Pod Insights No Such Thing As A Fish Little Fish: Right Over Our Heads About this episode Dan, James and Andy discuss YOUR facts, including Joan of Arc, Lily Allen and Vidkun Quisling. We also make some VERY STRONG jokes that require a lot of explanation, and we meet eight new Custodians of Fish Facts.
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Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 Jardiance has a big story to tell. Discover Jardiance's Empigliflozin 10 or 25mg tablets. Visit jardiance.com, call 1-888-968-6648, or talk to your doctor to see if Jardiance is right for you.
0:29 Speaker 01 Hello and welcome to another episode of Little Fish. This is our audience fact show. You have been sending in brilliant facts to podcast at QI.com, and we are here to tell you the best ones. And who are we, Andy? Oh, yeah. I'm Andrew Hunter Murray, and these are my friends Dan Schreiber and James Harkin.
0:47 Speaker 02 Good to be here, Andy.
0:48 Speaker 01 James?
0:49 Speaker 03 Oh, yeah, I love it.
0:50 Speaker 01 Let's crack on. Who's got a fact?
0:52 Speaker 03 I've got one.
0:53 Speaker 01 Yep.
0:53 Speaker 03 Uh, this is from Mary Kuna. I think maybe from Colorado, because she said, here's a fact from Colorado. When Denver smells like manure, it's about to snow.
1:04 Speaker 01 Ooh. When Denver smells like, what a great riddle. When Denver smells like manure, it's about to snow.
1:12 Speaker 02 That feels like the old, if you can see the hills, that means it's about to rain. And if you can't see the hills, it is raining.
1:18 Speaker 03 That's what we say in Bolton.
1:19 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:20 Speaker 02 Is it, is it because, uh, the area is going very dry, uh, because it's getting so cold that the smell can travel to your nostrils quicker?
1:29 Speaker 03 Not quite, not quite. What it is-
1:31 Speaker 01 Good theory, though. Go to town.
1:32 Speaker 02 Nice one, Professor. There are no points for trying on this show.
1:37 Speaker 03 I thought it was a very good effort, Dan. I don't mind saying so. Uh, it's because Denver's in kind of a bowl and lots of cattle live there. Uh, and you get this thing called the upslope effect where air pushes up against the mountains and goes up to the top of the mountains. And then when it gets to the top, it condenses and you get rain or snow. Uh, so it is one of these things where actually people think it's, they say, oh, if it smells like manure, it's going to snow, but it actually is true.
2:01 Speaker 01 So the air gets sort of pulled off the land, the cowy, manurey land.
2:06 Speaker 03 Yes, that's right.
2:07 Speaker 01 To the mountain, then turns into snow.
2:08 Speaker 03 Precisely correct.
2:09 Speaker 02 Does the snow taste like feces?
2:12 Speaker 03 Don't eat brown snow, that's what they say in Denver.
2:14 Speaker 01 There you go.
2:15 Speaker 03 Would you like one more fact about Denver?
2:16 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:17 Speaker 03 Uh, much of the tap water in Denver comes from a place called Gross Reservoir.
2:25 Speaker 03 It might be. Don't write in if you're from there because it might be that it's pronounced Gross. I'm not sure because it's named after a former chief engineer of Denver Water Dwight D. G. R. O. S.
2:36 Speaker 02 Ah, right. Nice.
2:38 Speaker 03 Gross. Gross.
2:39 Speaker 02 Yeah, it could be. Yeah. Yeah. Potato, potato. What a great Denver Nugget. Lovely.
2:45 Speaker 03 And if you can smell those Denver Nuggets, it's about to snow.
2:48 Speaker 02 It's the name of their basketball team as well, the Denver Nuggets.
2:50 Speaker 03 Oh.
2:51 Speaker 02 Is it? It is, yeah.
2:53 Speaker 03 Very good. That was a good one, yeah. It went right over my head.
2:55 Speaker 02 Is that a basketball joke? It went right over my head?
2:58 Speaker 03 Well, that one also went over my head.
3:01 Speaker 02 Three points. I don't understand basketball either. Let's do a fact. Let's do a fact. This one comes from Camille Jordan, sister of Michael Jordan, of course, from the Chicago Bulls. No, Camille Jordan is from Alton in Switzerland, and this is a fantastic fact. Technically, Camille says, the first flag on the moon was the Swiss flag.
3:22 Speaker 03 Hmm.
3:23 Speaker 02 Yeah. Wow. So, we all...
3:26 Speaker 03 I'm not sure if that is true.
3:28 Speaker 02 Well, let's, let's let Camille show her workings.
3:31 Speaker 03 Can I just say, I think we might have done this on QI where everyone thinks it's the American flag, but the Russians sent a probe up, it crashed, and there was a Soviet flag on there. So, we always thought it was Soviet, but what's the Swiss thing?
3:43 Speaker 02 You've absolutely kiboshed her reasoning here if that's the case. But so, let's say when the Americans landed on the moon, before they put up the American flag, they sort of accidentally put up another flag.
3:53 Speaker 03 No.
3:54 Speaker 02 Physicists from the University of Bern designed an experiment to be performed during the first moon expedition, a solar sail to capture solar wind particles. For the best result, the sail needed to stay up as long as possible, which is why it was set up even before the US flag. The equipment had a little Swiss cross on it, which depending on your definition of a flag, makes the Swiss flag the first flag to be placed on the surface of the moon.
4:19 Speaker 03 I call that a flag.
4:20 Speaker 02 Yeah, absolutely. Camille says that there's a short documentary that everyone can watch on YouTube called Burn on the Moon, which shows this story and shows how it is. So, if anyone's interested to look into that more, you can check that out there. Interestingly, there was another flag that was taken to the moon, not just the American, not just the Swiss flag. Or the Soviets. Or the Soviets, and this was taken up by Buzz Aldrin, which was the Freemason flag.
4:42 Speaker 01 Oh god.
4:43 Speaker 02 Well, he was part of a Freemasons Lodge, and the idea was that they wanted to open their own lodge on the moon.
4:50 Speaker 01 No.
4:50 Speaker 02 Well, this is according to Bedfordshire Freemasons' website.
4:54 Speaker 01 Bedfordshire?
4:55 Speaker 02 Yeah.
4:56 Speaker 03 They would know, if anyone would know. Probably they won't tell it to any of the other Freemasons, but just the Bedfordshire branch, they're the ones who really know what's going on.
5:04 Speaker 02 Here's what they say on their website. They say, "So two American astronauts landed on the moon in the Sea of Tranquility. One of these brave men's was Brother Edwin, Brother Edwin Eugene Aldrin Jr., a member of the Clear Lake Lodge number 1417 in Texas. Brother Buzz was authorized by the Grand Master of Texas to claim Masonic territorial jurisdiction for a grand lodge of Texas on the moon."
5:28 Speaker 01 No, I've just written, sorry, I'm just thinking back, because you know the footage of them getting off.
5:32 Speaker 03 Oh yeah.
5:32 Speaker 01 Buzz has his trouser leg rolled up, doesn't he?
5:34 Speaker 02 He does, yeah. On his space. And he's got that big wizard wand as well.
5:37 Speaker 03 It's not a wand, Dan. It's just a piece of wood that you do spells with.
5:44 Speaker 02 Yeah, so it got permission, and the idea was, because there was a lot of belief-
5:48 Speaker 01 From the Masons.
5:49 Speaker 02 From the Masons, not from NASA.
5:50 Speaker 01 No.
5:50 Speaker 02 Well, because he also, he snuck on-
5:52 Speaker 01 He was Catholic.
5:52 Speaker 02 He snuck on, yeah, some-
5:53 Speaker 01 He was doing lots of stuff, wasn't he?
5:55 Speaker 02 Yeah, he did lots of-
5:55 Speaker 01 It's amazing he had time to do any science on the moon.
5:57 Speaker 02 I know.
5:57 Speaker 01 Seems to be mostly like a tourist thing for Buzz.
5:59 Speaker 02 Yeah, the thought was, because apparently people were projecting that by the year 2000 there would be permanent lunar bases on the moon that would allow you to get there as quickly from Earth to the moon as you would fly a plane from San Francisco to Boston, and it would be a stopping point between your trip to Mars or the rings of Saturn. Therefore, it made sense for them to open a special lodge for them to have ready for them for that time.
6:20 Speaker 01 Absolutely.
6:21 Speaker 02 Yeah, so there we go.
6:22 Speaker 01 Good.
6:23 Speaker 03 Andy, give us a fact.
6:24 Speaker 01 All right, this is a fact from Alex Wilson, and it's about regret, okay?
6:28 Speaker 03 Okay.
6:29 Speaker 01 In 2009, Lily Allen was asked to do a gig. She was asked to do a gig online, right? But not as herself. She was asked to do a sort of streaming gig. Do you remember the video game Second Life?
6:41 Speaker 03 Yes.
6:41 Speaker 01 People had avatars and they had jobs inside Second Life. There was a whole Second Life economy. Like, it was a really big thing for a long time.
6:48 Speaker 02 Comedians like Jimmy Carr were doing live gigs.
6:50 Speaker 01 He'll play anywhere.
6:54 Speaker 01 Lily Allen was asked to do a gig in Second Life, right?
6:57 Speaker 03 Yeah.
6:57 Speaker 01 And-
6:59 Speaker 01 She was offered a fee, not in pounds, right, but in a new sort of like fake currency that was sort of doing rounds a bit. It was in Bitcoin she was offered.
7:12 Speaker 01 She was offered hundreds of thousands of Bitcoin.
7:16 Speaker 01 Which might, I think, I found a source that said it was equivalent to like $600.
7:20 Speaker 03 Interestingly, she did regret it. She thought it was a Doge coin. Yeah, I thought it was a dojo.
7:27 Speaker 03 It's like, that's one of her big songs from her album.
7:29 Speaker 01 Really? That's a really good joke that went Super good joke. Right over our heads.
7:34 Speaker 03 That's gonna be the name of this episode, isn't it?
7:36 Speaker 01 Lovely when you hear it form in real time. No, didn't know that. That's a really good joke.
7:39 Speaker 03 Yeah, she finds it's Pussy Palace and she thought it was a dojo.
7:43 Speaker 01 Oh, yes, yes, on her new album, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, got it, yeah. Well, do you want to hear how much she was offered? So she says hundreds of thousands of Bitcoin, right? If it was, if it was literally 200,000 Bitcoin.
7:56 Speaker 03 Yeah, I mean.
7:56 Speaker 01 Which she turned down.
7:59 Speaker 01 That would be worth about 13 billion pounds today. Okay. I have found a source which said it was $600 and with the value of Bitcoin as it was then, that would have been about 860,000 Bitcoin. Which at today's value would be $56 billion, 50 times the net worth of the King. Okay. About the 20th richest person on the planet. Yeah.
8:22 Speaker 03 Wow.
8:22 Speaker 01 Anyway, she said no to the gig.
8:23 Speaker 03 And instead they brought this blues artist called Elon Musk who came in.
8:29 Speaker 01 Alright, well instead it's a new act night.
8:32 Speaker 01 Come on Elon. Can you imagine, imagine that? I think you can't. I think you have to not imagine that.
8:38 Speaker 03 She's doing alright.
8:39 Speaker 01 She's doing great. But she's not Well, I mean As wealthy as the King. Yeah. She's not doing great as the new album of a test, but she's doing fine.
8:48 Speaker 03 I'm sure she's in a better place now, hopefully. Well, she's the Lord Byron of the 21st century.
8:54 Speaker 01 You're right. Would it have made her happy? No. Yeah, well, maybe.
8:59 Speaker 01 It makes you happy up to a certain point, then it doesn't make you happy. But I think above a certain point, surely it's got to make you happy a bit.
9:06 Speaker 02 Yeah. Well, I don't know. Do you remember we had Malcolm Gladwell on No Such Thing As A Fish? You should check out that episode if you haven't heard it, because it's a great guest appearance. He asked us a question, which was, which would you take if you were offered either, what was it? 10 million?
9:20 Speaker 01 £100,000, a million, 10 million, 100 million?
9:24 Speaker 02 Yeah.
9:25 Speaker 01 Or a thousand million?
9:27 Speaker 02 Yeah.
9:27 Speaker 01 A billion.
9:29 Speaker 02 And he said, most people pick 10 million.
9:30 Speaker 01 I think so.
9:31 Speaker 02 It's an imaginable number. And Dan swore blind he would take the billion.
9:34 Speaker 01 I just said a billion for the sake of playing the game, and he went nuts on me.
9:38 Speaker 03 Tore you a new one.
9:39 Speaker 01 Yeah, in a very funny way. It was great, but he just, the unhappiness that would bring to your life to take a billion
9:45 Speaker 02 Yeah.
9:45 Speaker 01 versus a million.
9:47 Speaker 03 So what did you do with it at the end?
9:49 Speaker 01 Put it all in Bitcoin, practically the day before. Anyway, you have to still keep making this show forever now.
9:56 Speaker 03 Okay, here is a fact from Peter Marsh, and Peter says, this is very good. At any one time, there must be a Polish person who is northernmost on planet Earth. And so they would be the North Pole.
10:12 Speaker 02 Yep.
10:13 Speaker 03 Okay, not a fact so far. But he says, but Peter says that it's usually very difficult to tell who it might be. But on 23rd of May, 1995, we can be sure it was either Marek Kaminski or Wojciech Moscow. Because they were the first poles to reach the geographic North Pole on that day. So they were the two North Poles at the North Pole.
10:37 Speaker 01 That's lovely.
10:38 Speaker 02 That's wonderful.
10:39 Speaker 01 That's lovely.
10:39 Speaker 03 Isn't it nice? And I thought I'd have a look at the South Poles. And it turns out there is an Arktofski Polish Antarctic Station, which is in the Antarctic, in the South Pole. And basically Polish people live there and do science there. And so there's always like a little community of South Poles as well.
11:00 Speaker 02 That's very good. That does, we can't do it now because we're putting it out, but that is a great quiz question. In 1995, for one day, there were three North Poles.
11:08 Speaker 03 Yeah.
11:09 Speaker 01 Oh, aren't there five already?
11:10 Speaker 03 Yeah.
11:11 Speaker 01 There's geographic, and then there's magnetic, and then there's, um.
11:14 Speaker 02 Okay, well, it's a complicated question, sure, for the quiz, but. Which quiz are you pitching it to?
11:20 Speaker 03 Maybe one of our quizzes that we do for Patreon?
11:22 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah, we could do it the next one. We're, uh, we're doing them quarterly and, uh, we're about to do our first one tonight as we're recording this episode. So, uh, yeah, let's bring it to the next one.
11:31 Speaker 03 Great.
11:32 Speaker 02 Dan's poll quiz.
11:33 Speaker 03 Yep. Oh, no.
11:37 Speaker 02 Uh, shall I bring in another fact here? This is from Andrew Perez, who writes, Joan of Arc once prayed at a chapel in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
11:47 Speaker 03 No.
11:48 Speaker 02 Yes.
11:49 Speaker 03 Not true.
11:50 Speaker 02 True. Is that the dairy state?
11:51 Speaker 03 Uh, Wisconsin is, yeah.
11:53 Speaker 02 Yeah. Yeah, just showing my knowledge.
11:56 Speaker 03 Great.
11:56 Speaker 02 Carry on. What do you know, she didn't, she lived, uh, she, as far as I understood it, she lived, uh, and died in France.
12:01 Speaker 03 Yeah.
12:01 Speaker 02 Yeah.
12:02 Speaker 03 The new world hadn't been discovered at that stage.
12:04 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah, yeah, you're both correct. But she was magic?
12:08 Speaker 03 Or there was another person called Joan of Arc.
12:11 Speaker 02 Oh, that's it.
12:12 Speaker 03 Who played a quarterback for the Green Bay Packers.
12:17 Speaker 02 That's it. No, it's not. Um, no, what this is, is there is a church that was built in 1420 and, um, it's in a, in a town that is southeast of Leon and it was where Joan of Arc prayed.
12:31 Speaker 03 Yeah.
12:32 Speaker 02 Now, there was a very rich American called Gertrude Hill Gavin, who was daughter of an American railroad magnate, and, uh, she was obsessed with Joan of Arc. She learnt that this chapel was, um, up for sale. So she acquired it, she had it dismantled and she had it shipped over to her property in Long Island. And, um, from there, it's been in America ever since. So she-
12:57 Speaker 03 But maybe it's moved from Long Island to Wisconsin?
12:59 Speaker 02 Yeah, I guess so, yeah.
13:00 Speaker 03 That's another journey.
13:01 Speaker 02 Yeah, exactly. What's interesting is this particular church was so beloved by one person in particular, um, who was an architect, that he basically mapped out every single brick and just said, if this was ever dismantled, this is how it would come back together. So the blueprint for how to put it back together was already written for her by this obsessive.
13:20 Speaker 03 So did he like label each brick and say, this one has to go here, this one has to go here?
13:24 Speaker 02 Basically, yeah, basically. Um, so, yeah, so she- She even renamed the chapel so that had Joan's name in the chapel. And in 1933, Pope Pius XI gave her written permission to have mass in that building. So it's officially sanctioned by the Vatican as well. I think we did a fact ages ago about Rosa Parks had a house that was going to be dismantled and just completely destroyed in America, and people wanted to save it. So someone bought it and shipped it over to Berlin in Germany, where it was for years. So you could go and visit Rosa Parks's house, which was, it's not one of her main houses, but somewhere she spent a lot of time. I think her brother lived in it and owned it.
14:04 Speaker 03 She rented it out as an Airbnb for the summer, didn't she?
14:07 Speaker 01 Yeah, you make it sound like she was more of a property lady than anything else, Rosa Parks. But that's why she was getting the bus to and from, of course. It was just to check on the property portfolio.
14:18 Speaker 02 But she, so it's been in Berlin for ages and then America requested that it be sent back for an exhibition. So it went back to America, was shown there, then brought back over to Europe.
14:27 Speaker 01 It's very dicey, all this moving stuff around. I'm not sure how I feel about it.
14:30 Speaker 02 Yeah.
14:31 Speaker 01 It's like they're about to move the biotapestry over here.
14:34 Speaker 03 Are they?
14:34 Speaker 01 Yeah, we're going to get it back.
14:35 Speaker 03 That's good.
14:35 Speaker 01 Briefly.
14:36 Speaker 03 I feel like tapestries are easier to move around than houses.
14:40 Speaker 01 You would think so. They are having the devil of a time.
14:43 Speaker 03 Are they?
14:43 Speaker 01 Because obviously it's so old and they're terribly worried that any movement of more than two millimeters and it'll just fall apart. And it'll be incredibly embarrassing if they open it up at the other end and it's been damaged in transit. So they're making a dummy 900-year-old tapestry, rolling it up and doing the journey with that in this ultra-buffard thing because of potholes and things.
15:01 Speaker 03 Right.
15:02 Speaker 01 And vibrations in the road. Oh, it's gonna be, it's gonna be a nightmare.
15:05 Speaker 03 Would it be easier just to move everyone who wants to see it to France?
15:09 Speaker 01 100%. Absolutely. I can move up and down two millimeters. I'm fine. Have you guys ever seen it?
15:15 Speaker 02 No.
15:15 Speaker 01 Me neither.
15:16 Speaker 03 No, I haven't actually.
15:18 Speaker 01 Oh, Dan's wondering.
15:19 Speaker 02 Was it shown in the British Library a while ago?
15:22 Speaker 01 It was not. It's been in bio for 800 years.
15:24 Speaker 02 I'm gonna, I think I'm gonna say no then.
15:29 Speaker 03 I'm gonna say no on account of the fact I'm not 100% certain where bio is.
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15:50 Speaker 03 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.
16:01 Speaker 04 And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone.
16:06 Speaker 05 One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.
16:12 Speaker 04 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.
16:35 Speaker 01 Here's another fact.
16:35 Speaker 03 Yeah.
16:36 Speaker 01 From Morten Faring. What a great name.
16:39 Speaker 03 Yeah.
16:40 Speaker 01 I suspect it might be Norwegian, Morten.
16:43 Speaker 03 Like Morten Hackett from Aha.
16:45 Speaker 01 Is Morten Hackett Norwegian?
16:46 Speaker 03 Yes.
16:47 Speaker 01 There we go. Well, Morten writes, "The most famous traitor in Norwegian history was named famous traitor."
16:54 Speaker 03 Was that not, is it Quisling?
16:56 Speaker 01 So is a guy called Vidkun Quisling, who was the head of the puppet government in Norway in the Second World War, after the Nazis invaded. And basically.
17:07 Speaker 02 For a very long time, I didn't know what puppet government meant. And I took it to mean the other version of what that is.
17:16 Speaker 03 What's that, Sutty? You want to take over Greenland?
17:22 Speaker 01 Oh, wow. That's really funny. Yeah. Well, he was ahead of that. And he was a, you know, big old collaborator. Anyway, Quisling has become a byword for being a traitor.
17:32 Speaker 03 In English as well.
17:33 Speaker 01 In English and in, yeah, Norwegian. And basically, Vidkun, which is his first name, is a Norse name, which means widely known. So Vidkun Quisling literally means famous traitor. And he is a famous traitor.
17:47 Speaker 03 That's good.
17:48 Speaker 01 He's a, yeah. He was the first Norwegian executed by the state in 75 years.
17:52 Speaker 03 I see.
17:52 Speaker 01 They didn't do it, but they did bring that out of retirement for him.
17:55 Speaker 03 Yes.
17:56 Speaker 01 Yeah, after the war. So bad news.
17:58 Speaker 02 Execute you. Good news, you're gonna be a very interesting fact.
18:01 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah, he tried. Also, I did a bit more reading up on him. He tried to do the world's first ever radio coup d'etat.
18:07 Speaker 03 Interesting.
18:09 Speaker 01 So you go in and you just do a radio broadcast saying, we control everything now.
18:12 Speaker 03 Well, quite often you would see a coup d'etat in, let's say, in Africa or something.
18:17 Speaker 01 Yeah.
18:17 Speaker 03 And the first thing you really see is the army, either side of the former president, saying, we're in charge now.
18:24 Speaker 01 Completely.
18:25 Speaker 03 So you can kind of see where they're coming from.
18:27 Speaker 01 Broadcast is absolutely essential. You've got to seize the means of communication.
18:30 Speaker 03 Yeah, I suppose the problem with radio is people can't see whether or not you're holding their president at gunpoint at that stage.
18:37 Speaker 01 Yes, yes.
18:37 Speaker 03 You have to do very good foley to make them believe what's happening.
18:41 Speaker 01 Yeah.
18:41 Speaker 02 Stamp, stamp, stamp, stamp.
18:43 Speaker 01 We're in charge. Um, yeah, you couldn't do that these days, of course, because there are too many podcasts. It's very hard to seize all the podcasts at the same time.
18:50 Speaker 02 Interesting. You could buy an inserted ad.
18:56 Speaker 03 And if you use the offer code FISH, you can also take over our nearby islands. Um, here's one from Kate Boyle. Kate says botulism cures anal fissures.
19:08 Speaker 01 Oh, gosh. Um, okay. Botulism is bad?
19:13 Speaker 03 In large doses, it's very bad. Even in quite small doses, it's very bad. It's the most poisonous thing, basically.
19:19 Speaker 01 Is it related to botox?
19:21 Speaker 03 It's so related that they're exactly the same thing.
19:23 Speaker 01 I understand.
19:25 Speaker 03 But you put minute amounts of botulism into your wrinkles.
19:29 Speaker 01 Right.
19:30 Speaker 03 And it paralyzes your skin and it removes the wrinkles.
19:33 Speaker 01 Yeah.
19:33 Speaker 03 But yeah, botulism is, is the most poisonous thing you can get. Uh, and because it stops muscle from spasming, it's used to help anal fissures as well as migraines, excessive sweating, overactive bladders and cerebral palsy.
19:47 Speaker 01 Gosh.
19:48 Speaker 02 Okay.
19:48 Speaker 03 It's pretty good.
19:50 Speaker 02 Stuff.
19:50 Speaker 03 Um, 2023 study that I had in my files, um, looked at the brain scans of people who had botox and said that they have different brain activity than the rest of us when they look at happy and angry faces. And that's because when you see someone happy, you kind of mimic their face and it makes you feel more happy. But they can't mimic the faces because they don't have so much botox in their heads.
20:16 Speaker 02 That's so.
20:16 Speaker 03 So it makes you less happy or it makes you less sad.
20:18 Speaker 02 Makes you less sad.
20:19 Speaker 03 Yeah.
20:19 Speaker 02 Do poker players secretly get botox?
20:22 Speaker 03 I would be surprised if they didn't. Because you're always looking for the tiniest little, um, help in poker.
20:29 Speaker 02 Yeah. Could you botox away your tell if it's say like a little twitch in your eye or?
20:33 Speaker 03 Absolutely.
20:34 Speaker 02 How much of you are allowed to, are you allowed, because they wear shades, don't they? Or sometimes?
20:38 Speaker 03 Many of them do, yeah.
20:39 Speaker 02 Are you allowed to wear like a mask?
20:41 Speaker 03 Um.
20:41 Speaker 02 Are you allowed to wear, are you allowed to sit in a bin like with your little eye hole cut out?
20:45 Speaker 03 You can play online.
20:47 Speaker 02 And that's sitting in a bin. That's, you've seen my home setup, I see.
20:53 Speaker 03 Cool.
20:53 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah.
20:54 Speaker 03 That's wonderful. Yeah.
20:55 Speaker 02 Okay, I'll go on here. It's from Mark Vent, um, who I know. I know Mark Vent. He's friends. Yeah. Um, so he has written in saying in Oxford, there's a building where the weather forecast could honestly read between minus 269 degrees and plus 150 million degrees. This is Cullum's fusion reactor, which produces plasma hotter than the sun. And it's right next to a machine that is colder than deep space. So, yeah. Why have they, is that useful for them to be next to each other? No, but it's probably a building that's dealing in.
21:32 Speaker 03 Could be.
21:32 Speaker 02 In, oh, do you mean do they need to be each other? Well, you suck all the heat out of one space and that probably helps you get up towards your 150 million degrees in the other space.
21:39 Speaker 03 Could very well be. It's possible it could work that way.
21:41 Speaker 02 It's like how it's hot sometimes next to the fridge.
21:43 Speaker 03 Behind your fridge.
21:44 Speaker 02 Behind your fridge. It's warm behind your fridge. Exactly. So that's probably what this is.
21:47 Speaker 03 That's what this is.
21:48 Speaker 02 They probably didn't even mean to create the fusion reaction because it was so bloody warm next to this bit. We should use this. This is just an unusable fridge. They just went too far in its coldness and heat.
21:57 Speaker 03 Is there a position between those two places where it's just right?
22:00 Speaker 02 Oh.
22:02 Speaker 01 There must be a bit where you stand there and it's perfect, but you've got to keep rotating.
22:05 Speaker 03 Yes, like a rotisserie chicken.
22:07 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah.
22:11 Speaker 01 Anyway, very cool, very cool.
22:12 Speaker 03 And very hot.
22:15 Speaker 01 Lovely. All right, those are your facts, but now let's have some of our facts because what we're going to do now is everyone who has joined Club Fish, our members' club, at the friend of the podcast here, gets one of our headline facts given to them in perpetuity to love and care for with a certificate. It's great fun. If you want to check it out, go to patreon.com slash no such thing as a fish. You can see all the stuff we've got there, ad-free episodes, lots of bonus content and friends of the podcast certificates. So let's dish out some facts now. Who wants to go first?
22:46 Speaker 02 I can do that.
22:46 Speaker 01 Yeah.
22:47 Speaker 02 This is a fact that now belongs to Dave Cronister. Dave, this is a fact from episode 25, rats wearing polyester pants can't get erections.
22:57 Speaker 01 Very nice.
22:58 Speaker 03 Not if you're a rat.
22:59 Speaker 01 Yeah, bad, bad. Is it polyester, is it the polyester or is it the, as opposed to linen?
23:05 Speaker 02 I think this was, yeah.
23:06 Speaker 01 Because obviously a rat in linen, little linen trousers would be very sexy.
23:10 Speaker 03 Silk.
23:11 Speaker 01 Oh.
23:12 Speaker 02 I think this was research that we got from Mary Roach. I think she wrote in a book of hers.
23:17 Speaker 03 She might well have done, yeah.
23:18 Speaker 02 I think it was Bonk and I think she went and she visited. Yeah, it's a wonderful book. I mean, she's, she's one of our favourite writers.
23:25 Speaker 03 The Rat Taylor, didn't she?
23:27 Speaker 02 Yeah.
23:27 Speaker 01 That's a great fact.
23:28 Speaker 03 Okay, here's another one. This is now under the custodianship of Tom Watsham. And Tom, this is your fact. During the First World War, entertainments for the troops included pillow fights, wheelbarrow races and wrestling on the backs of mules.
23:49 Speaker 01 It does make it sound fun.
23:50 Speaker 03 It does. Andrew Hunter-Murray, you were the one who said this the first time round.
23:53 Speaker 01 Was I?
23:54 Speaker 03 Yeah.
23:54 Speaker 01 Well, I can remember every word of the fact itself because we've got a list of them in front of us. I don't remember the pillow fights. I have just finished today reading Journey's End, which is an absolutely classic play set in the First World War by someone who's been through the First World War. And there is not a pillow fight to be seen. I'll tell you that. He very much edited that out of his mise en scène. I'll dish one out.
24:15 Speaker 03 Yep.
24:15 Speaker 01 This one goes to Matthew Akon. It's that the atmosphere in Venus is so hot that if you took a pizza out of the freezer there, it would cook in three seconds.
24:25 Speaker 02 No, you could do that in Oxford in that building.
24:29 Speaker 02 Take it out of the special minus 269 degree freezer. Frisbee it across. By the time it lands, perfect.
24:37 Speaker 01 Perfect.
24:38 Speaker 02 Lovely.
24:39 Speaker 03 Yeah, that was my fact. I don't remember much about it. Apart from, I don't think I worked it out myself. I think it was something I read elsewhere.
24:47 Speaker 01 Oh, that was before you went on your 10 year binge of creating the facts.
24:51 Speaker 03 But I think the idea was it would cook it, but it would be very crispy on the outside. And perhaps not exactly unfrozen on the inside.
24:59 Speaker 01 Yeah.
25:00 Speaker 03 Like if I do a barbecue, for instance.
25:02 Speaker 02 You really want to give it five seconds, don't you?
25:06 Speaker 02 Let's have another one. Okay, here's another fact, and this is going to Melanie Young. Melanie, this was one of my facts from episode 25. In Iceland, there is a phone app which tells you whether you're related to the person you're hitting on.
25:20 Speaker 03 That's an interesting one because there have been debunks of that.
25:24 Speaker 02 Yeah.
25:25 Speaker 03 But I think that it did exist. But I don't think it was like something you could buy in the app store or anything like that. Basically Iceland got all of this data and put it, made it available online so that anyone could use it. And some people as a project came up with this idea and they did actually make the app, but it wasn't commercially available.
25:43 Speaker 02 Oh, well, there we go. Well, it had a motto that went along with it, which was bump phones before you bump in bed. And quite a nice idea because it is a small ish population over there.
25:53 Speaker 01 Yeah, you probably know if someone's your cousin though, would you?
25:57 Speaker 02 Of course.
25:57 Speaker 01 You guys don't know your cousins?
25:59 Speaker 02 Sorry, not your cousins. You guys don't know that your cousins? Oh God. And I saw you kissing. Oh no. Oh no.
26:08 Speaker 03 No, I know what you mean.
26:09 Speaker 02 As in like, you'll know your immediate family and anyone who's more than a few cousins away, I think is fair game.
26:15 Speaker 01 Oh wow, okay.
26:18 Speaker 02 But as in.
26:18 Speaker 01 Plot twist.
26:19 Speaker 02 As in people used to marry their first cousins all the time and sometimes people still do. And it's like, it's, you know, it's nobody's, it's nobody's business.
26:26 Speaker 03 Yeah, but I think there are more people who are second or third cousins that they don't necessarily know about in Iceland than there might be in another country. Because of the small population and because no one really goes in and out very much.
26:38 Speaker 02 As it were.
26:40 Speaker 03 The problem is they're going to adapt, isn't there? But yeah, like the people who have lived there for many generations.
26:46 Speaker 01 Right, okay, okay.
26:48 Speaker 03 Okay, here is a fact, and this was a fact given to us by Simon Rich, the author.
26:54 Speaker 01 Simon Rich, yeah, so he was a writer for SNL. I think he was possibly the youngest writer that they ever had, and he's a brilliant short fiction writer. He writes a lot for The New Yorker in America. Very funny.
27:06 Speaker 03 Very good. And the custodian of this fact is also writer Galen, presumably.
27:12 Speaker 01 The ancient Greek physician.
27:14 Speaker 03 That's what it seems like, I don't know. It is that we've been told that this person is called Galen, whether that's a non deplume or whether that's your actual name, I don't know. But it doesn't matter because your fact, forever in your possession now, is that Coco, the gorilla who knows sign language, has owned and cared for three cats over her life.
27:35 Speaker 01 Did she look after them well?
27:37 Speaker 03 I think she did.
27:38 Speaker 01 Did she eat the cats? Did she eat the cats, is what I'm trying to say.
27:40 Speaker 03 I'm not sure. She did. No.
27:42 Speaker 01 I think she looked after them.
27:43 Speaker 03 I feel like if Coco, if you were looking after Coco and you gave her a cat and she ate it, you might not give her another one.
27:49 Speaker 01 No, you'd think she's full up, that's fine. Now, this is the perfect time to give her a cat when she's just finished.
27:54 Speaker 03 Even if she's sign languaging, saying, please, can I have another cat? You probably would sign language now.
27:59 Speaker 01 You know what pester power is like. I mean, people, you know, and once you've got one cat, you often get another one, don't you? Because they're very Moorish.
28:06 Speaker 03 Yeah.
28:09 Speaker 01 Well, congratulations, Galen. This one goes out to Irene Villatora. Irene, congratulations, because your fact forever is now. See if you can guess who said this one, Irene. Here it is. It's easier to escape a female yeti than a male yeti, because females have such long dangling boobs, they have to throw them over their shoulder before chasing in case they trip.
28:32 Speaker 03 You know what, Dan? I don't remember in the early days you having such wacky facts literally every week.
28:38 Speaker 02 Yeah.
28:39 Speaker 03 I thought that you mostly had straight ones.
28:41 Speaker 02 I think we were enjoying the playground of these in the early days.
28:47 Speaker 01 Yeah, no one was listening. It didn't matter.
28:48 Speaker 02 Yeah. And then the feedback started coming in and we moved on. No, this is, um, this is almost a sort of classic fact of the show in that it's been brought up in live shows and kind of occasionally makes a return. I made an interesting discovery recently, a sort of update on this, which is that it is, um, and I should say, this is, this is, this is a fact with air quotes going around it. It is believed by, it is a fact within the world of people who believe in Yetis.
29:16 Speaker 03 Yeti people.
29:16 Speaker 02 So it's like, it's an interesting thing for them. That's a reality. It's a fact in their world. Um, so this is when you were being chased downhill. It's easier to escape a female Yeti. What I discovered recently is that according to these same experts, it's easier to escape a male Yeti when they're running uphill because they have such long dangling testicles that they will bang on the rocks as they're running up and fall over.
29:38 Speaker 03 Like that dog of your friend.
29:39 Speaker 02 Like Dave the sausage dog.
29:43 Speaker 03 Did that ever make it to a show?
29:44 Speaker 02 Oh, it did. Yeah, yeah. Yes. Like Dave the sausage dog, who was the, uh, dog of the producer of the new Lily Allen album.
29:53 Speaker 03 Oh, wow. Bringing it back to Lily.
29:55 Speaker 02 Yeah.
29:55 Speaker 03 She probably could have afforded a different producer if she'd have got all that Bitcoin money. She could have bought that dog a golden posing pouch.
30:07 Speaker 03 Okay. Are we gonna do a couple more of these?
30:09 Speaker 02 I think let's do only a couple though.
30:10 Speaker 03 Okay. So this one, if I wasn't sure whether Galen was the real name of the last person, I suspect even more that this might be a nom de plume. Uh, but the next fact goes to someone called Smokey Big Spliff.
30:22 Speaker 02 Oh, fantastic.
30:23 Speaker 03 Smokey, your fact is that the Kama Sutra suggests 64 arts to practice alongside sex, including solving word puzzles, teaching birds how to talk, tattooing, making beds, and playing musical glasses filled with water.
30:40 Speaker 01 That's very nice.
30:41 Speaker 02 So good.
30:42 Speaker 01 Some of those might be nice if you've also just Smokey the Big Spliff.
30:46 Speaker 01 I presume?
30:47 Speaker 03 I assume so.
30:47 Speaker 01 I don't know about word puzzles. That feels like slightly high effort for, for that. But playing musical glasses filled with water? You could probably spend hours doing that.
30:55 Speaker 03 I feel like I've never been to one of those parties, but I imagine that's what they're doing.
31:00 Speaker 02 I love that fact.
31:01 Speaker 01 That's a great fact. The Kama Sutra, that was one of yours, James?
31:03 Speaker 03 Yeah.
31:04 Speaker 01 Well, you were working your way through at the time, weren't you?
31:05 Speaker 03 I was, yeah. I'm still up to the third one.
31:10 Speaker 03 Skip one and two.
31:12 Speaker 03 A bit too physical for me.
31:14 Speaker 01 Oh, that's very nice. Do you have one last one?
31:16 Speaker 03 Yeah.
31:17 Speaker 01 Here's this one. It goes out to Courtney V. Congratulations, Courtney. Your fact is now that, at any given moment, there are more than 15 trillion tonnes of water above the earth.
31:28 Speaker 03 Fantastic.
31:29 Speaker 01 Clouds.
31:30 Speaker 03 Clouds.
31:30 Speaker 01 Clouds.
31:31 Speaker 03 It's clouds. The fact is, clouds exist.
31:33 Speaker 01 Yeah. It's more about the fact that someone added up all the clouds, isn't it? Like, that's pretty cool.
31:39 Speaker 02 It doesn't fully make sense to me.
31:41 Speaker 03 I think there are different ways of counting.
31:43 Speaker 02 Yeah.
31:43 Speaker 03 Like, it's, I think you can extrapolate in these situations.
31:47 Speaker 02 I think you'd have to in this case, yeah.
31:49 Speaker 03 Because the thing is, they do move.
31:51 Speaker 02 Yeah.
31:51 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah.
31:52 Speaker 02 And they do empty.
31:53 Speaker 01 Yeah.
31:53 Speaker 02 And they refill.
31:54 Speaker 03 They've not got a list of, like, the one that looks like a giraffe. The one that looks like Mother Teresa.
32:03 Speaker 01 So congratulations, Courtney. Congratulations to everyone who's just been awarded a fact. I'm saying Courtney V., Smokey Big Spliff, Irene Villatora, Galen, Melanie Young, Matthew, Tom, and Dave. Congratulations to all of you. I hope you enjoy those facts. If you would like to get your own fact dedicated to you, just go to patreon.com slash nosuchthingasafish and join at the friend of the podcast tier, or join at one of the other tiers where you can still get ad-free episodes, lots of bonus content, and much, much more. That's it for this little fish. We'll see you again in a few days for another big fish. Bye for now.
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