Pod Insights No Such Thing As A Fish Little Fish: It's Not Shaped Like A Hobnob About this episode Dan, James and Andy discuss YOUR facts, including Ben Nevis, Mount Everest and Canadian toenails. We also explain why none of us has a Guinness World Record, and meet eight new Custodians of Fish Facts.
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Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 Making plans with asthma can be awful. It always goes from "that sounds fun" to "in this weather, what if my asthma acts up?" I got tired of saying no, so my doctor suggested Dupixent. I'm Rachel and I'm sponsored by Regeneron in Santa Fe to share my story with real patients like me.
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0:53 Speaker 00 Do more with less asthma. Ask your asthma specialist about Dupixent by name. Visit dupixent.com or call 1-844-DUPIXENT.
1:13 Speaker 02 Hi, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Little Fish. This is the show where we do away with our facts, the ones that we've spent time looking for, and we look at your facts, your brilliant, excellent, amazing facts that you send to us every week at [email protected] . We will read through them, we'll chat about them, we'll give you a little bit of extra information that we found ourselves, and then we will go into our custodianship section where we hand out some facts to people who are in our Friend of the Podcast here on Patreon. Anyway, without further ado, let's get into the facts. Dan, give us a fact.
1:51 Speaker 03 Okay, this has been sent in by Fiona McDonald, and she says, "I found out that cheese meltability is measured using a scale called the Schreiber scale."
2:04 Speaker 04 Lovely.
2:05 Speaker 02 Fantastic.
2:06 Speaker 03 I'll be honest, I haven't read the article in depth, but thought it sounded interesting. So thank you Fiona. Yeah, so this is, there was a company that was founded in 1945, which came to be known as Schreiber Foods. And it was founded by a man called L D Schreiber in partnership with his friend Merlin.
2:27 Speaker 02 And. Can I just first think, a German, are they?
2:30 Speaker 03 No, no, they're North American, I believe.
2:33 Speaker 02 I guess interesting to give your company a German name in 1945.
2:38 Speaker 03 Yeah, well, they're massive, by the way.
2:41 Speaker 02 Are they?
2:42 Speaker 03 It's, yeah.
2:42 Speaker 04 Big cheeses.
2:43 Speaker 03 Big cheeses. They provide the cheese slices that are used on 17 of the top 20 hamburger chains in the, in America.
2:52 Speaker 04 Wow.
2:52 Speaker 03 So it's like they are massive, $7 billion in sales every year. They developed the Schreiber meltability test to monitor how cheese handles heats.
3:03 Speaker 04 Didn't we have a live stage cheese eating competition with each other?
3:06 Speaker 02 We did.
3:07 Speaker 04 For the record for the most cheese slices eaten in something like a minute.
3:11 Speaker 03 I set up, while we were on tour, a chance for us to get a Guinness World Record. And Craig Glenday, editor in chief, came onto stage, pre-printed a certificate to, in case we managed it. And the four of us tried to eat as many slices. Now, it was an impossible task, I would argue. I don't think even the greatest cheese eater could manage it.
3:34 Speaker 02 No, no, that, that, like, the greatest cheese eater can manage it. That's the thing about the records.
3:39 Speaker 03 This isn't a record. No one has ever set it. We were gonna be.
3:43 Speaker 04 We were so shit that we didn't even get the record that has never been set before.
3:46 Speaker 03 Yeah, because what a lot of people might not realise about the Guinness World Records is that you can't just like be, I'm the first person to do this and this is where I got up to.
3:55 Speaker 04 Yeah.
3:55 Speaker 03 They set a bar of where the entry point for the record is, and I think it was 10 slices.
4:00 Speaker 02 Wait a minute, I was the record holder on stage, how was, right? I got like.
4:05 Speaker 03 Yeah.
4:05 Speaker 02 Three or four slices. So that means I am a world record holder. I'm just not a Guinness World Record holder.
4:11 Speaker 03 Yes, we need to make you a digital certificate.
4:17 Speaker 02 Who on earth would want a digital certificate? That's all I wanna know. We might come to that later. Um, is it true that Craig then had to destroy the certificate?
4:28 Speaker 03 In theory, that's what he should have done.
4:30 Speaker 04 He ate it.
4:31 Speaker 03 Yes.
4:32 Speaker 04 And he ate it in record time, may I say.
4:35 Speaker 03 But he unfortunately didn't take off the plastic and so that caused huge, huge issues. No, I, old sneaky Schreiber here, I've got it in my house.
4:44 Speaker 02 Have you really?
4:45 Speaker 04 Wow, an illegal.
4:46 Speaker 03 An illegal Guinness World Record.
4:48 Speaker 04 As you say this, an alarm's gone off in Guinness HQ and a SWAT team has been dispatched to tear the house down if you have to.
4:54 Speaker 02 And the worst, the worst thing is that the world's best SWAT team.
4:59 Speaker 02 Um, Dan.
5:01 Speaker 03 Yeah.
5:01 Speaker 02 When he printed that certificate off, there was no name written on it. Uh, because he didn't know which of us was going to break the record.
5:09 Speaker 03 Yeah.
5:09 Speaker 02 Have you written your own name in there?
5:13 Speaker 03 No, I think it said no such thing as a fish. What I did do in pen was add where it said they broke the record. I added in, did not.
5:20 Speaker 04 Very honest.
5:21 Speaker 02 Um, okay, let's do another fact. Andy, what have you got for us?
5:24 Speaker 04 I've got a fact from Alex Rogers.
5:26 Speaker 02 Okay.
5:27 Speaker 04 Which is that Ben Nevis is the highest point in the British Isles, but it's only the third highest Ben Nevis.
5:35 Speaker 02 Oh, that's great.
5:38 Speaker 03 That's lovely.
5:39 Speaker 04 There are lots of other places around the world, at least two, that have been named after Ben Nevis and they're higher.
5:44 Speaker 02 Where are they?
5:45 Speaker 03 Australia?
5:46 Speaker 04 Oh, you're so close. You're about, I want to say so close to Australia.
5:50 Speaker 03 New Zealand.
5:51 Speaker 04 Several hour flight away. Yes, New Zealand.
5:53 Speaker 03 Right.
5:53 Speaker 04 Um, there's one that's 16, 19 metres, there's one that's over 2,000 metres and Ben Nevis original edition is only 1345.
6:02 Speaker 02 Wow, I've climbed Ben Nevis. You guys climbed Ben Nevis?
6:06 Speaker 03 No.
6:06 Speaker 02 It was on my honeymoon and me and my wife climbed it and we got a guide who took us up there, even though there's only one path and you can't really get lost.
6:17 Speaker 03 Still, still follow me.
6:19 Speaker 04 Is he holding the umbrella all the way up?
6:23 Speaker 02 I don't really, I remember going online and some people saying, should we get a guide or not? And then some people replying, yes, you should get a guide. But now I think back at it, maybe it was the guides who were writing those replies. But no, he was very good, this person, and gave us some energy bars to eat on the way up and stuff like that. And then took our photo when we got to the top.
6:43 Speaker 04 I've got to say, James, you could have taken a selfie stick and an energy bar yourself. But I'm glad there are guides. And actually, people do get into difficulties. There are stories every single year of people going up basically in flip flops. And then it turns out, oh, the weather's turned really bad on this actually quite high mountain.
7:02 Speaker 02 Yeah.
7:03 Speaker 03 Yes.
7:03 Speaker 04 Yeah. Well, James, did you see the piano?
7:09 Speaker 02 No, I didn't see a piano, but I have, did, people have brought them up, have they?
7:14 Speaker 04 People have brought them up. Basically, in 2006, there were some litter pickers on Ben Nevis and they found a grand piano. They were going through a pile of litter.
7:22 Speaker 02 You can imagine they had one of those long plastic sticks with a claw on the end going, I can't get a good grip on it.
7:29 Speaker 04 Yeah, basically, they found a massive grand piano 200 metres from the summit. No one knows how it got there. There was, there was someone who carried a piano up for charity in 1980, but he took his down again. So it's really baffling. And there was a biscuit wrapper tucked inside, but it said best before 1986, but that doesn't really tell you very much.
7:48 Speaker 03 It's a lovely idea, by the way, of having an achievable mountain that has the name of a very hard, like, you know, if there was a lesser Mount Everest that was really achievable, that you could go, yeah, I've climbed Mount Everest.
7:59 Speaker 02 That was like, it was like the time when I entered the Boston Marathon, do you remember? And I was going to run the Boston Marathon, but it was just before Covid and then it got cancelled. But I did the one in Boston in Lincolnshire. Because that is the, it's the easiest marathon in the UK because Lincolnshire's so flat.
8:18 Speaker 04 Oh, very nice.
8:20 Speaker 02 Okay, here is a fact from Lindsay Whelan. And Lindsay says that the length of the inch is based on the millimetre.
8:30 Speaker 02 What?
8:31 Speaker 04 What?
8:32 Speaker 02 But surely, metric units are much newer than imperial units.
8:37 Speaker 04 Yeah, an inch is 25.4 millimetres or something.
8:40 Speaker 02 Correct.
8:41 Speaker 04 Are you saying that they took the millimetre and they said, well, let's have 25.4 of these?
8:46 Speaker 02 And that's exactly what I'm saying.
8:47 Speaker 04 No.
8:48 Speaker 02 It was the 1959 International Yard and Pound Agreement. And basically, all the different countries had different versions of the inch. And they all got together in 1959 and said, look, guys, we're going to have to standardise this. The US inch was 25.4000508 millimetres, while the UK inch was 25.399977 millimetres. So if you had, if you measured something that was two and a bit miles long, the difference would be about a centimetre.
9:24 Speaker 04 So that could be very important.
9:26 Speaker 02 It's hard to imagine when, but like, let's say you're building a tunnel from New York to London.
9:33 Speaker 04 Yeah.
9:34 Speaker 02 And then the difference could be quite.
9:37 Speaker 04 Stop. And you think, well, we've measured it, we've dug the distance, we've said we should, we're not, we're, it sounds like there might be something on one centimetre away through that soil, but we're going to go home now. We're not going to.
9:49 Speaker 02 You wouldn't go home, you'd just keep digging. And eventually you'd get there and you'd end up with two tunnels.
9:54 Speaker 04 Yeah.
9:55 Speaker 02 Um, okay, Dan, let's have another fact from you.
9:58 Speaker 03 Yes, well, actually, I'm taking us back into the mountains. Uh, this is from Hayden Freeman, who says, as most people know, New Zealanders, Sir Edmund Hillary was the first person to knock the bugger off and climb Mount Everest. But what few people will know is that fellow Kiwi Mark Inglis was the first person to climb Mount Everest as a double amputee.
10:17 Speaker 02 Cool.
10:18 Speaker 03 Yeah. This is, uh, this is someone who's quite a notable mountaineer, has written books and has been the subject of documentaries and so on. It's quite crazy. When he was climbing Everest, he actually broke one of the carbon fibre prosthetic legs in half.
10:37 Speaker 03 And so they had to temporarily fix it with duct tape while a spare was brought up from base camp to meet him so that he could swap it in.
10:45 Speaker 02 Gosh.
10:46 Speaker 03 Pretty wild. So New Zealanders have made quite an impact.
10:50 Speaker 04 Yeah. Well, they've had so much practice on the high Ben Nevis.
10:53 Speaker 02 I was gonna say, when Edmund Hillary climbed Mount Everest, has anyone checked that he didn't actually climb a mountain called Mount Everest in New Zealand?
11:04 Speaker 03 I don't think that's been checked. That's a really good.
11:08 Speaker 04 That's a really good point. Oh dear.
11:12 Speaker 02 Andy, let's have another.
11:13 Speaker 04 Yes. Uh, this is a fact from Alastair Boden, and we're staying in the mountains.
11:22 Speaker 04 I don't think we've ever covered this. It's a, it's a fact set on Mount Athos.
11:27 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah.
11:28 Speaker 04 Uh, which is in Greece.
11:29 Speaker 02 Yeah.
11:30 Speaker 04 Uh, and it's that there's an 82-year-old Greek monk, Michaelo Tolatos, who reportedly never saw a woman in his entire life because he was born to a woman. And very sadly, his mother died when he was just a few hours old, and he didn't have any family, so he was taken to Mount Athos. This monastery, which is in Greece, it's quite remote, and there are no women allowed. And he lived 82 years. Uh, he died in 1938, I think, and, uh, the details are quite scant, but it appears that he lived there his whole life and he just never saw a woman.
12:04 Speaker 02 Yeah.
12:04 Speaker 04 Also, he allegedly, he never saw a car, a plane, or a film, right?
12:08 Speaker 02 Well, how did he not see a plane? They literally, Thessaloniki Airport is no more than 20 miles away from Mount Athos.
12:15 Speaker 04 But maybe, he died in 1938, so maybe the last few years of his life, he was indoors, and you know.
12:21 Speaker 02 Fair enough. Well, in fairness, he didn't, he didn't see an iPad either, like.
12:25 Speaker 04 He was born in 1856, so the first 40-odd years of his life not seeing a plane was an absolute cinch. Or a car.
12:31 Speaker 03 Yeah.
12:32 Speaker 04 Or a film.
12:33 Speaker 03 I wouldn't include that on the list, the plane one, given that it hadn't existed for that long.
12:37 Speaker 02 Women, on the other hand, had existed for centuries before that.
12:39 Speaker 04 Yeah. Yeah.
12:40 Speaker 02 Um, okay, here's a really good one. So this is from Ewan Hopper. Ewan wrote to us about the 1952 Texas gubernatorial election.
12:51 Speaker 02 Which sounds unpromising, but the person who won that election was called Alan Shivers. And Alan ran for both the Democratic and the Republican Parties in the same election. And the reason was that the Republicans knew that he was going to win, so there's no point putting anyone up against him. But they wanted to encourage people to vote for their candidate Dwight Eisenhower as the president. And they thought that people might not go for a Democrat and a Republican. They might want to stay on party lines. So if they made Shivers a Republican as well, then they might just tick Republican Shivers, Republican Eisenhower.
13:34 Speaker 04 Are they allowed to do that?
13:37 Speaker 02 Well, they did it. So I guess so. And Shivers got 1.8 million votes in total. 1.3 million of them came to him as a Democrat and just under 500,000 came to him as a Republican. And he also got 664 votes as a no-party candidate. And that's where people wrote in about who they wanted to win, but didn't put the party in there.
14:04 Speaker 04 Right. Popular guy.
14:07 Speaker 02 Yeah. So yeah, 1.8 million votes. No preference got 36,672 votes. So 1.95% got no.
14:17 Speaker 04 That's not bad.
14:18 Speaker 02 It is. But the thing is with no preference, if you've got two options and they're exactly the same, to me, no preference means I like them both equally. It doesn't mean I dislike them both equally.
14:29 Speaker 04 That's a good point. If it's Alan Shivers against Alan Shivers and you're saying, I don't have a preference. Yeah, no one's got a preference, mate. They're all Alan Shivers.
14:38 Speaker 02 That should have been 100% no preference, shouldn't it? But Texas law later removed that option. So now you don't have a chance to do no preference anymore.
14:47 Speaker 04 I think that's sensible. That's very funny.
14:49 Speaker 02 Alan Shivers, very popular, massive racist.
14:54 Speaker 02 Said that segregation of black and white people was God's will and no law could supersede it. And he also said that being a communist should be punishable by death and that being a communist was worse than murder.
15:06 Speaker 04 Right.
15:08 Speaker 03 I always enjoy on Fish where we have a really funny, lighthearted chat about someone and then the person who's got the information says, anyway, massive racist.
15:20 Speaker 05 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.
15:34 Speaker 06 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.
15:45 Speaker 05 And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone. One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies. So join us and hear their stories and more, because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast, on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today.
16:19 Speaker 04 Can I move us north of the border to Canada for another fact?
16:22 Speaker 02 Yes, please.
16:22 Speaker 04 This is from Julie Pivers. And Julie writes, "Canadian scientists are currently collecting people's toenails."
16:31 Speaker 04 Thousands of them as well, thousands and thousands of sets of toenails the Canadian scientists want.
16:36 Speaker 02 For?
16:38 Speaker 04 For...
16:40 Speaker 02 Science.
16:41 Speaker 04 For science. They're going to be melting them down, apparently. That's really cool. Basically, 20% of Canadians live in homes which have slightly unsafe levels of radon.
16:54 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah.
16:55 Speaker 04 Which is a gas, it can cause cancer, and it occurs naturally as well. It's basically if you live in places which have uranium in the soil or the rocks, and it can break down. Normally, it's fine if you live out in the open, but most people don't live out in the open. Most people live in homes, and if it's in an enclosed space in a house, it can cause some damage.
17:12 Speaker 02 It's the same reason as why radiation levels are higher in coal more than anywhere else in the UK.
17:17 Speaker 04 Exactly, exactly. And there's a doctor called Aaron Gudazi who's looking into this, trying to find the causes of lung cancer in high radon environments, because it can cause lung cancer, which is very obviously... Very harmful and you need toenails because they're an archive of past exposure to radon. Your body takes in radon, it turns it into a kind of lead and then it just sort of shoves it into the slowly shedding tissues. So we're talking skin and hair and fingernails and toenails. And about 10,000 Canadians, I believe, are being recruited to test their homes for radon and then send in their clippings.
17:51 Speaker 02 Wow.
17:51 Speaker 04 Which is good.
17:52 Speaker 02 Do you know, I read this the other day, do you know what percentage of rocks contain uranium on earth?
17:58 Speaker 04 Oh, is it? It's either gonna be all of them or none of them. Do you mean percentage per rock or how many rocks globally?
18:06 Speaker 02 Okay, well, interestingly, the percentage per rock is almost zero. And the percentage of rocks globally is almost 100%. So Andy was basically right on both of his two guesses. But yeah, because uranium is basically inside the earth, almost every single rock that you pick. If you pick up a stone on the side of the road, it's probably got a tiny, tiny, tiny trace of uranium in it.
18:29 Speaker 04 Good lord.
18:30 Speaker 02 Isn't that amazing? I didn't know that.
18:31 Speaker 04 That is really amazing. Yeah, yeah. If you live in Devon or Cornwall, you can put a detector in your home, which is about the size of a biscuit and test it. That's fun.
18:40 Speaker 02 Hmm.
18:40 Speaker 04 Yeah.
18:41 Speaker 02 I would make it a size and shape of something that you don't eat.
18:45 Speaker 04 It's not shaped like a hobnob, I believe.
18:50 Speaker 02 It's got chocolate on one side.
18:54 Speaker 02 Okay, well, that is enough of your facts. Absolutely brilliant, as every week. Thank you so much to everyone who sent those in. And if you have a fact yourself, then do send it to podcast at qi.com. But we have not come to the end of this week's show because before we do that, we have to give out some facts. If you become a member of our Patreon at the Friend of the Podcast here, then you will immediately be assigned a fact. You will slightly less immediately be sent a certificate and you might be even less immediately than that mentioned on the show. But we will get round to you all and who is the first person we're getting round to today? Andy.
19:34 Speaker 04 This one goes out to Kate Armstrong. Congratulations, Kate. Welcome to Friend of the Podcast here. It's that Alexander the Great banned beards in battle to combat beard pulling. Which is apparently the scourge of the Macedonian.
19:50 Speaker 04 I wouldn't have thought it was a major problem, but-
19:52 Speaker 02 No, because you think once someone gets close enough to pull your beard, if you have a sword, you might have a way to stop them. Just cut off your beard.
20:01 Speaker 04 Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, but that was, uh, that was his innovation. And look, the guy was the terror of three continents or whatever, so I'm not going to gainsay him. Well done, Alexander.
20:13 Speaker 02 Yeah, at the age of 30, he had no more worlds to conquer.
20:16 Speaker 04 Exactly, exactly. Um, so he probably, he knew what he was doing with the beard stuff.
20:22 Speaker 02 Dan, what have you got for us?
20:24 Speaker 03 Uh, this is a fact for Beau. Congratulations, Beau. This is a fact of mine, which is that psychopaths don't experience contagious yawning like the rest of us.
20:36 Speaker 04 See, I'm now, I am now yawning.
20:38 Speaker 03 Well, James just yawned. I think it was a fake yawn to see we're psychopaths.
20:42 Speaker 02 It started off, I did, I thought I'll do a fake one for comedic purposes, not realising that this is a podcast medium and people won't be able to see that. But actually halfway through it turned into a real one.
20:54 Speaker 03 Oh, well, there we go.
20:55 Speaker 04 Fake it till you make it.
20:56 Speaker 03 Very nice.
20:57 Speaker 04 Um, yeah, I experienced a lot of contagious yawning. In fact, I experienced yawning contagiously so much that I think I'm especially unusually empathetic.
21:06 Speaker 02 Yeah, or just very tired.
21:08 Speaker 04 Yeah.
21:11 Speaker 02 It has happened a lot more since you had children, I have to say.
21:14 Speaker 04 Yeah, that's true. Contagious napping, it turns out, is also a real thing in meetings.
21:21 Speaker 03 And contagious meltdowns, apparently.
21:23 Speaker 02 Shut up, Dan, shut up.
21:26 Speaker 03 Uh, I, I can't quite remember where we got that fact from. It was either John Ronson, who had written the psychopath test, or it was Kevin, a professor called Kevin.
21:38 Speaker 04 Sounds legit.
21:39 Speaker 03 Yes, and he wrote a book on psychopaths. And I once had dinner with Kevin, um, along with Terry Jones of Monty Python. What a table. And, uh, yeah, and he told me that he was working with Andy McNabb. To train the England football squad to not change their decision on where they were kicking a penalty goal right at the last second. They were brought in as psychologists to say, make your decision and stick to it. Because apparently that was a problem within the squad.
22:10 Speaker 04 I'm sorry, Dan. Professor Kevin is working with Andy McNab
22:16 Speaker 03 Yes.
22:16 Speaker 04 Of the SAS.
22:18 Speaker 03 Thank you, yes.
22:18 Speaker 04 To help the England football squad not change a decision on a penalty.
22:23 Speaker 03 Yes.
22:24 Speaker 02 And it's worked. Like, when was the last time we lost a penalty shootout? It's a long time ago. You know when people say to you, like, what's your ideal dinner party?
22:32 Speaker 03 Yeah.
22:32 Speaker 02 I always say, Dan Schreiber, Terry Jones from Monty Python, and Professor Kevin.
22:40 Speaker 02 They're my three.
22:42 Speaker 02 But not McNab.
22:44 Speaker 04 Oh dear, James. He's not going to be happy. He's going to be bursting in through the windows halfway through the starters.
22:49 Speaker 03 Well, he's got so many annoying things he needs to happen. He needs the room to be lit black where he's sitting so you can't see his face. He needs that vocoder thing so that he talks in a different voice. He's a nightmare to have over at dinner. Interestingly, they didn't get to find out that World Cup, whether or not it worked, because it never went to penalty shootouts.
23:09 Speaker 04 England lost, didn't they? Bravo 2-0.
23:11 Speaker 02 Thank you.
23:13 Speaker 04 Thank you. That's the name of Andy McNab's book.
23:15 Speaker 03 Yes, nice. And it's Kevin Dutton. It's just come back to me. Kevin Dutton.
23:19 Speaker 02 Kevin Dutton. Okay, here is a fact that is now in the possession of Keith Baxter. Keith, your fact is that The Big Bang was quieter than a Motorhead concert. Interestingly, Andy, you spelt Motorhead without the umlaut.
23:35 Speaker 04 That's not intentional, and I'm very sorry. We will have to get that certificate corrected, Kevin. Or Keith, or Keith for that matter. We'll have to get... Keith, I know your name. I just spelt Motorhead wrong. Oh no, this is because it's all based off my ancient record-keeping and sometimes...
23:54 Speaker 02 And in fairness, Andy, like, your record-keeping, like, we use this spreadsheet in order to check that we haven't done facts before. And it would be correct to spell that without the umlaut, I think, because I'm never going to... Search Motorhead with an O.
24:06 Speaker 03 Oh, yes.
24:08 Speaker 04 Good point. So wait, the Big Bang was quieter than a Motorhead concert?
24:11 Speaker 02 Yeah, Motorhead, 126 decibels. And the Big Bang, apparently, 120 decibels, according to people who have studied the background radiation of the universe.
24:21 Speaker 03 It's insane that we, we know that or think we know that.
24:24 Speaker 02 Yeah. Let's go on to our next fact. So whose turn is it?
24:29 Speaker 04 It's mine. Uh, this one goes out to George Wade, uh, and it's a great one, is that Pixar accidentally deleted Toy Story 2 halfway through making it.
24:39 Speaker 02 Fantastic.
24:40 Speaker 03 This was an Alex Bell fact.
24:41 Speaker 04 Yes. Basically, they deleted it. The only thing that remained was one person who'd gone on maternity leave. And she, she had a computer at home that was kind of separated from the rest of the system. And so I think they basically drove the computer in under extreme caution.
24:58 Speaker 03 Hmm.
24:59 Speaker 04 Like, just, just strapped it in the back of a car or whatever, and, and coddled it until it got in, because that had almost everything on it.
25:05 Speaker 03 So yeah, so she had an early saved version.
25:07 Speaker 02 Yeah.
25:08 Speaker 04 Um.
25:08 Speaker 02 You wouldn't be able to do that these days, obviously. Getting in touch with people on maternity leave is very much a no-no.
25:16 Speaker 03 Toy Story 5 has ground to a halt for the next nine months.
25:21 Speaker 02 Uh, Dan, let's go on to the next one.
25:23 Speaker 03 Yeah, well, we're moving on to episode 24. So that was, that was episode 23 to all the custodians of the last four facts. And, uh, this one is for Ronnie. You are now the custodian of the fact that when he was bored, President Calvin Coolidge would ring a bell to summon bodyguards and then hide under the Oval Office desk. Was Coolidge the person who also, oh God, there were so many eccentric presidents, uh, that did very odd things in the White House, like the, the shower head? Was that Coolidge or was that someone else?
25:53 Speaker 02 I think that was LBJ, was it?
25:54 Speaker 03 Oh, it was LBJ, it was, that's right.
25:56 Speaker 02 He had a shower head directed at his genital area.
26:00 Speaker 03 Yes.
26:01 Speaker 04 Yeah.
26:01 Speaker 02 Um.
26:02 Speaker 04 Coolidge is the one who never said anything. He was very, very much the opposite of the, the current incumbent. Uh, he, he just never, he just barely said three words. You know, there was, there's that story that someone went to dinner with him, sort of flirtatious young woman, who said, oh, President Coolidge, I, I've, I've made a bet with my friends that I could get you to say just three words tonight. And he just said to her, you lose. And then said nothing for the rest of the evening.
26:26 Speaker 02 Very good. Okay, the next fact comes from someone whose name could be made up of two US presidents, Andrew Jackson and Jimmy Carter, because it's Andrew Carter. And your fact is that until 2011, the sun was only, in theory, a sphere. Dan, this is yours.
26:46 Speaker 03 Yeah, I love this about science, whereas they knew it was a sphere because that, by all indications, is what it was. However, until two probes were sent around to either side of it, twin probes, they couldn't officially confirm that it was a sphere. And that's what this did. They said, it's confirmed. We've, we've, we've seen it. We've actually seen it from the other side with two different probes. So I just love that about science.
27:11 Speaker 04 I'll do one. This goes out to Erin Eldridge. Congratulations, Erin. Your fact is that some birds' nests contain over 100 rooms and weigh up to 1,000 kilos and cause trees to collapse.
27:25 Speaker 02 Rubbish.
27:26 Speaker 04 It's true. 100 rooms. This is a bird called the sociable weaver, and it basically has these ginormous nests.
27:35 Speaker 02 Well, it needs them. It's so sociable.
27:37 Speaker 04 Yeah.
27:38 Speaker 02 These are for parties.
27:39 Speaker 04 It's like Dancehouse, the description of this bird's nest.
27:43 Speaker 02 How many kids does it have in there?
27:47 Speaker 04 Uh, yeah, but it's very cool. I think, I think I've seen pictures of them where they're absolutely ginormous and they're just a permanent sort of palace.
27:55 Speaker 02 Amazing. And Dan, last one for the day.
27:58 Speaker 03 The last one goes to Rohan Singh, and this is a James Harkin fact. It is the worst baseball team in South Korea has replaced its supporters with robots.
28:08 Speaker 02 Brilliant.
28:09 Speaker 03 Yeah, the Hanwha Eagles. They lost 400 games in the last five years, and that's as of recording from 2015, I believe. And they are nicknamed the Hanwha Chickens. So they've put up screens and you can put up your photo on the screen and you can do things like Mexican waves and chants along with it as you're watching the match. But yeah, Hark, do you remember more on this?
28:32 Speaker 02 No, I don't remember anything about them. And I thought since we're doing this on Zoom, I can quickly check and see if they've won any games recently.
28:38 Speaker 03 Yes.
28:39 Speaker 02 Uh, and in 2025, they had a record of played 144, won 83. So actually, yeah, they've improved quite a lot, I would say.
28:54 Speaker 03 Oh, well, there we go.
28:55 Speaker 02 So good old Hanwha Eagles.
28:58 Speaker 04 Yeah.
29:00 Speaker 02 Anyway, so that is the end of the show. Thank you so much to everyone who sent a fact in. Thank you especially to Rohan, Erin, Andrew, Ronnie, George, Keith, Beau and Kate, who are new custodians of facts in our friend of the podcast here. And if you would like to do that yourself, go to patreon.com slash no such things are fish and you will find details of how to join our many tiers. We have more tiers than a cinema at the end of Toy Story 2.
29:34 Speaker 04 Lovely.
29:34 Speaker 02 Does that work? I haven't seen it. But you can find everything on there and more. And if you'd like to hear more from us, then come back on Friday when we will have a regular episode of No Such Things Are Fish. In the meantime, it's goodbye from me, it's goodbye from Andy.
29:49 Speaker 04 Bye.
29:49 Speaker 02 And it's goodbye from Dan.
29:51 Speaker 04 So long.
29:52 Speaker 02 Just trying to do my audition for University Challenge. Bye.
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