Little Fish: No Orifice Boy

James describes the time he inhabited a giant robot, while he, Anna and Andy discuss YOUR facts. This week's subjects include candles, Canada and camphor. And the gang announce eight more Friend of the Podcast custodians. Visit nosuchthingasafish.com http://nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes. Join Club Fish for ad-free episodes and exclusive bonus content at apple.co/nosuchthingasafish http://apple.co/nosuchthingasafish or nosuchthingasafish.com/patreon http://nosuchthingasafish.com/patreon Edited by James Harkin Produced by Leying Lee Team includes Tara Dorrell, Joe Mayo and Ethan Ruparelia

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Anna Ptaszynski?

  Hi guys, Anna here. Just before we start this show, I wanted to remind you that we're about to perform our very first ever live episode of Drop Us A Line. That, of course, is the super secret show that we mention a lot publicly. That is part of our Club Fish offering. If you want to check out some of the previous Drop Us A Line episodes, please go to patreon.com/clubfish. Join up and you can hear all previous Drop Us A Lines. And we're so excited that we're going to be doing a live one on the 12th of September, King's Place in London, as part of the London Podcast Festival. It'll be at 4:30 in the afternoon. Please come us along and please send in your emails with whatever mad, weird questions, insults,

• 0:45Anna Ptaszynski?

  comments, compliments, we accept all sorts. Send them into [email protected]. And if you buy tickets to that show, please mention in your email that you've got tickets and we'll be able to pull up you out of the audience and force you to read aloud your email. Do buy tickets at nosuchthingasafish.com/live. If you fancy joining in the absolute chaos of our first attempt to record that, we can't wait. It's going to be really fun. We always love doing it in the office, if only to see Andy make a complete tit of himself hosting it. And looking forward to doing that in the flesh. Okay, that's all for now. On with the show.

• 1:37Anna Ptaszynski?

  Hello. Welcome to another episode of Little Fish, LF, the weekly podcast where we, the No Such Thing As A Fish team, go through the inbox, specifically Andy goes through the inbox, and he takes all of the greatest facts that you've sent us this week and we read them out back to you. And they're fantastic, always, without fail. My name is Anna Tashinsky. I'm here with James Harkin and Andrew Hunter Murray. Who's going to start?

• 2:02Speaker 01

  I'll start. In 2020, all three of Scottish football team Ross County's goalkeepers were named Ross. Ross Duen, Ross Laidlaw and Ross Munro. They also had a midfielder called Ross Draper and a striker named Ross Stewart.

• 2:18Anna Ptaszynski?

  So confusing.

• 2:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. Luckily, it's the surnames that go on the back of the shirts.

• 2:25Speaker 02

  But in the middle of a match, you'll panic and shout Ross, won't you? And then suddenly the goalkeeper's run over to you and says, "What's going on?"

• 2:31Speaker 01

  Do you know what? In football, there's a rule where you're not allowed to shout "my ball" if you're going to go to head it. Oh, we were always taught this at school. I'm not sure whether they would punish you, but basically if you shout that, no one knows who you're talking about. And so you might be put in the opposition off and that's ungentlemanly conduct.

• 2:49Anna Ptaszynski?

  What do you mean, no one knows who you are at that time?

• 2:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, you just say, "my ball", and then the defenders go, "Oh, I'm going to leave it to my mate."

• 2:55Anna Ptaszynski?

  Ah.

• 2:56Speaker 01

  Because you can imagine like a really good impressionist going, playing a football game and doing an impression of the opposition players.

• 3:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:04Speaker 01

  And then, you know, they leave the ball and then you jump through and score. So you're not really supposed to say "my ball", you're supposed to say your name. But I wonder if everyone's called Ross, whether you just wouldn't be able to say Ross's ball either.

• 3:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's fair enough. I think that's a much better version of football where everyone on the pitch is an impressionist and it's trickster football.

• 3:23Anna Ptaszynski?

  And you're blindfolded, so you have to judge whether the impressionist is the guy or not the guy.

• 3:27Speaker 01

  Or is the impressionist also look-alikes?

• 3:32Anna Ptaszynski?

  It's very hard to get the team together, but once you've done it, God, it's funny.

• 3:38Speaker 01

  Anyway, thank you very much for that fact. Ross in Sydney.

• 3:41Speaker 02

  Hey!

• 3:42Anna Ptaszynski?

  Good stuff.

• 3:43Speaker 02

  Wonderful. Here's one from Freya Bento, who signs off, "Yes, like the pie."

• 3:48Speaker 01

  Like the town in Uruguay.

• 3:50Speaker 02

  Yeah. But that's named after the pies? Or are the pies named after the town?

• 3:54Speaker 01

  Pies named after the town.

• 3:55Speaker 02

  Freya Bento.

• 3:56Anna Ptaszynski?

  What an amazing name. Unbelievable that your parents called you Freya in a cool way. Love it.

• 4:01Speaker 02

  In a cool way?

• 4:02Anna Ptaszynski?

  Yeah, got cool parents. I wonder if they were huge Freya Bento's fans?

• 4:06Speaker 02

  In the 19th century, Glasgow's Britannia Panopticon, the UK's oldest wooden music hall, that's relevant, the wooden bit, went on fire, destroying the attic's wax museum and killing possibly all of the animals in the basement zoo. This is not the funny bit. The upper gallery was saved, however, due to the amount of people who pissed on the wood over the years whilst watching shows, making it so soggy it never caught fire.

• 4:31Anna Ptaszynski?

  No. Wow.

• 4:33Speaker 02

  There you go. Good fact.

• 4:35Anna Ptaszynski?

  That's a good reason to urinate publicly. You never know when there's going to be a fire this day and age quite often.

• 4:40Speaker 01

  Do you know that, I think it's the Yazidi people are not allowed to urinate onto fire because fire is sacred and it's like a taboo?

• 4:51Anna Ptaszynski?

  I remember they had lots of strange taboos.

• 4:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. So that's one of them. So like for the Y series of QI, I was thinking like, Alan, who wouldn't piss on you if you were on fire?

• 5:05Speaker 01

  Might not get through, but...

• 5:06Speaker 02

  But there are so many answers to that question, loads of people.

• 5:11Anna Ptaszynski?

  That's quite cool that there was a fire in a wax museum, so it was like an upside down candle. If you just flipped it the other way around, you've just got a giant candle. Didn't you say there was wax on the top floor? Did I make that up?

• 5:23Speaker 02

  That was in the attic. Yeah, the wax museum was in the attic. Yeah, yeah.

• 5:26Anna Ptaszynski?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 5:26Speaker 01

  So normally the fire is on top of the candle.

• 5:29Speaker 02

  I see.

• 5:30Anna Ptaszynski?

  There you go.

• 5:31Speaker 01

  No, that's a really cool point.

• 5:32Anna Ptaszynski?

  Otherwise, they set fire to your table.

• 5:34Speaker 01

  Instead of pissing it out, a load of people whose birthday it was could come over and blow it out.

• 5:41Anna Ptaszynski?

  Lot of good ideas here. And here's another good fact, wood related, again. Ali Mackey says one of the oldest recorded ice cream flavours is wood.

• 5:50Speaker 01

  What?

• 5:51Anna Ptaszynski?

  Yeah, times were tough back in the day.

• 5:53Speaker 01

  Wood?

• 5:54Anna Ptaszynski?

  And Ali specifies that China's Tang Dynasty, so the 7th to the 9th centuries-

• 5:59Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 6:00Anna Ptaszynski?

  Had-

• 6:00Speaker 02

  So before rum raisin.

• 6:02Anna Ptaszynski?

  Rum raisin was the second, actually.

• 6:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 6:04Anna Ptaszynski?

  Had a recorded recipe for a frozen dairy dessert that involved camphor wood.

• 6:09Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 6:10Anna Ptaszynski?

  Which actually does have a scent, scented, doesn't it? So I'm not sure if they left the wood in once they've added the scent.

• 6:15Speaker 01

  I don't think that would be very nice, camphor.

• 6:17Speaker 02

  It's very perfumey and I think of it sort of as the thing you'd use to scent a room or a car, you know?

• 6:25Anna Ptaszynski?

  Yeah, I think of it as being a scent for a room, which means it would taste okay, wouldn't it? I know you wouldn't eat a scented candle or a scented stick.

• 6:32Speaker 02

  What are you talking about? My incense twigglers are delicious every night. Yum, yum, yum.

• 6:35Speaker 01

  I wonder if when you got your ice cream, you'd stick a piece of camphor in like a 99 flake.

• 6:41Anna Ptaszynski?

  Oh, yeah. Ice lolly, you could have, you could have the ice lolly stick.

• 6:45Speaker 02

  The stick is the lolly.

• 6:46Anna Ptaszynski?

  I think the lolly is the stick, yeah.

• 6:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, you wouldn't know when to stop eating, would you?

• 6:52Speaker 01

  Okay, here's another one from Noah Gettle. And Noah says, "Sorry to keep bothering you with sponge facts." So I assume there's been a number of emails before.

• 7:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's. Noah is a frequent flyer in the fish inbox. And welcome back, Noah.

• 7:05Speaker 01

  Finally, Noah, you're on the show. I don't know if Noah has been before.

• 7:10Speaker 02

  Maybe once.

• 7:10Speaker 01

  But Noah mentioned that most sponges are viviparous, as in they give birth live, like mammals. But the way they fertilize their eggs is they eat sperm out of the water column and it gets shunted on a different track from the food. So like it goes down a different hole, basically.

• 7:30Speaker 02

  How are you doing that?

• 7:33Anna Ptaszynski?

  What, can you do it the wrong, can it go down the wrong way? Sometimes, you know, your food goes down the wrong way.

• 7:37Speaker 01

  I feel like it does happen, yeah.

• 7:39Anna Ptaszynski?

  Must do.

• 7:40Speaker 01

  Sorry, sperm went down the wrong way.

• 7:45Speaker 01

  And Noah, to get off that subject a little bit, says there are deep sea glass sponges that are apparently more than 11,000 years old.

• 7:55Speaker 02

  Come off it. Older than farming.

• 7:57Speaker 01

  Oh, about the same as farming.

• 7:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, about the same as the oldest cultivation of lentils. And the first pottery was invented around this time as well.

• 8:07Anna Ptaszynski?

  And are we thinking that they were responsible in some way?

• 8:10Speaker 01

  That's the only logical conclusion, isn't it?

• 8:12Anna Ptaszynski?

  I think so.

• 8:13Speaker 02

  Are we, as in, there must be a bit of an uncertainty range on these things?

• 8:16Speaker 01

  11,000 plus or minus 3,000 years.

• 8:19Speaker 02

  Oh, okay. But even at the very youngest, that's 8,000 years. That's pretty good.

• 8:23Speaker 01

  So Noah sent us the link and I read through it. And basically, they took some specules, part of a sponge, and they looked at the isotopes of oxygen and various different isotopes. And you can tell how old things are by using science that I don't really understand.

• 8:38Speaker 02

  So cool.

• 8:39Anna Ptaszynski?

  Right.

• 8:40Speaker 02

  I've got another underwater one now. This is from Stephen Elsheschen. Sorry, Stephen. Sorry, I properly screwed up your surname there, but it's a really cool name. It's all, the only vowel in it is E, but there are three of them. That's not his fact, amazingly. Stephen's fact is that until 2012, half the functioning Canadian submarines were in a shopping mall in landlocked Edmonton, Alberta.

• 9:09Speaker 02

  This is so good. Basically, there was a place, the West Edmonton Mall. So this was a thing in the shopping mall called Deep Sea Adventure Lake. And they were real submarines that offered you a 20-minute submarine ride of the underwater artificial lake. You went down five metres. This is at the time when-

• 9:28Speaker 01

  That must have been huge, this mall.

• 9:30Speaker 02

  It is a big mall. They were small subs. The Canadian military at the time had three submarines, and the West Edmonton Shopping Mall had four submarines.

• 9:38Anna Ptaszynski?

  So were they designed for the mall? Were they designed for the military and then they realised-

• 9:41Speaker 02

  No, they were designed for the- they were never military. They were the first ever recreational submarines. There was a disaster in 1985 when one of them sank, but it was fine because it was a submarine.

• 9:51Anna Ptaszynski?

  It's what they're meant to do, isn't it?

• 9:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Well, they can, like submarines can get stuck at the bottom, can't they?

• 9:55Speaker 02

  That's a very good point. Yeah, yeah. Although this was only five metres down, so it was less... I don't think anyone ever died in the West Edmonton Mall in a submarine.

• 10:03Anna Ptaszynski?

  It's got the bends.

• 10:05Speaker 01

  Can I tell you about the coolest thing that I've ever been in, in a mall?

• 10:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:09Speaker 01

  This is, this is pretty cool, actually. So it was in China in the world's biggest mall, and I've forgotten what it's called. I think I've mentioned it here before. It's like the Global Mall or something. Anyway, I was in like a giant robot that was probably, I would say, three times my height. And I would sit on a chair in the robot and I could drive the robot around the mall.

• 10:33Anna Ptaszynski?

  No. So you were up at the top of it?

• 10:35Speaker 01

  I was like in the middle, like in its tummy kind of thing.

• 10:37Anna Ptaszynski?

  Wow.

• 10:38Speaker 02

  That's the closest any of us has been to living in the film Pacific Rim.

• 10:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:43Speaker 02

  Where they're getting big robots to fight. Did you have to fight any Kaiju?

• 10:46Speaker 01

  No, I chased my daughter around who was in a little ice cream van.

• 10:51Speaker 02

  Camphor, or, uh, trying to get a camphor flake. Yeah, yeah.

• 10:56Speaker 01

  But yeah, isn't that cool? They had one of those.

• 10:58Anna Ptaszynski?

  Was it manoeuvrable? Like, was it quite good at, um, moving around?

• 11:02Speaker 01

  Well, it was a little bit cumbersome, but I managed to get it around.

• 11:05Speaker 02

  How fast could it go?

• 11:06Speaker 01

  Oh, slow.

• 11:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. Well, that's sensible. They think of everything these days.

• 11:11Speaker 01

  I couldn't crush any skyscrapers with it.

• 11:14Anna Ptaszynski?

  Health and safety gone mad.

• 11:15Speaker 01

  But like, yeah, I was like, because we walked past it and I just went to my wife, "God, that's pretty cool, isn't it?" She went, "You should go on." And I was like, "Oh, no. This is probably for kids." "No, you should go." Before she could say it the second time, I was already there.

• 11:31Anna Ptaszynski?

  Um, I've got a fact here from Mikhail Anderson, whose fact is about Swedish footballer Gustav Lagerbilk. Gustav Lagerbilk is a Baron and the top dude of the noble house of Lagerbilk. I don't know if top dude is an official peerage term in Sweden. He says, "I've not looked into it deeper, but it can't be too common to hold a baronial title and be a football defender at a World Cup."

• 11:54Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 11:54Speaker 02

  No, it's at the World Cup.

• 11:55Anna Ptaszynski?

  Apparently so. Do we know if any of our defenders were in the House of Lords?

• 11:59Speaker 02

  Are there any Earls or Vike or, you know?

• 12:01Speaker 01

  We all have had the odd MBE, like David Beckham might have knighted.

• 12:04Anna Ptaszynski?

  But hereditary, come on.

• 12:05Speaker 02

  But you're not allowed, you're not allowed to have a gong that you got through doing football. I do know what you mean.

• 12:10Anna Ptaszynski?

  Or through doing charity work after football that's really about the football.

• 12:13Speaker 01

  I believe not. I can't think of anyone of the landed gentry who's ever played even professional football. The first person I could think of was Jan Vanagor of Hesselink, which I think like the off part of his name meant that he was of some kind of gentry. But he was, I think he was Dutch, maybe.

• 12:33Anna Ptaszynski?

  Nice. Cool. I, so I was wondering if in some places it's more common to be a member of the landed nobility, only because I found out recently, reading up on the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, as you do, that there was a time in their history when 1 million people were nobles, like nobles, not just gentry and nobility. It was because they had quite a mad system of distributing titles.

• 12:55Speaker 02

  It's because they were trying to avoid giving people a pay rise. They're going to say, "Look, we're not, we can't, we can't do it in the budget this year, but I'll tell you what we can do. We're going to put you in the nobility."

• 13:08Speaker 02

  I've got one more.

• 13:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, go on.

• 13:10Speaker 02

  This is from Elaine. Elaine says, "You may already subscribe to Clive Tompkins Link Fest", which I don't, I don't.

• 13:17Anna Ptaszynski?

  Oh, no, no.

• 13:17Speaker 02

  It sounds great because it's, I think it's lots of interesting links. There is a site that has water recipes that match the waters in various different places and sources. So for example, if you want to make a coffee, like you're in London, it provides you with a recipe of, you need 55% Perrier, 37% Harrogate Spring and 8% Aqua Panna. And that provides the right hardness, the right calcium, the bicarbonate, you know.

• 13:42Speaker 01

  That's pretty clever.

• 13:42Speaker 02

  If you want to feed James's cat.

• 13:45Speaker 01

  It's just 100% Evian.

• 13:46Speaker 02

  100% Evian.

• 13:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. But I'm interested because the water in London is rank, I think, like-

• 13:52Speaker 02

  Very hard.

• 13:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, coming from the north of England where we get all our water from the Lake District. It's like, you know, the water in London, I don't like it at all. So I'm surprised you can make such a horrible thing from three quite nice-

• 14:04Anna Ptaszynski?

  Okay, it's a matter of-

• 14:05Speaker 02

  I'm going to stand up for London water here. It's hard.

• 14:07Anna Ptaszynski?

  I like it. I like London water.

• 14:09Speaker 02

  It takes off the soap really fast. When you go up north and you're washing your hands and then you put them under, it takes about 30 seconds to get all the soap off. There's no time for that down south. It's busy. It's productive.

• 14:19Speaker 01

  You can't get bubbles in your bubble bath.

• 14:21Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 14:22Speaker 01

  Every three days I have to take out an enormous block of calcium out of my kettle.

• 14:28Anna Ptaszynski?

  I like that.

• 14:28Speaker 02

  At no extra cost. At no extra cost.

• 14:31Anna Ptaszynski?

  You don't need to take it out. It adds to the flavour over time.

• 14:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:34Anna Ptaszynski?

  Yeah, it matures the tea.

• 14:36Speaker 02

  You can sprinkle it on your, uh, food if you run out of salt. Just a bit of calc- crunchy calcium. It's lovely.

• 14:43Anna Ptaszynski?

  Anyway, any more for any more?

• 14:44Speaker 01

  Yes, I've got one from Lorenz Jan Van Stinis. No idea whether that is a person from the gentry, from whatever country Lorenz Jan is from. But Lorenz Jan says, "I don't think this has been mentioned yet," and you're absolutely right, "but Dominico Tedesco just replaced Vincenzo Italiano as head coach of Italian first division football team Bologna." Or maybe you did mention this, Andy. Or maybe we were just chatting about it.

• 15:12Speaker 02

  I think about it a lot, but I don't, I've never talked about it.

• 15:15Speaker 01

  No, really? The interesting thing about this, as if what I already said wasn't interesting enough, is that Tedesco means German in Italian and Italiano means Italian.

• 15:28Speaker 02

  In Italian.

• 15:29Speaker 01

  In Italian. Well, yeah, in many different languages. So, and more interestingly is the fact that Dominico Tedesco was born in Italy and Vincenzo Italiano was born in Germany.

• 15:41Anna Ptaszynski?

  Okay.

• 15:42Speaker 02

  I'm sorry.

• 15:42Anna Ptaszynski?

  So the Italian Mr. German has been replaced by the German Mr. Italian.

• 15:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. So that is-

• 15:47Speaker 02

  Amazing.

• 15:48Speaker 01

  That is fun.

• 15:48Speaker 02

  Amazing.

• 15:50Anna Ptaszynski?

  It's good fact. We get a lot of fights about football and football names.

• 15:53Speaker 01

  I certainly get a lot said to me from Andy.

• 15:56Speaker 02

  I think who's going to handle this well, James and Anna. Yeah, I think, um, we do get a lot, because there's been a World Cup on. I'd say the recent supply has dried up a little bit.

• 16:05Anna Ptaszynski?

  Okay.

• 16:05Speaker 02

  Uh, in the inbox, but we're dealing with a bit of a time lag because we, you know, we get the fact several weeks in advance, just have a bit of a buffer.

• 16:11Anna Ptaszynski?

  I see. I found it just kind of topical.

• 16:14Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah, it can happen. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 16:16Speaker 01

  I was kind of interested that the Italian word for German is Tedesco.

• 16:20Speaker 02

  Tedesco, yeah.

• 16:21Speaker 01

  Have you heard that before?

• 16:22Anna Ptaszynski?

  No, where's that coming from?

• 16:23Speaker 01

  Well, what's the German for German? Deutschland, right? And what's the French for German?

• 16:29Anna Ptaszynski?

  Allemannia.

• 16:29Speaker 01

  Allemannia. What's the Russian for German?

• 16:32Speaker 02

  I don't know.

• 16:32Speaker 01

  Nimietz. What's the English for German? German.

• 16:35Anna Ptaszynski?

  I don't know.

• 16:37Speaker 01

  Isn't it weird that all of those different countries have different words for German?

• 16:40Anna Ptaszynski?

  It's actually different.

• 16:41Speaker 01

  Isn't that so weird?

• 16:42Anna Ptaszynski?

  And then where's his Tedesco? Yeah.

• 16:43Speaker 01

  So Tedesco actually comes from a similar background as Deutschland. It's just those two words. One has morphed into the other.

• 16:51Anna Ptaszynski?

  Yeah.

• 16:52Speaker 01

  But the reason is that Germany was such like a huge, um, conglomeration of lots of different people that all these countries dealt with a different part of Germany at different parts of their time. And sometimes it was like the Germans, or it might be the Allemans, or it might be the, in Russian, they called them nimietz because it means someone who can't speak because they spoke a different language to them. In Finnish, it's saxa, which comes from Saxons.

• 17:22Speaker 02

  Right.

• 17:22Speaker 01

  So basically, everyone dealt with Germans for the main part of their history at different times. And so they all had different names.

• 17:29Anna Ptaszynski?

  That is really interesting. Um, well, can I just do one more? Because I thought this was just amazing. And this is from someone called Alambros. And it's that deer antlers have memory. And the explanation is that if a deer gets injured at a certain point in their antler, one year, it, so it will make a, like a big gash or a cut or something, there'll be a small callus which will then heal. And then those antlers will shed as they normally do every year. And when the antlers grow back the next year in the same spot,

• 17:59Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 18:00Anna Ptaszynski?

  there'll be a line, like a proper ectopic line, which is a remnant of that injury.

• 18:05Speaker 02

  What the hell?

• 18:06Anna Ptaszynski?

  What's going on there?

• 18:07Speaker 02

  What's going on with deer?

• 18:07Anna Ptaszynski?

  Because that was just air until you regrew your antlers. The, the spot where that was, was just in midair. And how does it know that that spot of air should become an injury again?

• 18:16Speaker 02

  Well, I don't think that's the solution. Whatever the answer is, it's so clearly not that.

• 18:20Speaker 01

  I don't think, like, when you get a 3D printer, it doesn't go, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, something, something, eh, eh, eh, something, something.

• 18:27Speaker 02

  Running low on air. Oh, for God's sake. I've got to buy a new air canister for the 3D printer. This is so typical. So expensive.

• 18:35Anna Ptaszynski?

  I've misexplained that.

• 18:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:37Anna Ptaszynski?

  But the thing is, it's amazing.

• 18:39Speaker 02

  It is amazing. That is really incredible.

• 18:41Speaker 01

  That is crazy.

• 18:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:42Anna Ptaszynski?

  Just to know. And there's a little bonus fact actually from Lambros, which is that in Greek, when a man is being cheated on by his partner, we say, "He has antlers." So like if we'd say, "You've been cuckolded."

• 18:52Speaker 01

  Cuckolded, yeah.

• 18:52Speaker 02

  Couple of taunts. Yeah, yeah.

• 18:53Speaker 01

  Same in like quite a few countries. It's like the bull's horn thing.

• 18:57Anna Ptaszynski?

  Yeah. But why is that? Because aren't cuckold is about cuckoos, isn't it? And then is the-

• 19:02Speaker 01

  It's about cookies.

• 19:03Speaker 02

  Cuckoos.

• 19:04Speaker 01

  Oh, cuckoos, sorry.

• 19:05Speaker 02

  It might be about cookies, but it depends on the marriage, doesn't it?

• 19:11Speaker 02

  That was never a factor for us.

• 19:12Anna Ptaszynski?

  Mine actually would break down over that, I can imagine.

• 19:15Speaker 01

  Well, it's the old Shane Wan-like thing, isn't it? Why are you so fat, Shane? Because every time I have sex with your wife, she gives me a cookie.

• 19:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:24Anna Ptaszynski?

  There we go.

• 19:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:25Anna Ptaszynski?

  We should probably wrap up, shouldn't we? And move on to the next bit of this show. And so we are now about to bestow some of our former headline facts on lucky recipients. Who wants to go first?

• 19:35Speaker 02

  I'll go first. Here is one that goes out to Jane. Jane, congratulations. Your fact is now that, according to a recent theory, Stonehenge was built as part of a team-building exercise.

• 19:47Anna Ptaszynski?

  Wow. It was tougher then, wasn't it? Now you go and, what, do axe-throwing or something, or a round of golf?

• 19:53Speaker 02

  I drove past only the other day.

• 19:54Speaker 01

  Did you?

• 19:55Anna Ptaszynski?

  Yeah.

• 19:55Speaker 01

  Was there a big old traffic jam next to Stonehenge, like there always is?

• 19:59Speaker 02

  That's traditional. And it was very nice, but I think it's nice that, because you then get to have a little gawk without feeling bad, despite the fact that you...

• 20:06Speaker 01

  I deliberately, I deliberately don't look at it. Because I'm like, the reason this traffic jam is here is because people are looking at Stonehenge. There's no reason for there to be a traffic jam. It's because people are slowing down to look at Stonehenge, so I'm not going to look at it.

• 20:18Anna Ptaszynski?

  Wait, what possible better reason could there be than looking at our greatest monument?

• 20:22Speaker 01

  I'm just saying that there's no reason to have a traffic jam, when all I want to do is get to slough.

• 20:27Anna Ptaszynski?

  Yeah.

• 20:28Speaker 02

  What you need to do, clearly, is make the road a six-lane superhighway at that exact moment, just for that 200 metres.

• 20:36Speaker 01

  That goes over the top of Stonehenge?

• 20:37Speaker 02

  Goes over the top of Stonehenge, yeah, yeah.

• 20:39Anna Ptaszynski?

  You just need one extra lane. You need the Henge lane, which is signposted for the next three miles, if you want the Henge lane.

• 20:46Speaker 02

  For gawkers.

• 20:47Anna Ptaszynski?

  For gawkers, yeah.

• 20:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's lovely. That's quite a good idea. I don't know why they haven't done that. Yeah, right.

• 20:51Anna Ptaszynski?

  All right, shall I give a fact to somebody?

• 20:53Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 20:53Anna Ptaszynski?

  How about this one? And this is for someone whose name apparently is The Furver of a New Convert. No further questions.

• 21:03Speaker 01

  No further questions?

• 21:05Anna Ptaszynski?

  Hey. This is amazing, because this person with the extraordinary name gets the best fact I've ever said, which is that, while digging New York subway tunnel in 1916, worker Marshall Maybe got sucked through a pocket of air, blasted up through 12 feet of riverbed, through the river, and then thrown 20 feet into the air. Yes.

• 21:31Speaker 02

  I think this was a special request, which we don't do anymore. We did a few in the early days of dishing out facts, but we just, it's basically too complicated now.

• 21:39Speaker 01

  Because this wasn't a headline fact.

• 21:40Anna Ptaszynski?

  No, it wasn't.

• 21:41Speaker 02

  This wasn't a headline fact, so this is actually a bit of a cheeky, cheeky, cheeky one.

• 21:44Anna Ptaszynski?

  When you say it was a special request, was it from The Furver?

• 21:47Speaker 02

  I think, believe it was, yeah, yeah.

• 21:48Anna Ptaszynski?

  It's her name, Convert. Oh, well, Mrs. or Mr. Convert, there you go, have that fact. Although I will say that, so Andy, when he's recording all the facts we've said on the show, he puts a little caveat sometimes after them. And this one comes with a caveat in brackets, much discussion, dubious? Question mark?

• 22:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:06Anna Ptaszynski?

  He survived, two colleagues perished.

• 22:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:08Anna Ptaszynski?

  So it actually ends with a bit of a tragedy. And I don't think it is dubious, all right?

• 22:14Speaker 02

  It was in a newspaper at the time.

• 22:15Anna Ptaszynski?

  It was in a newspaper, for goodness sake.

• 22:18Speaker 01

  Does it not ring a few bells that his surname is Maybe?

• 22:24Anna Ptaszynski?

  Oh my gosh, do you think they accidentally capitalized that? And actually, the article was Marshall Maybe.

• 22:32Speaker 01

  Oh, very good. Okay, here is a fact now that is under the custodianship of Casey Krub. Casey, your fact is that the Great Wall of China is held together by sticky rice.

• 22:43Anna Ptaszynski?

  Nice.

• 22:43Speaker 02

  Very funny.

• 22:44Speaker 01

  I've been up the Great Wall of China.

• 22:46Speaker 02

  As have I.

• 22:46Speaker 01

  Recently.

• 22:47Speaker 02

  I haven't.

• 22:49Speaker 01

  And the reason I say recently is because I think it's quite new, but I came down on like...

• 22:54Speaker 02

  It's not quite new, it's famously very old. What magical big robot were you in this time, James? Do you know what? I'm starting to doubt all these stories.

• 23:02Speaker 01

  So I came down on a toboggan.

• 23:05Speaker 02

  Cool.

• 23:05Speaker 01

  So I think that is relatively new. If you go to like, one of the main bits of the Great Wall, you can go up on a cable car, so you don't have to walk all the way up there. And you can come down on a little toboggan ride.

• 23:16Anna Ptaszynski?

  Wait, sorry, when you say go up it, how, um, sorry to show my ignorance, but how tall was the wall?

• 23:21Speaker 01

  It's on the top of a big old hill.

• 23:23Speaker 02

  Because it famously follows the landscape no matter where it goes, so it goes up and down over bits and...

• 23:27Speaker 01

  And it's in a hilly area because it's on a border, or it was on a border.

• 23:30Anna Ptaszynski?

  Got it. It was, it's not like a 100-metre-high wall that you have to climb up and then toboggan down.

• 23:34Speaker 02

  So, question, James.

• 23:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:36Speaker 02

  There's the main bit of the wall, and there are ramparts on either side. So are you tobogganing along the wall in a downhill direction, or are you tobogganing down the hill?

• 23:44Speaker 01

  You're down the hill, so you start at the wall, and then for the entirety of the toboggan, you're going away from the wall.

• 23:50Speaker 02

  I understand. That's very cool.

• 23:51Anna Ptaszynski?

  Yeah. That's amazing.

• 23:53Speaker 01

  It is a really fun thing to do, I have to say, and the queues for it are outrageous.

• 23:58Anna Ptaszynski?

  I bet.

• 23:58Speaker 01

  Just like all queues in China, actually, for, for big fun things, very, very long. But the queues for the Great Wall of China, good grief.

• 24:05Speaker 02

  Did you leave skid marks?

• 24:08Anna Ptaszynski?

  Andy!

• 24:09Speaker 01

  What?

• 24:10Anna Ptaszynski?

  Children listen.

• 24:12Speaker 02

  Sorry, that's a very childish question.

• 24:13Speaker 01

  I went down with my daughter, my four-year-old daughter. We were in a toboggan together.

• 24:17Anna Ptaszynski?

  Wow, that's a dream.

• 24:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, and she was just going faster, faster, all the way down. But if you go too fast, they tell you off.

• 24:24Speaker 02

  Here's another one. Jay Scoines, your fact is that the world's largest single-celled organism can get up to 12 inches long.

• 24:34Anna Ptaszynski?

  Really good.

• 24:34Speaker 02

  How cool is that?

• 24:35Anna Ptaszynski?

  When it's excited.

• 24:37Speaker 02

  Very good.

• 24:37Anna Ptaszynski?

  We probably said...

• 24:39Speaker 02

  Sure we did. This is a single cell called Caullerpa taxifola, and it gets up to a foot long. And it's just one cell.

• 24:46Anna Ptaszynski?

  Really amazing.

• 24:47Speaker 02

  Just so cool.

• 24:48Anna Ptaszynski?

  Here's another one for Henry Taysom. I remember this fact, and this is actually a fact my friend told me, who is obsessed with snakes. And it's that if you're bitten by the boomslang snake, you bleed from every orifice.

• 25:01Speaker 01

  Every?

• 25:02Anna Ptaszynski?

  Every orifice.

• 25:04Speaker 01

  How many orifices do you have?

• 25:06Speaker 02

  I don't have any. I've had mine removed. It's not appropriate.

• 25:10Anna Ptaszynski?

  You've had yours filled in.

• 25:13Speaker 02

  Just a bit of easy fill. Waiting for it to dry, sand it down, and you've just solved, you've removed a potential impropriety. Sorry for being responsible for the children I encounter on the bus or passing in the street. Just don't think it's appropriate for people that have orifices. It's 2026, grow up.

• 25:32Anna Ptaszynski?

  We've gone to a strange place, but at least you don't need to fear this snake.

• 25:40Speaker 02

  Well, I don't know what will happen if the snake bites me. Yeah, you're right, nothing.

• 25:44Anna Ptaszynski?

  Oh, nothing, nothing happens.

• 25:45Speaker 01

  There's a boomslang snake in the room, quick, get no orifice bite.

• 25:57Speaker 01

  Bumping into the wall.

• 26:02Anna Ptaszynski?

  It's a weird superpower here, elected to have, but we gave them the choice. We said, you can have anything, Andy.

• 26:09Speaker 01

  He was bitten by a radioactive Ken doll.

• 26:14Speaker 02

  Oh, dear.

• 26:15Anna Ptaszynski?

  There you go, yes, it thins your blood, doesn't it? Makes your blood very, very thin, and it spurts out everywhere.

• 26:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, I know Henry Taysom. Hello, Henry, if you're listening.

• 26:22Anna Ptaszynski?

  Do you?

• 26:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:23Anna Ptaszynski?

  Oh, nice.

• 26:24Speaker 01

  Okay, the next one goes out to Olivia. And Olivia, your fact is that Albert Einstein has a social media team.

• 26:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is all about dead people with social media accounts. Dead celebrities where the estate is still trading, isn't it? And there are loads of them around.

• 26:37Anna Ptaszynski?

  Yeah.

• 26:37Speaker 02

  Because there are all these weirdly active accounts, you know? I used to know, I'm sure you have known people who've done, they've had to be the voice of a company on social media. I used to know a bloke who did, oh god, I can't remember whether it was KFC or something similar, but actually, he did about 17 of them. And it was just his way of, you know, making ends meet while he, while he worked as a comedian.

• 26:59Speaker 01

  I imagine if they don't mind giving you leeway to say whatever you want, which some of them, it seems like they really don't care. Like, is it the Ryanair or EasyJet, where they just basically spend the whole time trolling people?

• 27:11Anna Ptaszynski?

  Really?

• 27:12Speaker 01

  I think like, if they give you the opportunity to do that, I reckon that's quite a good job for an upcoming comedian.

• 27:17Speaker 02

  You cancelled my flight and you lost all my luggage, and they just say, ah, ah, ah. We'll do it again, you stupid bastard.

• 27:26Speaker 01

  There is a bit of that that happens.

• 27:28Speaker 02

  Oh, dear. Here's one more. This one goes out to Alice, and it's the fact that The Very Hungry Caterpillar was originally called A Week with Willie the Worm. Yeah, really good. The Very Hungry Caterpillar, and Eric Carl, who wrote it.

• 27:43Anna Ptaszynski?

  Yeah.

• 27:43Speaker 02

  We're all fans.

• 27:44Anna Ptaszynski?

  Although I don't remember if it was originally a caterpillar, because the big reveal with a worm is what? It's, you don't get the big double-faced spread at the end.

• 27:53Speaker 01

  Are you trying to avoid the spyler for The Very Hungry Caterpillar?

• 27:58Anna Ptaszynski?

  Look, I just don't want to ruin it, like...

• 28:00Speaker 01

  No, you're right, he wouldn't go into the chrysalis or...

• 28:03Speaker 02

  He might get chopped in two.

• 28:04Anna Ptaszynski?

  It must be that, it must be, oh, magic, it's two worms.

• 28:07Speaker 02

  But then he's got another friend.

• 28:08Anna Ptaszynski?

  Yeah.

• 28:08Speaker 02

  That's nice. I think that's a nice ending for the story.

• 28:10Speaker 01

  Then he has to share all the food with them.

• 28:12Anna Ptaszynski?

  Isn't that a good lesson? This feels like a better lesson for kids, actually, because The Very Hungry Caterpillar just teaches you how great it is to be beautiful. But A Week with Willie the Worm teaches you how good it is to have a friend to share with.

• 28:23Speaker 01

  Does it teach us good to be beautiful?

• 28:25Anna Ptaszynski?

  That's certainly the lesson I've tried to drill into children.

• 28:27Speaker 01

  It basically says, as long as you keep eating non-stop for a week, you're going to be really, really fit.

• 28:33Anna Ptaszynski?

  Yeah.

• 28:35Anna Ptaszynski?

  It's a misleading piece of literature, I think we can agree.

• 28:38Speaker 01

  There is, I think people, like kids, have written into Eric Carl and said, actually, all caterpillars only live on single leaves, and they never have any variation in their diet whatsoever. And also, they all go into either chrysalises or cocoons, which is the opposite of whatever Eric Carl said.

• 28:57Anna Ptaszynski?

  Get it right, Eric. I'm with the kids.

• 28:59Speaker 02

  On Monday, he ate a leaf, and on Tuesday, ate two of the same kind of leaf.

• 29:03Anna Ptaszynski?

  No, look, I think...

• 29:04Speaker 02

  Is this what you want, children? Is it because...

• 29:08Anna Ptaszynski?

  This is Gen Zed.

• 29:09Speaker 01

  And at the end of the week, he felt quite sick and didn't really like the look of himself when he looked in the mirror.

• 29:17Speaker 02

  But he resolved that that's fine, and he's got next week to change things, and that, oh god, now he's got a great...

• 29:21Anna Ptaszynski?

  He got on a Zentix prescription, and everything's okay now.

• 29:25Speaker 02

  Boo.

• 29:25Anna Ptaszynski?

  Righty-ho, last fact for the day, I think, and this is for Shannon O'Keefe. And this is a fact that in World War II, the 20 Committee was in charge of turning German spies. In Roman numerals, that made them the XX Committee, i.e. the Double Cross Committee.

• 29:42Speaker 01

  Very strong.

• 29:43Anna Ptaszynski?

  Yeah, really good.

• 29:44Speaker 02

  Did they think of the committee number after they thought of the main job of the committee? Maybe.

• 29:48Anna Ptaszynski?

  I think they did, yes. This was a fact by Anne Miller, who is, who has been on the podcast many times. Anne is a big spy fan, isn't she? In fact, has written entire novels about spies for children.

• 30:01Speaker 01

  Yes, entirely factually accurate, unlike The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

• 30:05Anna Ptaszynski?

  Yes.

• 30:06Speaker 01

  Or the animal spies.

• 30:07Anna Ptaszynski?

  She's not mixing her burka cocoons and her chrysalises.

• 30:09Speaker 01

  Oh, no.

• 30:10Anna Ptaszynski?

  Anytime soon. All right, lovely, that is all of the facts that you've sent us, and that's all of the facts that we are giving you this week. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Little Fish. And especially thank you to our eight new custodians, who are Jane, The Furver of a New Convert, Casey Krub, Jay Scoines, Henry Taysom, Olivia, Alice, and Shannon O'Keefe. Take good care of those facts. For the rest of you, please do come back this time next week for another Little Fish, or you can listen to A Big Fish, otherwise known as No Such Things a Fish, at the end of this week. If you want to become a friend of the podcast and become a fact custodian, with which you don't only get a fact, you get a special certificate sent to you into your inbox

• 30:54Anna Ptaszynski?

  that you can print off and frame, stick on your wall forever, and brag about. Then go to patreon.com/clubfish. And do keep writing into podcast at q i dot com with your favourite facts. They might make it to this show. Andy loves getting the emails. He's always begging for more. Give him more. And we'll see you again soon. Thanks so much for listening. Goodbye from us.