Pod Insights No Such Thing As A Fish Little Fish: Still Rockin' The Cloaca About this episode Dan, James and Andy discuss YOUR facts, including Nottingham and wedding hams. Dan and Andy argue over Ben Stiller movies. Again. And we name eight more Friend of the Podcast fact custodians.
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0:43 Speaker 01 Hello and welcome to another episode of Little Fish. This is your bonus Monday episode where we put down our four favorite facts from the last seven days, and we go through your favorite facts that you've submitted to podcast at qi.com. Andy trawls through the email inbox, he picks out the best choice selections, and we bring them here. So why don't we get into it? Who wants to start off?
1:05 Speaker 02 I'll start off. I'm James, by the way.
1:07 Speaker 01 Nice to meet you.
1:09 Speaker 02 I have a fact from someone called Thomas, Thomas Martin.
1:13 Speaker 01 That's a nice name. My name's Andy.
1:15 Speaker 02 He mentioned you in the intro.
1:17 Speaker 01 Did he?
1:17 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:18 Speaker 01 Well, I feel like we're off the blocks.
1:20 Speaker 02 What's Thomas? Thomas Martin writes that the richest person in the world lives in Nottingham.
1:26 Speaker 01 Oh, interesting. Uh, okay, shoe trillionaire? Nottingham was a big shoe country, wasn't it?
1:33 Speaker 02 Uh, that's Northampton, I think.
1:35 Speaker 01 Sorry? Nottingham is...
1:37 Speaker 02 Nottingham has a goose there.
1:39 Speaker 01 Has caves?
1:40 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah, lots of caves in there.
1:42 Speaker 01 Cave, I'll say somebody's monetized caves.
1:45 Speaker 02 Dan, any thoughts?
1:46 Speaker 01 Well, I'm just thinking Robin Hood's from the area.
1:48 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah.
1:49 Speaker 01 I mean, imagine bumping into the richest man on earth on the road. That is a, that's a good payday.
1:54 Speaker 02 You could give it to the poorest man in the world.
1:55 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:57 Speaker 03 Here's the thing, though. I'm pretty sure Elon Musk is the richest person alive, so he must be from Nottingham. Is this a clever riddle that Thomas has posed us?
2:05 Speaker 02 His money is just on paper, really. And in a way, you could say that this person's money is just on paper as well, because this person has got 63 quadrillion pounds, but they can only spend it in one particular coffee shop in Nottingham, because someone gave them a gift card, and there was a little typo on the gift card. And the 10 pound balance to this place called 200 Degrees Coffee actually came through as 63 quadrillion.
2:35 Speaker 03 That's really funny. That's really funny. And if you can spend it all in the coffee shop within a month, you get to keep everything.
2:42 Speaker 02 It's like Brewster's 63 quadrillions. Yeah, amazing. That's fantastic.
2:48 Speaker 03 That's so charming. I love it. I love those stories. I love them. Yeah.
2:52 Speaker 02 Do you remember the 6th of October 2016?
2:56 Speaker 03 Of course.
2:57 Speaker 02 The night of that.
2:59 Speaker 03 No, I just remember the daytime.
3:01 Speaker 02 Yeah. Well, probably when you were asleep, because I'm talking midnight, everyone in the UK lost 10% of their worth.
3:08 Speaker 03 Oh.
3:09 Speaker 02 Literally everyone.
3:11 Speaker 03 Is this like a gravity thing?
3:14 Speaker 02 No, what happened was, around that time, Francois Hollande did a speech about Britain. And a lot of the transactions in the stock markets and in the financial markets are done by computers. And he did this, and it triggered off a mini sell-off of sterling.
3:34 Speaker 03 Right.
3:35 Speaker 02 And then the computers sort of saw that, and then sold more, and then sold more. And these programs all started selling loads of sterling. Then there was a second sell-off limit that was hit, and then even more started being sold. And then it all got fixed before we woke up in the morning.
3:53 Speaker 02 So within two minutes of this happening, 8% of the value of sterling was wiped off. And then when the human traders caught up, they sort of fixed it all. So only if you'd gone to a bureau de change at midnight on that day and tried to change your pounds into euros, you could have had a problem, but for everyone else, it didn't make any difference at all.
4:14 Speaker 03 That's so funny. That's like a financial version of that film Night at the Museum.
4:18 Speaker 02 Is it?
4:18 Speaker 03 Yeah.
4:19 Speaker 02 What happens in that?
4:20 Speaker 03 Well, everything goes crazy in the museum every night and Ben Stiller has to fix it all before the morning.
4:24 Speaker 02 Oh, and then does it get fixed?
4:26 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
4:27 Speaker 02 It's like a financial version of The Simpsons, isn't it? Because whatever happens in The Simpsons, by the end of the episode, they're always back to normal.
4:34 Speaker 03 Right, okay. Can I just say, I'm staggered that one of us has not seen Night at the Museum, Dan.
4:40 Speaker 03 What? I'm staggered you haven't seen Night at the Museum.
4:42 Speaker 01 No, I just didn't accept your premise that it was similar to this situation. It becomes a museum that is sentient. Everything is sentient all of a sudden.
4:49 Speaker 03 Yeah, true.
4:50 Speaker 01 The money didn't become sentient.
4:51 Speaker 02 But then the markets traded by themselves.
4:53 Speaker 03 Uh huh.
4:54 Speaker 02 So there is a little bit of sentience there.
4:56 Speaker 01 Okay, well, that's still more space odyssey, you know, it's like it's a sentient AI as opposed to a waxwork of Roosevelt.
5:04 Speaker 03 This is why our film podcast didn't work, okay? I just want to say that.
5:09 Speaker 03 I'll do a fact.
5:10 Speaker 02 Yep.
5:10 Speaker 03 Uh, this is a fact about Canada and it comes in from Martin Williams. Good Canadian name.
5:16 Speaker 02 Hmm.
5:17 Speaker 03 Um, this is about Wood Buffalo National Park. It's the largest park in Canada, right?
5:23 Speaker 01 Do at night, the wooden buffalo become sentient and run amok?
5:26 Speaker 03 Very funny.
5:27 Speaker 01 Okay.
5:28 Speaker 03 Um, it's just about the size of this park.
5:30 Speaker 02 Okay.
5:31 Speaker 03 Some parks are big, right?
5:32 Speaker 02 Yeah, Hyde Park.
5:33 Speaker 03 Hyde Park, pretty big.
5:34 Speaker 02 Yeah.
5:35 Speaker 03 This park is 44,000 square kilometres. It is bigger than Denmark and if it became an independent nation, it would be the 130th largest country in the world.
5:45 Speaker 02 Right.
5:46 Speaker 03 Which I love. And Martin has done some more maths, which I respect.
5:52 Speaker 02 Sorry, point of order?
5:53 Speaker 03 Yep.
5:53 Speaker 02 Um, Denmark owns Greenland.
5:55 Speaker 03 Yeah, Martin.
5:58 Speaker 02 So actually Denmark is the largest country in Europe if you don't count Russia.
6:03 Speaker 03 Really good point. Does it own Greenland or was it one of those funny things where Greenland owns itself but it's governed from?
6:09 Speaker 02 It's the other way around. So Denmark owns it, but Greenland governs itself.
6:13 Speaker 03 I understand. I understand. Okay.
6:15 Speaker 01 Time of recording, of course.
6:16 Speaker 03 Time of recording. All right. Well, I'll do. I'll do the rest of Martin's email anyway, because it's brilliant. Collectively, the 39 national parks and reserves of Canada have an area of 343,000 square kilometres, larger than the Republic of the Congo and over 40% larger than the entire UK.
6:31 Speaker 02 This was why my picnic failed in Canada because I'm like to my mates, I'll see you in the park.
6:36 Speaker 03 Just middle of the park here. So that's how big they are. Despite this, not one of them boasts a Waitrose or Wetherspoons location. I am aware of these chain institutions almost exclusively due to your podcast, which mentions them curiously often. This has piqued my own curiosity and should I ever travel to the UK, I will most assuredly visit a Wetherspoons.
6:55 Speaker 01 Okay.
6:55 Speaker 02 It is interesting that you can learn quite a bit from our character probably by the various institutions that we mention on this show.
7:02 Speaker 03 Yeah, exactly. And Martin says, the one he's, he's already picked the Wetherspoons he'll go to. He says, I'll go to the mechanical elephant in Margate in the hope of bumping into Dan. Hopefully, hopefully it looks better in person than the photos online.
7:16 Speaker 02 That's a bit unfair. I mean, sure, he hasn't combed his hair today, but.
7:23 Speaker 02 Go on, Dan, what are you saying?
7:25 Speaker 01 I won't be in that one. Obviously I'm in Ramsgate at the far superior Wetherspoons. I don't want to give the impression, by the way, that I go to Wetherspoons. I've been to that one.
7:35 Speaker 02 There's nothing wrong with going to Wetherspoons.
7:37 Speaker 01 I don't want to be the Wetherspoons guy, though.
7:38 Speaker 03 You're not the Wetherspoons guy. You're the wife guy. You can't be both.
7:44 Speaker 01 All right, let's move on to another one. This one has been sent in by Pete Sorrell Cameron. He says, I don't know if you have covered this before. I don't think it's an outrageous fact, but it's always tickled me that Oscar nominated actor Michael B. Jordan's father is called Michael A. Jordan.
8:02 Speaker 02 That's really good. I've never heard that before.
8:04 Speaker 01 That's really good. I try to look in more to see if there are any other initials that were in sequence.
8:11 Speaker 03 Well, there's Michael AA Jordan and then there's Michael AAA Jordan, who's half the size.
8:15 Speaker 01 Yes.
8:15 Speaker 03 Yeah.
8:16 Speaker 01 Well, Michael, so his dad, Michael B. Jordan, is not an actor. He works as a supervisor at John F. Kennedy Airport, JFK, of course, son of J E K.
8:26 Speaker 03 No.
8:27 Speaker 01 No.
8:27 Speaker 03 No.
8:28 Speaker 01 Not true.
8:28 Speaker 03 Not true.
8:29 Speaker 01 You had me. No, he was, he was JPK, his dad. And then weirdly, JPK's dad was PJK. So that's a whole new game there.
8:40 Speaker 03 What does the P stand for?
8:41 Speaker 01 Um, well, who knows? Patrick, I believe.
8:45 Speaker 03 Who knows?
8:45 Speaker 01 Who knows?
8:46 Speaker 03 Who knows?
8:46 Speaker 01 But I'm gonna say Patrick.
8:48 Speaker 03 Okay.
8:48 Speaker 01 I believe.
8:49 Speaker 03 Okay.
8:49 Speaker 01 Um, yeah, just quite fun. I, I love that little bit of sequencing.
8:53 Speaker 03 Yeah, really good.
8:54 Speaker 02 Really nice.
8:55 Speaker 01 The only one that I would thought of, which was another confusing version of that is same first names. So you guys remember Evelyn Waugh, where Evelyn Waugh had a wife who was also called Evelyn?
9:05 Speaker 03 Yes.
9:05 Speaker 01 So the way that the friends distinguished them was he was Hevelin and she was Shevelin.
9:10 Speaker 02 Okay. And they had a child called Ethelyn.
9:16 Speaker 03 Yeah, lovely fact.
9:17 Speaker 01 Yeah, great fact.
9:18 Speaker 02 Um, here's one from Tony Elquist, and Tony said, "Around the year 1000, French peasant Lutard of Vertus was commanded by God to preach against certain practices of the Church, including tithes, oaths, sacraments, and the veneration of the cross. Eventually, he was branded a heretic and killed himself by throwing himself in a well. The way God chose to communicate with him was via a swarm of bees, a swarm of bees that flew into his anus."
9:50 Speaker 02 Well done if anyone saw where that sentence was going.
9:53 Speaker 03 I'm starting to see why he threw himself into a well. I think the constant bees flying into your anus would be his.
10:00 Speaker 02 Actually, quite interestingly, the bees flew into his A.
10:04 Speaker 01 Yes, they did.
10:09 Speaker 03 So sorry, he was, did you say he was a saint?
10:11 Speaker 02 Uh, he was, no, he was a peasant.
10:13 Speaker 03 Okay, you can be both.
10:16 Speaker 02 Absolutely. Many of the best ones.
10:18 Speaker 03 Yeah.
10:19 Speaker 02 Were both. Uh, but no, he was a heretic.
10:21 Speaker 03 Oh, sorry, okay.
10:23 Speaker 02 Thought he was a heretic, so I'm sure some people venerate him, because that's the thing with heretics. Like, usually the majority of people don't like you, but there's usually a few.
10:31 Speaker 03 Like JD Vance.
10:35 Speaker 02 Are we saying he's a saint or a heretic?
10:36 Speaker 03 Heretic, I think.
10:37 Speaker 02 Okay.
10:37 Speaker 03 Yeah, I believe. At that time of recording, he's beefing with the Pope about matters of Catholic theology. Like, that is honestly bringing a knife to a gunfight.
10:45 Speaker 02 It really is.
10:45 Speaker 03 Not that the Pope would approve of either fight, but still. No, so sorry, God communicated with this heretic by flying a swarm of bees up his bottom.
10:52 Speaker 02 That's according to Tony, yeah.
10:55 Speaker 01 Amazing. What are the bees communicating? Yes.
11:00 Speaker 03 Yeah.
11:00 Speaker 01 Right, so it's like an alarm.
11:02 Speaker 03 Hi honey, I'm home.
11:03 Speaker 01 Yeah.
11:04 Speaker 03 In your anus.
11:05 Speaker 02 It could have been worse. They could have communicated him, with him through his nostril, which we know is the most painful place to be stung by a bee.
11:12 Speaker 03 Yeah.
11:12 Speaker 02 According to Schmidt.
11:14 Speaker 03 Yeah.
11:15 Speaker 02 The Schmidt Pain Index.
11:16 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah.
11:17 Speaker 02 Um, do you know, do you know what scaphism is?
11:20 Speaker 03 Scaphism?
11:21 Speaker 01 Is it a, is it a kind of heresy?
11:23 Speaker 02 Um, no, but it's something that could happen if you were heretical.
11:27 Speaker 03 Oh, okay.
11:28 Speaker 02 Uh, it was a. Yeah, a method of execution. Uh, and it was done by the Persians, according to Plutarch. Uh, and he described that the person who was to be killed was trapped between two boats, one on top of the other. So like you're inside an Easter egg kind of thing. And your head and your limbs are sticking out, but they're covered in milk and honey. And you're basically eaten by insects. That's your punishment.
11:54 Speaker 03 Oh, okay.
11:55 Speaker 02 It's death by insects, basically.
11:56 Speaker 03 Between two boats?
11:58 Speaker 02 Yeah.
11:59 Speaker 01 Yeah, I didn't fully understand that.
12:00 Speaker 02 So, like, imagine, imagine two, like, rowboats.
12:04 Speaker 03 Oh, rowboats, yeah.
12:04 Speaker 02 Like, it's not two ferries.
12:07 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, yeah.
12:08 Speaker 02 So it's like one rowboat on top of the other, so you have.
12:11 Speaker 03 Like an egg, yeah.
12:12 Speaker 02 Like an egg, yeah.
12:13 Speaker 03 I see, yes.
12:14 Speaker 01 Yeah.
12:14 Speaker 02 Um, so yeah, but it was basically just a place to hold your body down while you had to stick your bits out. And then the insects would eat your bits.
12:22 Speaker 03 Crikey.
12:24 Speaker 03 No fun, no fun being a heretic back in the day. No.
12:26 Speaker 02 No.
12:29 Speaker 02 You would say this has got to be the heretics era, really.
12:31 Speaker 03 Absolutely.
12:32 Speaker 02 Doesn't it?
12:33 Speaker 03 There's never been a nicer time. It'd be quite funny to see an animation of, say, like, Richard Dawkins being subjected to all the different ways that heretics were murdered back in the day. Wow. Well, just to give us an idea of like, what, like, he's living in a good time. He's able to go on stage and say these things. Yeah. A different time, he would have had, I didn't know that, like, we didn't, we didn't know that as an option of death.
12:55 Speaker 02 Has he been cancelled, Richard Dawkins?
12:57 Speaker 03 Not as far as I'm aware, no, no, no.
12:59 Speaker 02 Because that's the modern punishment of a heretic, isn't it?
13:01 Speaker 03 Food for thought. I'll take the cancellation, please, over. I'll have the bees up the bum.
13:09 Speaker 02 You get the bees on the bum. You have to go between two boats while insects eat your arms, and you get a Netflix special.
13:21 Speaker 03 Here's a great one from Anna Lisa, with two eyes, who.
13:26 Speaker 02 Hungry noses and mouths.
13:28 Speaker 03 Very strong.
13:31 Speaker 03 In the west coast of Estonia, we used to have about 10,000 Estonia Swedes living. They moved to what is now Estonia about 1,000 years ago.
13:41 Speaker 02 Wow.
13:42 Speaker 03 And stayed rather insulated until the second one bore, isolated, I suppose.
13:48 Speaker 03 But in the olden days, this is just a cool fact, which Anna wants to let us know, about a thing called ham fish, as she calls it. In the olden days, it was a tradition that every year after a girl was born, a smoked ham would be put away and stored for her wedding. So a few days before the big day, 20 or so well-aged hams would be available, and you'd then boil them to make them edible, and you'd have all your, like, wedding, wedding hams.
14:13 Speaker 02 It's a really nice idea.
14:15 Speaker 03 Yeah. I think that's a really good idea.
14:18 Speaker 02 It's just putting a little bit aside. It's like a bottom drawer, we would call it.
14:21 Speaker 03 It's like a junior riser.
14:23 Speaker 01 A little bit like that, yeah. It would have been the equivalent, yeah. It's slightly more similar to my thing where you literally put things away for the wedding. Yes, I see that. I do see that. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, I like, I like the analogy. Yeah. And there'll be government campaigns saying, you really should put hams away. You really should salt hams and store them for your daughter's eventual wedding. Nothing, no word about what the son's got. I suppose if there's one wedding, it's, you know, at this time. Yeah, you got half a ham. You got half a ham. Yeah, yeah. That's very good. That is very cool. Um, Andy, we, I'm sure we've said this before many times, but you pick all these facts for us, don't you? You sort of curate what James and I get. Um, I just don't know why you pick these particular themes for me sometimes. I'm really sorry.
15:07 Speaker 01 Well, there's Rob Walters sent in saying you can absorb aspirin through your skin, which is why you shouldn't masturbate for too long with liniment.
15:15 Speaker 01 Thank you, Andy. Yeah. What's liniment? Liniment is, um, well, Dan, Dan knows all about it.
15:24 Speaker 01 Is it made from the willow tree or something? I think it must be a medical, medical goo. Okay. I think so. I think it's a, yeah, it's got, it's heated as well. It's one of those heat lubricants. Oh dear. Or like deep heat? Yeah. Or crumbs. I believe so. Okay. Well, we've got a second reason. I mean, I haven't, I haven't used it in quite a while.
15:43 Speaker 01 But not after that first time, but I think that was liniment. Yeah. Okay. Um, yeah. And then this other one sent in by John Turbot. Here's the headline from Scientific American. This may be the oldest butthole imprint on earth. Yeah. I'm just getting a lot of butthole and masturbation stuff from you in my DMs. James has the bees up his bottom. I don't. That's fair enough. What I would say is if I see a fact that's really good, but I don't want to read it out myself, um, I think I know, I know a patsy.
16:16 Speaker 02 Can you tell us about the oldest bum?
16:17 Speaker 01 Yeah, this is actually very interesting.
16:20 Speaker 03 You're welcome.
16:20 Speaker 01 So they discovered an animal squatting in the mud. And it was preserved. And it's the first time that they've seen this. Now, it's a cloaca, right? So it's the exit point of multiple different things.
16:34 Speaker 03 So they didn't find the animal. It's the oldest fossilized imprint of a bottom.
16:37 Speaker 01 Yeah, exactly. And it's around 299 million years ago that there was a volcanic eruption. And this was buried in a patch of mud in what is today, central Germany. Yeah, so it's fossilized, the fossilized butthole imprint, as Scientific American puts it.
16:55 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's a...
16:57 Speaker 03 I do love that idea that we've got a more organized filing system for what we let out of our bodies.
17:03 Speaker 02 What do you mean? Like, has in birds, that everything goes in and out of one hole, but we have a few different options?
17:09 Speaker 01 Exactly. We have a few different holes in which we allow the urine out or the poo out.
17:14 Speaker 02 Thank you, Professor.
17:16 Speaker 01 I'm still reading the Scientific American article here.
17:20 Speaker 03 What feels like progress is what you're saying?
17:23 Speaker 01 Yeah, I feel like I'm more organized than you guys say I am, just by the nature of that.
17:30 Speaker 03 And I assume from how you are in your day to day working life that you were still rocking the cloaca.
17:36 Speaker 03 I just sort of thought, Dan wouldn't have got around to sorting this out yet.
17:40 Speaker 01 What a sort of like really posh schoolboy bird that would be at school.
17:44 Speaker 02 I honestly think you haven't even reached cloaca status. You're like a shipworm that only has one opening. So you're... Everything goes in and out, including the food goes in and the poo comes out and the wee goes out. And the breathing happens all in one hole.
18:00 Speaker 01 Well, it's good to work. I won't think of me.
18:05 Speaker 03 Bet you wish you'd been a bit nicer about my night at the museum analogy now.
18:08 Speaker 01 Now I think that was really cool, I know.
18:10 Speaker 03 Yeah. Here's one from C.C. Lamb. This is about a really interesting sounding place in southern Utah, USA.
18:21 Speaker 03 My husband and I were visiting St. George, Utah, and... I drove a rental car from Las Vegas up to meet him. And as I drove, I could see the gorgeous Virgin River, as it's called, as I crossed it on my way to Zion Country. I learned shortly afterwards that the Virgin River I crossed, that's its name, was named after a Mr. Virgin, who was an early settler of the region.
18:46 Speaker 03 It's named after Thomas Virgin, 19th century settler.
18:49 Speaker 02 That's very good. And that was one where you tried to trick us.
18:52 Speaker 03 Yeah, how'd it go?
18:53 Speaker 02 Tried to slip it in.
18:54 Speaker 03 Yeah.
18:54 Speaker 02 Unlike anyone did to Mr. Virgin.
18:57 Speaker 03 Brilliant. Superb. While in St George, we went to visit a fascinating dormant volcano in Snow Canyon State Park, named, of course, after Lorenzo and the rafters Snow.
19:07 Speaker 02 No.
19:08 Speaker 03 Who were the early Mormon pioneers in the area.
19:10 Speaker 02 Oh, that's very good.
19:12 Speaker 03 Snow Canyon.
19:13 Speaker 02 Yeah.
19:14 Speaker 03 That's funny.
19:14 Speaker 02 That's fantastic.
19:15 Speaker 03 That's very good. Lovely, lovely double, double tap there.
19:18 Speaker 01 Lovely double tap. Well, hey, listen, thank you, everyone, for sending in your facts. Please do keep them coming in podcast at qi.com. We love going through these and reading them out here. But before we wrap up the episode, one more thing to do, which is if you are part of the highest tier of Club Fish, which is our private members' club on Patreon. It's called Friend of the Podcast, that tier, you will be eligible to become custodian of one of the facts from the 12-year history of Fish. And so we've been going through the big, long list, dishing them out, and we've got eight new custodians to give away today. Who wants to go first?
19:51 Speaker 02 I'll go first. This one goes out to Stuart Earl. And Stuart, your fact is that the Statue of Liberty originally wore a headscarf.
20:01 Speaker 03 Hmm.
20:02 Speaker 02 Yes.
20:03 Speaker 03 I think this was one of my facts.
20:04 Speaker 02 It was.
20:05 Speaker 03 Yeah. And I remember, because I was, I was looking at the Statue of Liberty's face before it was erected on top of the body. And I thought it looked exactly like Elvis Presley. So I started digging into it.
20:17 Speaker 02 How interesting. Was it based on the mother of Bertoldi or something?
20:21 Speaker 03 Yes, I think it was.
20:23 Speaker 02 How interesting that she looked like Elvis Presley.
20:25 Speaker 03 Yeah, so that's interesting in its own right, isn't it? Anyway, I started looking into it. And then there was this whole thing about Egyptology at the time. Someone had written a book about the sort of obsession with Egypt at the time. And it was just a fact within that.
20:40 Speaker 02 Interesting fact, Elvis Presley wore size 479 blue suede shoes.
20:47 Speaker 03 Brilliant fact.
20:49 Speaker 01 We've got to explain, that's the she's, the sandal size.
20:52 Speaker 03 Yeah.
20:53 Speaker 01 Of the Statue of Liberty.
20:54 Speaker 02 And I'm also, I think I might have got the number wrong, but anyway.
20:57 Speaker 03 I think it was 800 and something.
20:58 Speaker 02 Was it?
20:58 Speaker 03 I think it was 879. I think you got that. I think that was that. Anyway, um, shall I do one?
21:02 Speaker 01 Yeah.
21:03 Speaker 03 This one goes out to a llama. A polo mint takes 42 and a half minutes to dissolve if you stick it up your nose.
21:13 Speaker 02 Very good.
21:13 Speaker 03 We did this at a live show.
21:14 Speaker 02 Yeah, we did it.
21:15 Speaker 03 When I say we did this at a live show, Dan, you, I believe, did it at a live show. You stuck a polo up your nose.
21:19 Speaker 01 Yes, because, um, we, we recorded over an hour. So I thought, okay, this is interesting. It might, it might be done by the time we finish.
21:26 Speaker 02 Did it not sting like, uh, liniments on the penis?
21:31 Speaker 03 Or a flock of bees up the bottom?
21:35 Speaker 01 Sorry.
21:36 Speaker 03 Flock? Herd? Swarm.
21:40 Speaker 01 Swarm.
21:42 Speaker 03 It's like herding bees, as the old saying goes.
21:47 Speaker 03 What happened? I can't remember.
21:48 Speaker 01 It didn't work. It didn't work. No.
21:51 Speaker 02 No, but this, it came from a study because you need to know if things get stuck up children's noses, how long they have been up there.
21:59 Speaker 01 Yeah.
21:59 Speaker 02 And they use polos because it's like, you know, boiled sugar, basically.
22:03 Speaker 03 Right. So it will dissolve eventually.
22:05 Speaker 01 Yeah.
22:06 Speaker 03 Maybe you, maybe the pH in your nose is unusual in some way.
22:08 Speaker 01 Oh, interesting. Yeah.
22:09 Speaker 03 Have you got an unusually mild nose?
22:11 Speaker 01 Well, right into scientists. Um, let's do another one. This is to Georgie the first.
22:18 Speaker 01 Georgie, your fact is now when you have a tattoo lasered off, you end up pooping it out.
22:23 Speaker 03 Beautiful fact.
22:24 Speaker 02 Do you think it's Georgie L?
22:25 Speaker 01 Yeah, probably. But I quite like Georgie the first as a.
22:28 Speaker 03 Congratulations, Your Majesty.
22:30 Speaker 01 This was one of yours, Andy. These are quite a few, um, sort of famous facts.
22:35 Speaker 03 Hall of Famers.
22:35 Speaker 01 Yeah, I would say.
22:36 Speaker 03 It's good to know where all my tattoos have gone since I had the procedure.
22:40 Speaker 02 Yeah.
22:40 Speaker 01 Yeah.
22:41 Speaker 02 It's that the ink goes into your poo. It's not that the poo has a picture of, you know, Greg Wallace on it.
22:50 Speaker 02 Whatever. You might have tattooed on your body.
22:53 Speaker 03 I showed you that in confidence, Dan. And it was a different time.
23:00 Speaker 02 What was on the other bum cheek? I can't remember.
23:02 Speaker 03 It was, uh.
23:05 Speaker 03 It was Hugh Edwards, but the point.
23:10 Speaker 02 I bet you regretted getting Scott Mills on your penis.
23:16 Speaker 01 Um. Yeah, no, it's, uh, that was, I was thrilled by that fact. It was a very funny fact.
23:21 Speaker 02 Yeah, very good. Very nice indeed. Okay, here is a fact that is now under the custodianship of Martin Nutterbaum. And apologies, Martin, if I've mispronounced your name, but your fact is that the man who invented the airship, Alberto Santos Dumont, had dinner parties with 10-foot-high chairs so his guests could experience the joy of flight.
23:45 Speaker 01 Yes.
23:46 Speaker 03 Fantastic. That was another all-time, Santos Dumont was such an amazing character.
23:51 Speaker 02 Yeah, he is brilliant.
23:52 Speaker 03 I saw, I went recently to the Science Museum and they've got the, one of the top floors is the flight thing and his name is all over it. They've got loads of his early designs and things and yeah, it's really cool.
24:03 Speaker 01 Original items?
24:04 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
24:05 Speaker 02 Is he the one, or it was definitely in that era in Paris where they were like the only person who had a dirigible, like a hot, a balloon, and they used to float from house to house and just sort of sit outside your window going, hi, it's me.
24:20 Speaker 03 It sounds really familiar. Yeah, you're right. I think you're right. He did that. Lovely.
24:24 Speaker 01 I remember years ago at the QI building, we organized a book event with Philippe Petit. He's the man who did the tightrope walk between the Twin Towers. And so I was, I was there helping him set up and so on. And he sort of went, uh, do you have a ladder? And we're like, you want a ladder? And he likes to start all of his talks while perching at the top of a ladder to give you the sense of him maybe falling off.
24:48 Speaker 03 Wonderful.
24:49 Speaker 01 Just before the beginning of his talk.
24:51 Speaker 03 Wonderful.
24:51 Speaker 01 I don't know if he does it for all, but certainly that day, I had to go find a ladder.
24:55 Speaker 03 What a guy.
24:55 Speaker 01 Anyway, let's get another fact.
24:57 Speaker 03 Here's another one. This one goes out to Rachel Robertson. Rachel, your fact is, "A new scientific study has concluded that there are too many scientific studies." Vintage Dan phrasing there. And, uh, this would have been about 2017. And I guess they just.
25:12 Speaker 02 They stopped, didn't they?
25:14 Speaker 03 They stopped.
25:16 Speaker 01 Quite right.
25:16 Speaker 02 We've had enough of scientists. We've had enough of experts.
25:22 Speaker 03 Yeah, sort of time wasting science studies, I suppose, is what they were, they were concerned about.
25:28 Speaker 01 Yes, yeah.
25:29 Speaker 03 But is any study really a waste of time?
25:31 Speaker 02 No, you never know where the new breakthrough is going to come from. It might be something about, you know, how long does it take a tortoise to go around the lake or something? But you don't know, like, that could be the next.
25:42 Speaker 03 Exactly.
25:42 Speaker 02 Meta sunglasses.
25:44 Speaker 03 Exactly. To pick one brilliant, brilliant invention.
25:50 Speaker 01 Let's do another fact. This is going out to Kathleen Frederick. Speaking of tortoise studies, you should never pick up a desert tortoise in case it pees itself to death.
26:00 Speaker 03 Oh, yep.
26:01 Speaker 01 Good advice.
26:03 Speaker 02 I learned that when I went to Death Valley in America. Because that's the rule and it says it, it might even say it on signs or something like, don't pick them up.
26:15 Speaker 03 Really?
26:15 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah.
26:16 Speaker 03 Are they, are they around the place? Did you see one there?
26:18 Speaker 02 I don't think I saw one, though. I think they, they like to hide away.
26:21 Speaker 03 Oh, yeah, I'm sure they're pretty secretive. Death Valley, of course, named after Sir Reginald Death.
26:27 Speaker 02 Yes.
26:27 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
26:29 Speaker 02 Frankie Valley.
26:30 Speaker 03 Frankie Valley.
26:35 Speaker 03 Oh, brilliant. I'll do one more. This is a James fact and it goes out to Renata Strausser and it's that firefighters use wetter water than we do.
26:46 Speaker 02 Yeah, I love that fact.
26:47 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's a great one.
26:48 Speaker 02 It's a really good one because they put little, like little chains of something.
26:54 Speaker 03 Polymers.
26:54 Speaker 02 Polymers, that's the word I was stretching for. And it just makes it more slippy, but it means that it goes through the pipes quicker, which means that when you fire it out, it goes quicker to the fire.
27:05 Speaker 03 It's stunning.
27:06 Speaker 02 That's fantastic.
27:06 Speaker 03 When you find that, it's one of those facts, when you find it out, you have to, just you have to know more.
27:10 Speaker 01 Yeah.
27:10 Speaker 03 It's great. I think we said at the time, they keep slipping over on the extra wet water afterwards, which is quite funny.
27:15 Speaker 01 Really?
27:15 Speaker 02 Yeah.
27:15 Speaker 01 Yeah, so good. We do have one more fact to dish out.
27:18 Speaker 02 Okay, I'll do the last one for the day and that is, oh, this is a very interesting one. So Katie Baker Smith, your fact is that plants have their own internet made of fungus.
27:33 Speaker 02 And I think what's interesting about this is that we did this fact quite soon after this was discovered. There was a few books that came out around the same time that talked about this mycelium network between trees. But I think in recent years, there's a suggestion that it's been overblown a little bit.
27:52 Speaker 01 Really?
27:52 Speaker 02 And the interesting thing is, because it's such a good idea, and like intuitively, it sounds like, oh, this must happen, right? And it tells you a lot about forests and whatever. It gets taught everywhere now. And if you go to lots of museums, they'll have like full areas that tell you about mycelium network and stuff like that. But actually, my understanding is it probably does happen to a certain extent, that fungi help the trees.
28:18 Speaker 01 Yeah.
28:18 Speaker 02 But the idea that they all kind of talk to each other and stuff might be a little bit overblown.
28:22 Speaker 01 Right. So they still might have basic communication, but not to the point of, because they're saying stuff like they, they do, and we said, online shopping to the point where they can distinguish between their relatives, and they can make sure they're stealing from other competing plants and, and all that stuff.
28:38 Speaker 03 Online shopping, I guess they'd be using Amazon, which is of course a place where there are lots of trees.
28:43 Speaker 01 Yes.
28:43 Speaker 03 Named after Michael Amazon.
28:46 Speaker 02 Or TreeBay.
28:47 Speaker 03 Really good.
28:48 Speaker 01 It was sitting there.
28:48 Speaker 02 Yeah, I might have actually said that on the day, I think.
28:51 Speaker 03 I think that's fine. I think, yeah, yeah, yes.
28:55 Speaker 02 But yeah, I'm not sure. I know I have quite a few tabs open for a debunk of this with the idea of going into it on QI in the next couple of years.
29:03 Speaker 01 Oh, wow. That will be fascinating, because that's a good example of where we can learn how sometimes we overblow and pull back. How did we overblow it? Because it's data that was showing what was happening. That's great. I'm excited for that.
29:15 Speaker 03 Walnut Mart, I suppose, because walnut's a kind of tree, and Walmart has a very big online shopping presence.
29:20 Speaker 01 I could hear the keyboard tapping in the background. Were you asking for?
29:25 Speaker 03 Just a big online shopping.
29:26 Speaker 01 Just tragic, yeah. And I'm going to be writing a pretty stiff complaint to ChatGPT afterwards.
29:30 Speaker 02 You don't need ChatGPT.
29:35 Speaker 01 Okay, congratulations to Katie, Renata, Kathleen, Rachel, Martin, Your Royal Highness, Georgie the First, or Georgie L, Alama, and Stuart. You are now the custodians of those eight facts. As well as getting that, you will have already received a digital certificate, which, oh, Andy, you've got a joke. You're looking furious.
29:59 Speaker 02 It's gotta be better than ChatGPT tree. It's not.
30:01 Speaker 01 All right. Anyway, moving on. You will have received, as I say, a digital certificate. So if anyone wants one of those, they're very cool. You just need to go to patreon.com/clubfish, because Clubfish, as we've said, is our private members' club. So head there. And do please, as I said, keep submitting facts for this show. We love it. So [email protected] . They all go to Andy. Otherwise, we'll just see you again on Friday with a big fish. So we'll catch you all then. But for now, from me, goodbye. James.
30:31 Speaker 02 I also say goodbye.
30:32 Speaker 01 Okay, and we'll see you next week. Sorry, Andy.
30:36 Speaker 02 I guess it's tree commerce.
30:37 Speaker 01 Okay, goodbye.
30:52 Speaker 04 ChatGPT for Teens is designed to help teens learn, think critically, and grow their skills. ChatGPT for Teens supports active learning by breaking concepts down. Rather than giving teens the answer, study mode helps teens work through problems, and interactive quizzes test their knowledge and provide immediate feedback. Safety protections are on by default, and parental controls offer families additional options, like setting study hours and quiet hours. Visit chatgpt.com/parents to learn more.
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