Pod Insights No Such Thing As A Fish Little Fish: The OId Ron Brown About this episode Dan, James and Andy discuss YOUR facts, including pigs, pangolins and sea slugs. We also make some dubious rhymes, and meet seven new Custodians of Fish Facts.
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Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 Stop the podcast.
0:01 Speaker 01 Stop the podcast.
0:02 Speaker 00 Hi, everybody. We are sponsored this week by Progressive.
0:05 Speaker 01 That's right. So, everyone talks about how challenging it is to raise kids, but what about protecting them? I'm talking outlet covers, kitchen cabinet locks, baby gates. Where do you even start?
0:15 Speaker 00 Yes, it is a nightmare. Well, protecting your home and your auto is a great place to start.
0:22 Speaker 01 Progressive offers customized coverage options, so you can be sure you have the right coverage for you and your loved ones.
0:27 Speaker 00 They're basically the outlet covers, kitchen cabinet locks, and baby gates of insurance.
0:32 Speaker 01 Don't wait. Get your quote today at progressive.com.
0:35 Speaker 00 Progressive Casualty Insurance Company affiliates and other insurers. Not available in all states. On with the show.
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1:23 Speaker 01 Hey, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Little Fish. This is the show where we put down our favorite facts from the last seven days and we go through the [email protected] inbox. We pick out the best facts that you have all found, and we're going to read them out now. I'm sitting here with James Harkin, Andrew Hunter-Murray. Guys, let's do it. Who's got a fact? I've got one. This is a great one. It's from James Patterson, and it's that. The author? No. Up to you now. It's spelled slightly differently. Oh. I've got an answer for everything.
1:56 Speaker 01 James Patterson, or James Patterson using an incredibly unimaginative nom de plume. The fact is, it's that during the Cold War, a KGB agent had several meetings with Edinburgh Leith MP and communist sympathiser Ron Brown. However, they were unsure if he was spying for them or not, because they couldn't understand his thick Scottish accent and had no idea what he was telling them.
2:23 Speaker 03 That's incredible.
2:24 Speaker 01 It's, um...
2:25 Speaker 03 Did you do some reading on that? Is that true?
2:26 Speaker 01 A little bit. It's from this Ben McIntyre book about Oleg Gordievsky, who was, I think, a double agent on various sides. And the quote was, "Brown may have been leaking top grade secrets, but equally, he might have been talking about football." And they just couldn't tell, they just could not tell.
2:42 Speaker 03 That's amazing. Can I just say, my wife is Russian, as has been mentioned a few times on this show, and she actually finds the Scottish accent the easiest to understand.
2:49 Speaker 01 That's so interesting.
2:50 Speaker 03 I don't know why. When you learn another language, it's kind of, you can understand it usually, but when people talk over each other, that's when it's tricky. But she can do it with us.
2:58 Speaker 01 I wonder if it's the cadence. I mean, there are, because there are Scottish accents and Scottish accents.
3:01 Speaker 03 There are.
3:01 Speaker 01 You can get, you can get some really, really hard to decide.
3:04 Speaker 03 Because actually Edinburgh is a relatively soft accent.
3:06 Speaker 01 Yeah, it is. It is, absolutely.
3:08 Speaker 04 Glasgow's often said to be the harder of the two to shit a gun.
3:11 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah. I don't know where Ron Brown was from. I know he was the MP for there, but he was apparently a colourful character. He was a Labour MP who damaged the parliamentary mace in a row over the poll tax and ended up in court for stealing his mistress's underwear.
3:24 Speaker 03 Wow.
3:25 Speaker 01 Yeah.
3:27 Speaker 01 That's very cool. I have another political one. Shall we jump to that very quickly? So this is sent in to us by Brady Steeper, and it's to do with Canada's longest-serving Prime Minister, who's called William King. So he says it's important to know before hearing this fact that he guided the country through the Great Depression, the Second World War, established Canadian citizenship, and successfully challenged the power of the Crown. And the guy who he was challenging it against was called Lord Bing, in a delightfully named constitutional crisis called the King Bing Affair, or the King Bing Wing Ding.
3:59 Speaker 03 Yes.
4:00 Speaker 01 Yeah. I presume they were just waiting for, they had at some point had to have a wing ding.
4:04 Speaker 03 Yeah. Honestly, I've never heard the phrase wing ding used outside of funts.
4:09 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah.
4:10 Speaker 03 I didn't know it was a thing, a wing ding was a thing.
4:14 Speaker 01 No, I don't think I did either. No.
4:15 Speaker 04 I think you say, oh, we had a wing ding. I've, I've heard that.
4:18 Speaker 01 No, I've heard we had a ding dong.
4:21 Speaker 03 That was when it was the Prime Minister of China, Mr Ding, and the Vietnamese currency, the dong.
4:31 Speaker 01 Ding dong ding dong.
4:35 Speaker 04 Well, anyway, the fact that Brady wanted to send to us is that on his death, King donated his estate to the Canadian government, and that included all of his diaries, 172 volumes.
4:45 Speaker 01 Wow.
4:46 Speaker 04 And when they were read, they revealed that he made huge use of seances during his term as Prime Minister. So while he was Prime Minister, he was consulting with his dead mother, he was consulting with a former dead Prime Minister, Sir Wilfrid Laurier, and his dog, Pat. He would talk to his dog, Pat.
5:05 Speaker 01 I think he stands up in Parliament, "I think we need more biscuits."
5:13 Speaker 03 And one other thing to say, woo.
5:17 Speaker 04 Woof.
5:21 Speaker 04 Yeah, but I mean, apparently he spoke to Pat about the importance of the involvement that Canada had in the Second World War, conscription into the army.
5:30 Speaker 01 Blimey.
5:30 Speaker 04 I seem to remember reading about this, and I think that the story has been changed a bit over the years. I think he was using it as a way to air his own thoughts, and he would use either his dead mother or a former Prime Minister as a sort of soundboard.
5:43 Speaker 01 Can you choose who you get to speak to in a seance? I don't really know much about that.
5:46 Speaker 04 You can, you can try and request. I think that's largely, people go and they hope that someone that's on their mind will show up.
5:53 Speaker 01 No, but if you've got a particular previous Prime Minister, can you say, "I'd rather have someone from the other party, actually." Or can you say, like, "Is Genghis Khan available? We're in the middle of a total war."
6:01 Speaker 04 I'm sure you could, yeah.
6:02 Speaker 01 It depends how pliable your medium is, I guess.
6:05 Speaker 04 Yeah, exactly.
6:06 Speaker 01 Yeah.
6:06 Speaker 03 Did you read that in the news about the Canadian Prime Minister? Was he in Davos this week?
6:11 Speaker 01 Carney.
6:12 Speaker 03 Yeah, he stole some sandwiches. It was the Mark Carney sunny Barney.
6:16 Speaker 01 Oh my God.
6:17 Speaker 04 I was wondering why you hadn't said anything for the last minute.
6:23 Speaker 01 I can't believe you let me go through a whole séance chat.
6:26 Speaker 03 Sorry, I wasn't listening to any of that.
6:28 Speaker 01 You're gonna be shocked when you hear what happened while you were gone into your pun temple.
6:33 Speaker 03 Okay, here is a fact from Sasha M. And Sasha says, well, Sasha sends us what they call "an almost perfect sentence with no further context." This is from Harper's Magazine. And the sentence goes, "South African taphonomists found that pigs decompose more slowly when they are wearing winter garments and more quickly when they are eaten by the Cape Grey mongoose."
7:00 Speaker 01 Yes, I sort of would have expected that last bit, I guess.
7:07 Speaker 03 It's a brilliant sentence. I love it. Absolutely fantastic.
7:10 Speaker 01 Winter garments as well.
7:11 Speaker 03 Yeah, well, what they do is they use pigs decomposing to analogize to humans. Like, if you want to do an experiment to see how humans are going to decompose, you can't get a human and do it, right? But you can get a pig. There might be one left over from an abattoir or something. And so that's why they do it. So they put them in garments to see how the pig decomposes in case someone has been... Let's say you find a body in the top of a mountain and it's at a certain level of decomposition, you compare it with the pig.
7:42 Speaker 01 No, but I'm just imagining the process of getting the winter garments, like having to drag a dead pig into a branch of North Face. Yeah. We need something a little bit bigger in the waist, I'm afraid.
7:54 Speaker 03 Yeah.
7:55 Speaker 01 That's a great sentence.
7:56 Speaker 03 Yeah, lovely. I also read a brilliant study. This was from quite a few years ago now, about 20 or 30 years ago, but they put three tonnes of dead pigs in the middle of a forest in America. And again, they wanted to see what would happen when it decomposed. And this one was slightly different. They wanted to see if there was a big die-off of any animal, how it would affect the ecosystem.
8:20 Speaker 01 Interesting.
8:21 Speaker 03 So they put these dead pigs in the middle of the forest. They looked at first the vultures came and then the maggots and then the flies and all that kind of stuff. And basically what they found is it gets really nasty. Really quite quickly.
8:35 Speaker 01 Right.
8:36 Speaker 03 And not only did it get really nasty and there was dead pig everywhere and it was all rotten. Actually, the area never really recovered. And it still hasn't really recovered and they're still studying it today because it's not back to how it was when they did the study.
8:52 Speaker 01 Gosh.
8:53 Speaker 03 So, yeah.
8:54 Speaker 01 That's wild. That is wild.
8:56 Speaker 03 Again, it's just scientists, you know, you need to know this stuff.
8:58 Speaker 01 Absolutely.
8:59 Speaker 03 You don't know when it's going to be useful in the future.
9:01 Speaker 01 Absolutely, yeah.
9:02 Speaker 04 Andy, you, let's get a fact.
9:04 Speaker 01 This is you. This is a fact from Nicholas Wilkinson. Uh, who begins, unpromising, it's maybe not exactly a fact, but, um, you know, the pangolin?
9:15 Speaker 04 Yeah.
9:16 Speaker 01 Okay, it's a strange scaly creature, isn't it?
9:18 Speaker 04 Quite hard shelled.
9:19 Speaker 01 Hard shelled, much used in traditional.
9:22 Speaker 03 Looks a bit like an armadillo.
9:23 Speaker 01 Yeah, it looks a bit like an armadillo, lovely long claws. Uh, traditional Chinese medicine gets through a fair few. I think they've just been removed from the official.
9:31 Speaker 03 I think they're the most trafficked animal in the world.
9:33 Speaker 01 Well, I'm glad you say that. Well, I'm not glad you say that. I'm very, I'm incredibly sad you say that because they're lovely. Sorry. Okay, um, so you know the thing of more sharks, many, many more sharks are killed by people than people are killed by sharks?
9:48 Speaker 03 Yeah.
9:49 Speaker 01 Um, so Nicholas writes, this is similar because of the trade in pangolin products. About a million pangolins are very sadly killed by humans each year, obviously horrendous. The total of humans killed by pangolins is one.
10:04 Speaker 03 Oh, wow.
10:06 Speaker 01 So they have no teeth, they're slow moving, they have poor eyesight and they're about the size of a cat, okay? So it's an amazing story. It's from the book Mammals of Thailand, right? Um, when threatened, the pangolin will wrap its tail completely around itself, turning itself into a ball, basically. So it's almost impossible to unfold.
10:24 Speaker 03 Yeah.
10:24 Speaker 01 Like an armadillo or a hedgehog, whatever. Um, but this is related by a naturalist called W W A Phillips. A villager clubbed a pangolin one day in the jungle and started back for his village. The pangolin slung over his neck, the tail hanging down on one side, the head on the other.
10:38 Speaker 03 Uh oh.
10:39 Speaker 01 But the pangolin was merely stunned. When found later, the man was dead on the trail, strangled. Hmm. Because the pangolin had suddenly come to and then thought, right, coil up, defensive.
10:50 Speaker 03 Pangolin strangling.
10:51 Speaker 04 Oh my God, if only there was a head of state that ride with that.
10:56 Speaker 01 If you can think of a header state who rhymes with pangolin or strangling, podcast at qi.com. Yeah, and it was still curled around his neck when the guy was found, proving he'd been the victim of a scaly mugging. There you go.
11:08 Speaker 03 Yeah, really good. Amazing. What a story.
11:11 Speaker 01 What a story.
11:12 Speaker 04 Well, while we're in the world of animals, jelk ludelfilj, apologies for the pronunciation there.
11:20 Speaker 01 No notes.
11:22 Speaker 04 Ludelfilj.
11:24 Speaker 01 It's very rare to hear you nail it the first time, but jelk.
11:30 Speaker 04 J E L K E?
11:32 Speaker 03 Jelka, probably. But that was exactly how you speak when you're doing an impression of the Nobel committee.
11:38 Speaker 04 Sorry, jelka or jelk. But it's a great fact you've sent in, which is when biologists catch lizards during fieldwork, they use a loop of dental floss with which they lasso the lizard. This makes sure that the lizard remains unharmed and can be later released again without injury. The lasso is of course known as a lizoo.
12:02 Speaker 04 So a little dental floss lasso for lizards.
12:04 Speaker 01 That's really quite sweet.
12:06 Speaker 04 It is quite sweet.
12:07 Speaker 01 Yeah.
12:07 Speaker 03 I love it. Okay, here is a fact from Sam Walker, which Sam describes as a little fun fact, but let's see what you think. Sam says that the average ejaculate contains approximately 220,000 terabytes of data.
12:24 Speaker 01 Terabytes?
12:25 Speaker 03 Terabytes.
12:26 Speaker 01 That's massive, isn't it? Like, one terabyte is very big.
12:29 Speaker 03 It's more than I've got on my computer. Dear.
12:33 Speaker 01 You can get clo- you can get special cloths. Buy one of the lights and that'll show you where you need to devote most intensive attention to.
12:41 Speaker 03 Oh, dear.
12:44 Speaker 03 You know, when you walk straight into your own trap?
12:49 Speaker 04 You could almost physically hear the funk as your head hit.
12:55 Speaker 03 A proper sideshow, Bob, and the rakes, wasn't it?
12:59 Speaker 04 Wow.
13:00 Speaker 03 So, yeah, this, this is because each sperm contains around 37.5 megabytes of DNA data, which is basically, your genome is in every sperm. And there's a lot of sperms in an ejaculate. But I think if you were to put it in a zip file, if you were to compress it, because actually, all the data is kind of very similar.
13:24 Speaker 04 If it's gone into your zip, something's gone wrong.
13:29 Speaker 03 What I'm saying, like, there's a fact that says that the amount of data is the same as the entirety of English Wikipedia, approximately 40,000 times.
13:40 Speaker 04 Wow.
13:41 Speaker 03 That amount of data. But the truth is that all that data is almost the same. So if you were to put it into a computer, you can compress it. And actually, I think it would be much, much smaller than that.
13:50 Speaker 04 Okay.
13:51 Speaker 03 Because it's like, the thing is about data, is you can have, like, Mary has a little lamb written down, but you could do the same thing 200 million times. But is there really any more data there? Or is it the same amount of data just replicated?
14:04 Speaker 04 So it's a lot of... Just see a receptionist at the sperm. Thank you, Mr. Harkin, but actually, we just need you to fill the sample. Thank you. But I will pass that on to...
14:16 Speaker 01 I'm writing it down, is it far? I gotta...
14:19 Speaker 03 And you're gonna need to give that away.
14:26 Speaker 00 Stop the podcast.
14:27 Speaker 01 Stop the podcast.
14:28 Speaker 00 Hi, everybody. We are sponsored this week by Progressive.
14:32 Speaker 01 That's right. So, everyone talks about how challenging it is to raise kids, but what about protecting them? I'm talking outlet covers, kitchen cabinet locks, baby gates. Where do you even start?
14:42 Speaker 00 Yes, it is a nightmare. Well, protecting your home and your auto is a great place to start.
14:48 Speaker 01 Progressive offers customized coverage options, so you can be sure you have the right coverage for you and your loved ones.
14:54 Speaker 00 They're basically the outlet covers, kitchen cabinet locks, and baby gates of insurance.
14:59 Speaker 01 Don't wait. Get your quote today at progressive.com.
15:01 Speaker 00 Progressive Casualty Insurance Company affiliates and other insurers. Not available in all states. On with the show.
15:09 Speaker 05 She's been thinking about this sleepover all week, but I think about her food allergies all the time. Fortunately, her doctor prescribed Zolair, omalizumab. It's proven to significantly reduce allergic reactions if a food allergy accident happens.
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16:06 Speaker 06 paid for by Genentech and Novartis.
16:11 Speaker 01 This is a very brisk one from Kenneth Bowman or Baumann. Hopefully, this is suitable for Little Fish. I work for a competitor of Chevrolet, so this one stings a bit. The Chevrolet Suburban is the longest-produced automobile model or nameplate still in production today. It was introduced in 1934.
16:29 Speaker 03 Wow.
16:30 Speaker 01 They've been making Chevrolet Suburbans since 1934.
16:32 Speaker 03 Gosh.
16:33 Speaker 01 Isn't that weird?
16:34 Speaker 03 I can't picture anything, but I can't imagine what a Chevy is like.
16:38 Speaker 01 It's a really quite big American car.
16:41 Speaker 03 Is it?
16:42 Speaker 01 And I'm sure they get much bigger, but it is on its 12th generation. Like, if you look at the first-generation one, it does look different to the modern. Really? Yeah, of course.
16:50 Speaker 03 Like Doctor Who is just...
16:51 Speaker 01 Exactly, exactly. Yeah, also on roughly the 12th generation.
16:55 Speaker 03 That's what I...
16:56 Speaker 01 I can't remember, actually. Yeah. A rare chink in the armor for you, Dan.
17:02 Speaker 01 Are we counting the audiobooks?
17:06 Speaker 03 That's amazing.
17:07 Speaker 01 Yeah, I know, it's a good one, isn't it?
17:08 Speaker 03 Is there any other ones that are kind of similar? I can't imagine, like, like a Ford Fiesta?
17:13 Speaker 01 I think Ford Fiesta, that's the one that was in my... That's interesting, isn't it? It's like when you say thing of a car and people say ace of spades. If you ask a British person to name a car, they'll probably say Ford Fiesta.
17:21 Speaker 03 I think so. But wasn't like some of the early Volkswagens, didn't they date back to World War II? I don't know.
17:27 Speaker 01 Yes, they probably had a bit of a... They probably had a bit of a clear out of the Volkswagens, didn't they? After the mid 40s?
17:31 Speaker 03 I think they...
17:32 Speaker 01 Tended by association? I don't know.
17:33 Speaker 03 Maybe. This is the problem with doing this show with no Google.
17:36 Speaker 01 Absolutely.
17:36 Speaker 04 Yeah. I'll do one more here, which was sent in by Chloe Martin. She says, "A good Hong Kong fact for you. Redknack Cellar Terrace in the Hong Kong mid-levels is so named because the original sign writer wrote Alexander Terrace right to left, as in the Chinese way. Redknack Cellar."
17:54 Speaker 01 Oh, is Alexander backwards?
17:56 Speaker 04 It's Alexander backwards.
17:57 Speaker 03 Now, we've mentioned this on the show before.
17:58 Speaker 04 We have, and we've mentioned it because my mum and dad lived on that road.
18:02 Speaker 01 Yes.
18:02 Speaker 03 Yeah.
18:03 Speaker 04 It's a friend of the podcast, Redknack Cellar.
18:05 Speaker 03 Last one?
18:06 Speaker 04 Yeah.
18:06 Speaker 03 Okay, this is from Graham Wallace, and Graham says, "You've covered animal regeneration previously, but this seems to be an extreme example. There are two sea slugs from the species Sacoglosson that can amputate their entire body and then come back to life."
18:23 Speaker 01 Wait, what's... What's left if you've amputated your entire body?
18:27 Speaker 03 Your head.
18:28 Speaker 01 Oh.
18:29 Speaker 03 Head and body.
18:30 Speaker 01 Oh, yes, yes.
18:31 Speaker 03 Separate your head from your body?
18:33 Speaker 01 No more shoulders, knees and toes, though.
18:35 Speaker 04 It's a quick game.
18:36 Speaker 01 Head, head.
18:40 Speaker 01 You've got your eyes and your ears and your mouth and your nose, too.
18:42 Speaker 04 Actually, yes, yeah.
18:44 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah.
18:47 Speaker 03 So here's the thing. How do you get the energy to regrow your body if you're only head and you don't have a digestive system?
18:53 Speaker 04 I guess you can't travel around to eat because you were using your body for that.
18:56 Speaker 03 Even if you could eat, was the food can't digest?
19:00 Speaker 01 Yes.
19:00 Speaker 03 You don't have a digestive system.
19:02 Speaker 01 I would say small, like micro digestive system just in your mouth.
19:06 Speaker 03 Hmm, it's kind of, but there's something more.
19:09 Speaker 01 Hmm. Do you park the bottom of the hole in your neck on the anus of another slug and take in the nutrients of what's passed through their body?
19:19 Speaker 04 Wild, Dan.
19:20 Speaker 03 I mean, that, I could imagine that working.
19:23 Speaker 01 Nature is wild.
19:25 Speaker 04 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
19:26 Speaker 03 But sea slugs especially, they are wacky.
19:29 Speaker 04 Yeah.
19:29 Speaker 03 What seems to happen is that they eat some algae and the algae photosynthesises, creates energy, and that gives them the energy to then create their body.
19:40 Speaker 01 That's insane.
19:42 Speaker 03 I know.
19:42 Speaker 01 That is nature. That is, yeah.
19:44 Speaker 04 That's as weird as you said, Dan.
19:45 Speaker 03 Is it? Yeah, I was gonna say, is it any weirder than attaching your head on to someone's anus to get the nutrient?
19:51 Speaker 04 It's weirdly like, like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein monster, where it's like electricity was turning, like, it's, it's creating this kind of zap sense of question over here.
20:02 Speaker 01 Actually, I don't think she ever says the galvanizing force is electricity in the book.
20:07 Speaker 03 No, but in the preface, she does talk about Galvani's experiments.
20:11 Speaker 01 Yes, but that's just an example. And actually, it's very unclear what chemical mechanism is used to bring the creature to life.
20:17 Speaker 04 Yeah, but I would.
20:18 Speaker 01 Sorry, I'm just forced to, I'm just forced all again else.
20:20 Speaker 04 I would, I would have said Frankenstein in that case, but I said Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which is the name of the Kenneth Branagh film.
20:29 Speaker 01 In which electricity is used. I'm gonna cut off my top knot right now. Very nice. Very nice.
20:35 Speaker 04 Okay, well, this is brilliant. We love these facts coming in. Thank you so much, everyone. And before we wrap up with this episode, we've got one more important thing to do, which is hand out some past headline facts to members of the highest tier, friend of the podcast of Club Fish. So who wants to go first?
20:52 Speaker 01 I will.
20:56 Speaker 01 Uh, this one goes out to Radu Flueras. Fantastic name, Radu. Uh, this is the fact that in medical jargon, lol used to mean little old lady. Uh, and that meant that other doctors' acronyms included lolinad, little old lady in no apparent distress, or lolfodigub, little old lady fall down, go boom.
21:20 Speaker 04 This is great. This is episode 27, and we had as guest on the show Helen Zaltzman.
21:25 Speaker 03 It's such a weird one, this kind of medical jargon stuff, because the idea is that doctors write it on your notes. And then I saw a really, really believable debunk saying.
21:37 Speaker 03 You're allowed to get your notes now. There's absolutely no way that any doctor would do this. And a load of doctors saying, yeah, it was a thing that happened in the past, but we don't do it anymore. But then I've heard actual doctors saying, yeah, we do do that.
21:49 Speaker 04 We do this all the time.
21:50 Speaker 03 So I don't know what to believe.
21:51 Speaker 04 Yeah. In between carving our initials on your liver during sensitive operations. Yeah, I think probably, it definitely used to happen a fair bit before you could get your notes quite so easily. Yeah. And Helen is of course a complete podcasting Don. She's of Answer Me This and The Illusionist and all sorts of other shows and.
22:10 Speaker 03 I don't think it's too much to say that we were partly inspired to make this show from Helen.
22:15 Speaker 04 Yeah, they showed kind of the potential of what a podcast could be to everyone who was making it at the time. So that was very cool. We love Helen.
22:22 Speaker 03 Okay, here is one for Alice Jackson. And Alice, your fact, I'm sorry, it's another Dan Triebler one. Only joking. No, it's a great fact. It is that according to researchers at Glasgow Caledonian University, listening to Billy Connolly can substantially increase your tolerance to pain. And this is, the way that they do this is you put your hand in ice for as long as possible. And you take it out when you can't manage it any longer. And they've done a few experiments like this. The famous one is the one about swearing, which is you could keep your hand in the ice for longer if you're just going.
23:02 Speaker 04 Effing and jefing.
23:03 Speaker 03 Yeah, effing and jefing, yeah.
23:05 Speaker 04 Oh, I thought you were just doing a thick Scottish accent. I couldn't understand what you were saying. The old Ron Brown.
23:13 Speaker 04 Well, congrats to you, Alice. That's your fact. And now Kate Hames. We have one for you.
23:19 Speaker 03 No, I'm just laughing because do you remember, you called me Hames for quite a long time.
23:25 Speaker 04 Hames.
23:26 Speaker 03 But I think one reason was, did I not get mentioned in someone's book?
23:30 Speaker 04 Yeah, you received an acknowledgement in Steve Colgan's book, which was Hames Harkin. And you became Hames for a very long time. Yeah. So Kate Hames, this is your fact. The first woman to cycle the world learned to ride a bike the day before she set off. Is this friend of the podcast?
23:48 Speaker 03 Annie Londonderry.
23:49 Speaker 06 Annie Londonderry.
23:50 Speaker 01 Yes. Who was an amazing world travelling cycling lady. And she was, I think she was about 23 when she did it. She was so young. I think she might even have had a husband and children who she might have written out of the story.
24:05 Speaker 03 She did.
24:05 Speaker 01 Which she was selling to the press because she wanted to be like, young, single, cool lady.
24:08 Speaker 06 Right.
24:09 Speaker 01 Gets press attention.
24:10 Speaker 03 You know what, that's a lot of the story, but there's so much more to it. And you can read all about it in the excellent book, Everything to Play For, the QI Book of Sport by James Harkin and Anna Tashinsky. She has a whole chapter about her.
24:22 Speaker 01 Yeah.
24:23 Speaker 03 In that.
24:24 Speaker 01 Or you can just go on Wikipedia. I mean, it's all that.
24:26 Speaker 03 Or you could listen back to episode 27 as well. I think we found some stuff that isn't in Wikipedia for that. And we went to the old newspaper archives because she was in the newspapers quite a lot. And they gave like lots of really amazing stories of when she fell off her bike and all this kind of stuff.
24:43 Speaker 01 Nice.
24:44 Speaker 03 Yeah.
24:44 Speaker 01 And do you think, did she cheat for any bits? Obviously she went on boats over the ocean bits.
24:48 Speaker 03 Yeah, we think, we think that a lot of her stories should be taken with a bit of a pinch of salt.
24:53 Speaker 01 Yeah. But she was very cool.
24:55 Speaker 03 Yeah, oh yeah, super cool.
24:56 Speaker 01 Very early friend of the podcast. One of the first ever friends of the podcast, actually.
25:00 Speaker 04 Yeah, but she did make it to, we did recently, if you're part of the top tier of Club Fish, there is the friend of the podcast here. If you remember that, after three months, you get sent a T-shirt. And we have made a Friends of the Podcast T-shirt, which lists all of the greatest friends of the podcast. And she makes it on there. Annie Londonderry appears. Andy, let's go to you.
25:18 Speaker 01 This is a fact that goes to Mark Norman. Mark, your fact is that when Californian ground squirrels are attacked by snakes, they increase their blood pressure. So their tail gives off more infrared radiation, making them look bigger. You might be thinking, well, my blood pressure would increase if I was being threatened by a rattlesnake. But the really cool thing is they do this with rattlesnakes, which they know can see in infrared. Even though the squirrel itself can't see in infrared, it knows that the snake can.
25:47 Speaker 04 It's fascinating.
25:48 Speaker 01 And it doesn't do it with other snakes. So we know it's a deliberate thing because it knows.
25:53 Speaker 03 I guess it just knows it works. Maybe it doesn't know about the infrared spectrum.
25:58 Speaker 04 Yeah.
25:58 Speaker 03 It just does something.
26:00 Speaker 04 Yeah.
26:00 Speaker 03 And this works against that snake and they're like, guys, we should do that again.
26:03 Speaker 04 Exactly.
26:04 Speaker 03 Here is a fact. This one goes to JDG. JDG, I don't know what you're, what they stand for, but I think the J might be Joshua, looking at your email address. But anyway, JDG, this is your fact now, and that is that every day, over 100 people used to watch King Louis XIV get up and get dressed.
26:26 Speaker 04 Magnificent fact.
26:28 Speaker 03 Yeah, that was one of your facts, Andy, and it was a brilliant fact about, yeah, about how his life was just on display.
26:36 Speaker 01 Yeah, it was called the Revue, wasn't it? And people just woke up and, well, they woke up early and then went to watch him wake up. And then they watched him have his first wee of the day. And then they watched him get dressed. And then they watched him have his breakfast.
26:49 Speaker 04 Yes, we're actually thinking of launching a higher tier where you can get this kind of access to if anyone registers their interest.
26:57 Speaker 01 Yeah.
26:57 Speaker 04 Very cool. I'm going to read out the next one here. And by the way, that last fact was from episode 28. So here's the second one from that episode, which is now under the custodianship of Gemma Donnell. And it is that there is an original Picasso that we will never see because it was eaten by the dog.
27:15 Speaker 01 Really nice.
27:16 Speaker 03 I know he was very prolific, Picasso, wasn't he?
27:18 Speaker 04 Yeah.
27:19 Speaker 03 And he was the one who also did a, supposedly did the drawing on a napkin to pay for his croissant.
27:26 Speaker 04 Yes, that's right.
27:27 Speaker 03 And they said, Mr. Picasso, can you sign it, please? And he said, no, I want to pay for my coffee, not the entire cafe.
27:33 Speaker 04 Yes.
27:34 Speaker 01 Always a way to end yourself to the staff, isn't it?
27:36 Speaker 04 Do you guys ever do this in cafes or restaurants? I do it all the time.
27:39 Speaker 03 Yeah.
27:39 Speaker 04 Half of them are sort of a bit of tedious humour. And, you know, yeah, get 10% off.
27:47 Speaker 01 Five?
27:48 Speaker 04 Yeah.
27:48 Speaker 01 Okay, we'll just take a service charge from that. Thank you very much.
27:52 Speaker 04 They've actually added 10% to the bill. Time wasting.
27:57 Speaker 01 Oh, here's another one.
27:58 Speaker 04 Yep.
27:59 Speaker 01 It goes out to J F. Uh, this is the fact. It's that during the Second World War, the US Navy diving manual contained detailed instructions over what to do if eaten by a giant clam.
28:10 Speaker 03 Wow.
28:11 Speaker 01 Yes. Yeah, that's, that was one of mine. I can't remember the details about it now, but it was just in this. I remember seeing the images.
28:19 Speaker 03 Yeah, I remember it. And then we looked into it and actually a giant clam isn't strong enough to.
28:25 Speaker 01 It takes an hour to close.
28:26 Speaker 03 Yeah.
28:26 Speaker 01 All of this.
28:27 Speaker 03 And even if it did close, it has little gaps in it and you'd be able to get your foot out anyway.
28:31 Speaker 01 Yeah, just a clam. Grow up.
28:35 Speaker 03 I don't want to be responsible as a podcast for anyone being eaten by a giant clam. And then saying, oh, I'm just going to keep my foot in here for an hour because no such thing as a fish said that I'll be able to easily wiggle it out.
28:46 Speaker 01 They call no such thing as a fish. They know what they're talking about in the underwater realm. Be fine. Um, I sort of think it would be cool if we were responsible for that.
28:54 Speaker 03 Do you?
28:55 Speaker 01 Well, we're trying to get publicity this year, aren't we? It's the year of, you know, putting ourselves out there.
28:59 Speaker 03 You're right.
28:59 Speaker 01 So I think getting listeners eaten by giant clams would, is one way of doing it.
29:05 Speaker 03 Yeah.
29:05 Speaker 01 It's that or the one show.
29:06 Speaker 03 I think the problem with that is if we try and get our listenership up by doing away with our listeners.
29:13 Speaker 01 Yeah.
29:14 Speaker 03 You know, we have to get two new listeners for the one that we've lost.
29:17 Speaker 01 That's a, do you know what? That's a really good point. That's a really good point. Okay, well, there we go. Our latest custodians. Congratulations to J F, to Gemma, to J D G, to Mark, Kate, Alice and Radu. You are now the custodians of all these facts. If you yourself would like to get ownership of one of our facts, all you need to do is join the top tier of Club Fish. Go to patreon.com slash no such thing as a fish. And not only will you be given a shout out on the show, but we will also send you a digital certificate and, uh, do with that what you like. Um, anyway, we're going to be back again next week. Do keep sending us your facts. We absolutely love reading them out here on Little Fish.
29:59 Speaker 01 Otherwise come join us again on Friday for another regular episode of No Such Thing As A Fish. We will see you then. Goodbye.
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