much more, let's see how this plays out.
27:39 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah. He sounds great, I need to read him.
27:42 Speaker 02 Oh man, Day of the Triffids, everyone goes blind and plants can suddenly kill you.
27:46 Speaker 01 Yeah.
27:46 Speaker 02 And walk.
27:47 Speaker 03 And except one guy, who, um, had bandages over his eyes when everyone else went blind.
27:53 Speaker 02 Yeah.
27:53 Speaker 03 And so he wakes up and then, oh.
27:55 Speaker 02 It's very much like 28 Days Later, where he wakes up in hospital.
27:58 Speaker 01 Yeah, sounds great.
27:59 Speaker 03 Do you wanna hear a 28 Days Later fact that I thought of today? So, if, uh, you have a zombie, and every day, that zombie can bite one other person, and they become a zombie.
28:12 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah.
28:12 Speaker 03 And then, that zombie, every day, can bite another one. 28 days later, you wouldn't even notice. It'd be like, less than 3% of people would be zombies. Five days after that, everyone in the world would be zombies.
28:25 Speaker 01 Wow.
28:26 Speaker 03 Because it just ramps right up.
28:28 Speaker 01 Yeah.
28:28 Speaker 03 Like, the final five days goes from 3% to 100%.
28:33 Speaker 01 Yeah.
28:33 Speaker 02 Right.
28:34 Speaker 01 I, um, I once interviewed Erica McAllister, who's been a guest multiple times on our show, works at the N H M, and flies, and I interviewed her for my book about zombies, because she has a theory that zombies couldn't exist because of flies. So, let's say they do exist, we would not have noticed, because the rate that they would have been eaten, their rotten flesh, and make them collapse. Because there's nothing to hold them together would be so quick and flies would meet the demand of all the rotting flesh that we just wouldn't know if zombies were around. So flies are saving us from zombies.
29:08 Speaker 03 Do you reckon when John Wyndham used to write his novels and he would be like, and then the plants take over and that, and then he suddenly thinks, wait a minute, there's no one to water them. They'll probably, and then he just goes, oh no, forget about that.
29:24 Speaker 01 No book readings at the Royal Botanical Society.
29:29 Speaker 03 But I reckon like when you do those, you must constantly come up with like, what about this? Oh, I better.
29:34 Speaker 01 You've got to push past it. I think a lot of sci-fi, the Martian relied on there being a storm on Mars that would take out that. That's the only thing that's not factually accurate to do in the book. Yeah. But sometimes you just gotta let it go.
29:46 Speaker 02 Because like what eats plants? Cows. So you end up with just build the world with a lot of cows. But that's a different kind of horrifying sci-fi.
29:52 Speaker 03 Because they are scary cows.
29:54 Speaker 02 You bet.
29:55 Speaker 03 Can you imagine that? Oh my God, monster cows.
29:57 Speaker 02 Millions of cows everywhere.
29:58 Speaker 03 Sorry, I've just got to go. I've got an idea for a sitcom.
30:03 Speaker 02 I'm off to Walton Towers later, James, if you want to come.
30:08 Speaker 01 All right, listen, we need to wrap up. Congratulations to the latest custodians of our fish facts. That is Charlie, Natalia, Monty, Louisa, Laura Lufu, Jared, Gitwang, Kiara. You are all now custodians of these facts. And if you're listening and you want one yourself, all you need to do is go to patreon.com slash clubfish, join the highest tier of clubfish, which is friend of the podcast. And that's what you'll be getting one day, a shout out on the show. But before that, a digital certificate acknowledging your fact. All right, we are going to be back again later this week with a proper episode of No Such Thing As A Fish and then back again next week with more Little Fish on another Monday. We'll see you then. That's all from us for now. Goodbye.
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