Little Fish: This Is A Song

James tells us the only joke so-far in his hour of standup, while he, Anna and Andy discuss YOUR facts. This week's subjects include vampires, fires and football identifiers. And the gang announce eight more Friend of the Podcast custodians. Visit nosuchthingasafish.com http://nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes. Join Club Fish for ad-free episodes and exclusive bonus content at apple.co/nosuchthingasafish http://apple.co/nosuchthingasafish or nosuchthingasafish.com/patreon http://nosuchthingasafish.com/patreon Edited by James Harkin Produced by Leying Lee Team includes Tara Dorrell, Joe Mayo and Ethan Ruparelia

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

• 0:13Anna Ptaszynski?

  Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Little Fish, the little version of Big Fish, no such thing as a fish. And this is where we look at all the delicious, delectable, gorgeous, beautiful facts that you've sent into our inbox and we repeat them and get the credit for them. My name is Anna Tashinsky and I'm sitting here with James Harkin. Hi James.

• 0:37Speaker 01

  Hi Anna, I'm gonna credit the people who send them in, but fine.

• 0:40Anna Ptaszynski?

  Oh, is that how we do it? Okay, I need to stop claiming these as my own. Hi Andrew Hunter Murray, I'm also sitting here with you, hello.

• 0:48Speaker 02

  Hi.

• 0:48Anna Ptaszynski?

  Hi, and you're the one who's been compiling all of these facts and sending them through to us.

• 0:53Speaker 02

  It's a team effort, but yes.

• 0:57Anna Ptaszynski?

  Thanks for that. You're the quarterback and then we're just all the other irrelevant ones in the team. Isn't that how American football works? That the quarterback is just the whole team and then everyone else stands there cheering them on?

• 1:09Speaker 01

  A simplification, but I see where you're coming from.

• 1:11Speaker 02

  I've gotta say, I've heard some dodgy intros in my time, most of them by me. This one is coming very close to the heights.

• 1:18Anna Ptaszynski?

  Thank you. Well, I learn from the best, Andy.

• 1:21Speaker 01

  You're very much the water boy, you have no such thing as a fish, aren't you? That's like the worst person in the team. He can't even get on the team and has to bring the water to the other team.

• 1:30Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 1:31Anna Ptaszynski?

  Ouch.

• 1:31Speaker 02

  Who are you in the team, James?

• 1:33Speaker 01

  Uh, I am the running back.

• 1:35Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, I put in the legwork.

• 1:37Anna Ptaszynski?

  And who's Dan?

• 1:39Speaker 02

  Dan is the little kid who comes on at the start of the match.

• 1:43Speaker 01

  To sing.

• 1:44Speaker 02

  "God Save America", is that what it's called?

• 1:47Anna Ptaszynski?

  Yeah. "God Save America".

• 1:48Speaker 01

  "God Save America". I don't know why people came up with their own national anthems when you could literally just put your own country name. "God Save the Central African Republic".

• 2:01Speaker 02

  It works, it absolutely works.

• 2:03Speaker 01

  It works.

• 2:03Anna Ptaszynski?

  There you go. All right, shall we do some facts?

• 2:05Speaker 01

  Oh yeah.

• 2:06Speaker 02

  No, I think we're out of time, I'm afraid.

• 2:09Speaker 01

  Can I do a quiz?

• 2:10Speaker 02

  Oh yeah.

• 2:11Speaker 01

  You know what, my quizzes on this are usually a little bit oblique and difficult to get, so we'll go for a simple one. What is the capital of Egypt?

• 2:18Speaker 02

  Cairo.

• 2:19Speaker 01

  Incorrect, Anna.

• 2:21Anna Ptaszynski?

  Is it Aswan?

• 2:23Speaker 01

  Good knowledge of another place in Egypt, but no, it isn't.

• 2:26Anna Ptaszynski?

  I only know one more.

• 2:27Speaker 01

  It's the new capital.

• 2:29Anna Ptaszynski?

  What?

• 2:30Speaker 01

  The new capital.

• 2:31Speaker 02

  Okay. What's it called?

• 2:33Speaker 01

  It's just called the new capital.

• 2:34Anna Ptaszynski?

  Sorry?

• 2:35Speaker 01

  So Egypt has got itself a new capital and it's called it the new capital.

• 2:41Anna Ptaszynski?

  What is going on?

• 2:42Speaker 01

  Basically, they decided to move the government out of Cairo because Cairo was getting so big compared to the rest of the country. They thought if we move a lot of the stuff to another place, a new special city, like lots of countries have done that.

• 2:54Anna Ptaszynski?

  Yes.

• 2:55Speaker 01

  And we will for now just call it the new capital. And over the years, they've tried to come up with new names, but they've just been unable to.

• 3:03Anna Ptaszynski?

  No way.

• 3:04Speaker 01

  They keep having like competitions where someone can name the city and then no good answers come. So they just, they think that maybe they might call it Memphis after the old capital of.

• 3:14Speaker 02

  Oh nice, but I think new Memphis will be absolutely fine or something like New York or, or you know, lots of places you can do that with, so.

• 3:21Speaker 01

  Well, New York of course wasn't named after.

• 3:23Speaker 02

  York?

• 3:24Speaker 01

  Old York, no.

• 3:24Speaker 02

  What?

• 3:25Speaker 01

  New York was named after the Duke of York, not Prince Andrew.

• 3:29Speaker 02

  Andrew Michael Windsor, as he is now?

• 3:31Speaker 01

  Not him, but.

• 3:32Anna Ptaszynski?

  I did not know that, it's hilarious.

• 3:34Speaker 01

  And then they kept the new because it was called New Amsterdam.

• 3:37Anna Ptaszynski?

  Oh wow.

• 3:38Speaker 01

  It wasn't named after Old York.

• 3:40Anna Ptaszynski?

  That's a great fact.

• 3:41Speaker 02

  That's a thing that's named after a person.

• 3:45Speaker 01

  Oh my god. We're doing it by accident now.

• 3:49Speaker 02

  It's a book.

• 3:50Speaker 01

  But other places that are called capital, Seoul means capital in Korean. Astana means capital in Kazakh.

• 3:59Anna Ptaszynski?

  Cool.

• 4:00Speaker 01

  Beijing means northern capital in Chinese, some kind of Chinese. And Kyoto means capital city, but isn't the capital.

• 4:10Speaker 02

  But Tokyo is the other way around, isn't it?

• 4:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, but that To means, I think, eastern or western or northern or something.

• 4:17Speaker 02

  Oh, okay, okay.

• 4:17Speaker 01

  Because To means different, it has different meanings.

• 4:20Speaker 02

  Okay, got it.

• 4:21Speaker 01

  But yeah, Kyoto means capital city.

• 4:23Anna Ptaszynski?

  And is that because it used to be the capital?

• 4:25Speaker 01

  Uh, yes, it was. It has been the capital, but Tokyo means like, let's say it's eastern capital. So the Ky means capital, but then the To meant eastern.

• 4:35Speaker 02

  So nice, so good.

• 4:36Anna Ptaszynski?

  Really good.

• 4:36Speaker 01

  So it's not that unusual.

• 4:38Speaker 02

  That's great. Did you say who sent that in?

• 4:39Speaker 01

  That was sent, of course, by David Lyford Tilly because I always credit the people who sent that back to us.

• 4:45Anna Ptaszynski?

  Sure dude.

• 4:46Speaker 01

  Just to say, like I always do, I would never ever forget that because that would be a terrible thing to do.

• 4:52Anna Ptaszynski?

  No, indeed.

• 4:52Speaker 01

  Especially after I've just made a big deal of it.

• 4:55Speaker 02

  Here's one, this is about a place name. Not as famous as Kyoto and not as famous as Cairo, but it's a place which our correspondent Dan Cohansby lives about 10 minutes from and it's Buttsville, New Jersey.

• 5:10Speaker 01

  Named after, obviously, Nicky Butts, the footballer.

• 5:14Speaker 02

  Well, it's named after a man named LL Butts.

• 5:17Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, okay.

• 5:18Speaker 02

  By his father, Michael Robert Butz.

• 5:20Anna Ptaszynski?

  Butts with a Z?

• 5:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, B-U-T-T-Z, population about 200.

• 5:26Anna Ptaszynski?

  I thought it was named after someone by that person's dad, as sort of a gift to his son.

• 5:30Speaker 02

  Yes, Michael Butts named it after his son LL. Badly named, yeah, yeah. And just that's New Jersey for you.

• 5:37Anna Ptaszynski?

  Only two famous LLs then, him and Cool J, hey?

• 5:42Speaker 01

  LL Cool J of course is shot for ladies love Cool James.

• 5:46Anna Ptaszynski?

  And I think the same is true of.

• 5:48Speaker 01

  LL Butts.

• 5:49Anna Ptaszynski?

  Ladies love Butts.

• 5:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, I suppose.

• 5:51Anna Ptaszynski?

  Never a truer word was spoken.

• 5:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:54Anna Ptaszynski?

  That's a very good fact.

• 5:55Speaker 02

  LL, middle name Big, Butts.

• 5:57Speaker 01

  Brackets and I cannot lie.

• 6:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, so there you go.

• 6:01Anna Ptaszynski?

  I've got a fact here from Jill Rogers.

• 6:03Speaker 01

  Oh yeah.

• 6:04Anna Ptaszynski?

  Jill Rogers said that my fact is that vampires are a recession indicator. The more vampires you get, the worse the economy's going.

• 6:12Speaker 01

  Interesting, so the last big vampire thing I would say would have been Twilight.

• 6:16Anna Ptaszynski?

  Yeah.

• 6:16Speaker 01

  Did that come during the financial crisis, did it?

• 6:19Anna Ptaszynski?

  It did, it did. Now, I don't like to read out someone's fact and then take a slight issue with it, but yes, that's the example that she uses along with a few other vampire things that were released during that particular recession. And I would say it could just be that that was a time when vampires were trendy and it happened to coincide with a recession. But apparently this is a big pop culture theory.

• 6:40Speaker 01

  What about that sort of like vampire stuff with Michael Jackson and stuff, right? You know, Thriller and all that kind of thing?

• 6:47Anna Ptaszynski?

  Oh.

• 6:48Speaker 01

  Is that vampire stuff? No, wasn't it?

• 6:49Speaker 02

  It's just general spooky stuff in Thriller, isn't it?

• 6:52Speaker 01

  Because I thought that might coincide with like Margaret Thatcher closing the mining pits.

• 6:57Speaker 02

  Maybe, but it was, in America, it was more Ronald Reagan-y, wasn't he? I don't know how he left the economy.

• 7:03Anna Ptaszynski?

  I think it's these kind of stretches which lead to these spurious correlation causation things. Anne Rice, nice, don't know, not cited here.

• 7:10Speaker 02

  What about John Polidori, who wrote the first ever vampire story in Lake Geneva with Byron and Mary Shelley and Percy Shelley? When she wrote Frankenstein, and that was because there was the Year Without a Summer? Do you remember this? 1816, because the volcano had erupted and crops were ruined everywhere, unquestionably a recession.

• 7:27Anna Ptaszynski?

  Yeah, so I'm surprised she doesn't cite that, that would have made her case.

• 7:30Speaker 01

  Does she cite any other, like, are we doing all the hard work here or what?

• 7:33Anna Ptaszynski?

  You are, yeah, and it is hard work Jill, so next time. No, she mostly is citing a theory. She says that this was dropped, in my opinion, too casually by my friend who works in publishing when I was talking about the wild coincidence that a bunch of my favorite authors announced their next books would be vampire based, even though they'd never done vampires before. So she's saying, does this mean another recession's coming?

• 7:54Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 7:54Anna Ptaszynski?

  She also asked Andy, as a fiction writer, have you ever been pressured to add some vampires to your work?

• 8:00Speaker 02

  I've never been asked to add anything supernatural to any of mine.

• 8:02Anna Ptaszynski?

  Haven't you?

• 8:03Speaker 02

  No, no.

• 8:03Anna Ptaszynski?

  It might work, maybe consider it next time. Anyway, no, that is a great fact and I liked digging into it, even though it is a potentially spurious correlation causation. It's definitely something that a lot of people online think.

• 8:16Speaker 02

  I think we came up with two examples there, Anne Rice and the Thatcherite coal mine stuff and the Polidori thing. I think that, actually, I'm starting to think it holds water.

• 8:24Anna Ptaszynski?

  Okay, well done.

• 8:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, my thing was more about Michael Jackson and I don't actually know when Anne Rice wrote Interview with a Vampire, so.

• 8:31Speaker 02

  But that aside.

• 8:34Speaker 01

  I thought it was probably earlier than that, but I might be wrong.

• 8:38Anna Ptaszynski?

  It's not important, this isn't the really heavy fact-based show, this is the random speculation show.

• 8:43Speaker 01

  If we are gonna win the Nobel Prize for Economics, then we might as well get it right.

• 8:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:49Speaker 01

  Okay, here is one from Tommy Curran Jones. And this, he says, is an architectural irony fact. And it is that buildings in the flamboyant style, and flamboyant means flaming, keep catching fire.

• 9:05Speaker 02

  Great.

• 9:06Speaker 01

  Okay, so he gives us some examples. Nantes Cathedral, Collegiate Church of Saint Wulfrin in Abbeville, Arras Town Hall in Arras, the Palais de Justice in Rouen and Rouen Cathedral, Chartres Cathedral, basically all of these French places. And a lot of them burnt down. And Tommy says whether they burnt down so frequently because of their name or because they're 600-year-old buildings largely made of timber, I'll leave up to you.

• 9:38Anna Ptaszynski?

  That is great. Stop doing stuff in the flamboyant style.

• 9:40Speaker 01

  Flamboyant. I didn't know that meant flaming.

• 9:42Speaker 02

  No, I've never heard that.

• 9:44Speaker 01

  No. I suppose it makes sense.

• 9:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, when you say it out loud, yeah, you think, of course. But I just never made that connection.

• 9:49Anna Ptaszynski?

  I do need to say, who wrote in?

• 9:51Speaker 01

  It was Tommy, Tommy Curran Jones.

• 9:52Anna Ptaszynski?

  Tommy, and he says that's an ironic building fact.

• 9:55Speaker 01

  Yes, he does.

• 9:56Anna Ptaszynski?

  Which, if we're really nitpicking, it's not, of course. It's opposite, isn't it? Not irony. If something called flaming is set on fire, it's the opposite of irony. But that is not to take away from how amazing the fact is.

• 10:07Speaker 01

  Well, I'm sorry, Tommy, you've been Tschadzinski'd.

• 10:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:11Anna Ptaszynski?

  I kept it very positive, I think.

• 10:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 10:13Anna Ptaszynski?

  Yeah. I don't think anyone's egos have been damaged there.

• 10:16Speaker 02

  All right, well, let's see if you can Tschadzinski this one, Anna. This is from Eva O'Donnell. And it's about a place called Bell Harbour, which is a little town on the west coast of Ireland, right? There's a nearby town called Ennis Timman. And one night, some locals in Ennis Timman, which had only two houses with wirelesses at the time this happened, right? Two radios in the whole village.

• 10:34Speaker 01

  Oh, sorry. Wireless has a different meaning these days.

• 10:37Speaker 02

  Sorry, this is several decades ago. Some locals were in Ennis Timman on a wild December night. They were trying to listen to the events of the Second World War, despite the...

• 10:46Speaker 01

  Oh, did you hear that? That was a big bang. Where was that?

• 10:51Speaker 02

  But through...

• 10:52Speaker 01

  To a news article, I suppose.

• 10:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. Radio news. And then through the hissing and interference, they gathered to their consternation that a nation on the far side of the globe had had the audacity to bomb Bell Harbour. They didn't panic. They set about barricading the roads and preparing for the Japanese invasion of Ennis Timman. They felt sure it was coming. Because obviously, nobody in Ennis Timman had heard of Pearl Harbour.

• 11:15Anna Ptaszynski?

  Yeah.

• 11:15Speaker 02

  But they heard Bell Harbour has been bombed by a huge Japanese air fleet.

• 11:21Anna Ptaszynski?

  And that's the assumed...

• 11:23Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 11:23Speaker 01

  It's quite egotistical, don't you think? To think, rather than the fact that there might even be another place called Bell Harbour somewhere? Because it's not that unusual a name.

• 11:33Speaker 02

  It's true, but they blocked the roads with rubble and they got an array of weapons together. And they stayed up all night preparing for the Japanese onslaught.

• 11:40Anna Ptaszynski?

  No.

• 11:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:41Anna Ptaszynski?

  I wonder if they would have won.

• 11:42Speaker 02

  It's one of the great what might have been's of history, isn't it? What if Japan had decided to invade the west coast of Ireland?

• 11:49Anna Ptaszynski?

  Here's another one. This is from Gio James. This email says, hey, guys, long time listener and long time fact submitter. Ouch. Hoping that the timeliness of this one makes it more interesting than the drivel I've shared before.

• 12:01Speaker 01

  I feel like I would remember that name if Gio had got in before.

• 12:04Speaker 02

  That's a cool name, isn't it?

• 12:05Anna Ptaszynski?

  It is. I think it's Gio, short for Georgina. I think, because I know one of those, but a very cool shortening.

• 12:10Speaker 01

  Well, it's a surname that I thought was most cool.

• 12:13Anna Ptaszynski?

  James, you find this James.

• 12:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. No.

• 12:16Anna Ptaszynski?

  See, yeah, not getting that.

• 12:17Speaker 01

  Of LL Cool Fabe.

• 12:20Anna Ptaszynski?

  Anyway, don't do yourself down, Gio. I'm sure your other facts were great, but I love this one. She says, whenever the Swedish national football team plays the Danish national football team, the scoreboard reads S W E D E N, as in Sweden. But, she then says, and here's a quiz for you. This is also true of a few other team combinations. Can you see if you can guess them all? And she lists three. I haven't checked if this is all of them, but I suspect it is.

• 12:44Speaker 01

  How are we going to guess? Can you give us half of it or something?

• 12:46Anna Ptaszynski?

  Oh, what a good idea. I'll give you half of it. So Andorra is the second half. Who are Andorra playing to make this combination?

• 12:55Speaker 02

  Okay, so Poland.

• 12:57Anna Ptaszynski?

  Really good.

• 12:58Speaker 02

  Poland, Andorra.

• 12:59Anna Ptaszynski?

  Yeah. Very good. Although Andy, of course, was the one who read these emails initially.

• 13:03Speaker 02

  I've forgotten everything.

• 13:05Speaker 01

  No, no, no, no, no. Like in any quiz, sometimes you can work out the answer, but mostly you get it because you've heard it somewhere before. Just because Andy literally heard it this morning before he sent you those emails doesn't make it any different than if I heard it on the radio 12 years ago.

• 13:19Speaker 02

  Well, look, it's 1-0. Let's have another one. Let's see how we go.

• 13:24Anna Ptaszynski?

  These are such a good collection. Okay, this one is if Tanzania is playing...

• 13:32Speaker 01

  Bhutan.

• 13:32Anna Ptaszynski?

  Can... Very good. Yes.

• 13:35Speaker 01

  Come on, 1-1.

• 13:36Anna Ptaszynski?

  Bhutan won all. Okay, this is the decider.

• 13:39Speaker 01

  Also, I would say that Bhutan and Tanzania have never played each other at football. I'm very happy to say that.

• 13:45Anna Ptaszynski?

  In theory...

• 13:46Speaker 01

  I actually saw someone in a Tanzania shirt two days ago.

• 13:50Anna Ptaszynski?

  And that's why you got that right?

• 13:51Speaker 01

  Isn't that amazing?

• 13:51Speaker 02

  That's really cool.

• 13:52Speaker 01

  It's so unusual. I'd never seen anyone in a Tanzania shirt before in my whole life.

• 13:56Anna Ptaszynski?

  That's so weird.

• 13:57Speaker 02

  I wouldn't recognise one.

• 13:58Speaker 01

  Well, it says in massive letters Tanzania on the front.

• 14:01Speaker 02

  Still wouldn't get it.

• 14:03Anna Ptaszynski?

  Can't read.

• 14:03Speaker 01

  Is that a Bhutan shirt?

• 14:05Anna Ptaszynski?

  So if Russia...

• 14:07Speaker 01

  Belarus? No.

• 14:09Anna Ptaszynski?

  Hold on. Yeah. This is if Russia are playing someone... This is the hardest one. This is a really tough country to get. You've probably forgotten this is a country. No offence to those who live there.

• 14:19Speaker 01

  Something that ends in R U S, though, right?

• 14:21Anna Ptaszynski?

  Yes.

• 14:22Speaker 01

  So that can't be that hard. There's only 193 countries.

• 14:25Anna Ptaszynski?

  Let's start from alphabetically, from the beginning. You should get there quite soon if you start alphabetically.

• 14:30Speaker 02

  Syrus, the cloud.

• 14:31Speaker 01

  Cyprus.

• 14:32Anna Ptaszynski?

  Well done, Gio.

• 14:33Speaker 02

  Cyprus as well. Yeah, but if Russia were playing a Syrus cloud.

• 14:39Anna Ptaszynski?

  Well, it was a good assist.

• 14:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, you knocked it over and then I headed it in. But you weren't intending to knock it over. You were intending to hit it straight at the floodlights. And you accidentally sliced it over and it landed right on my head and went in the goal.

• 14:52Anna Ptaszynski?

  That's a beautiful cross from Andy. He looks surprised himself.

• 14:56Speaker 02

  I don't know what's going on.

• 15:03Anna Ptaszynski?

  Okay, what about another one? Is it my turn?

• 15:07Speaker 01

  Can be.

• 15:07Anna Ptaszynski?

  Can be. It's gonna be, this is a song.

• 15:12Speaker 01

  We've reached that part of the show where Anna does her song.

• 15:18Anna Ptaszynski?

  You've cut it out every time. This week is the week it's going in.

• 15:23Speaker 01

  What are you on about?

• 15:25Anna Ptaszynski?

  Sorry, this is a fact sent in.

• 15:29Speaker 01

  Did you just read the word fact as song?

• 15:31Anna Ptaszynski?

  I think you'll see why I said it. When I tell you that this person's name, who sent this in, is Are Tunes Samonsen. And Samonsen has a lot of the same letters as the word song. And also, I'm very tired. And he says that I was just listening to you talking about toothpicks, as we were recently. And I thought I should mention that the world's largest factory of wooden toothpicks is at Fliisa in Norway. Or rather was. It's been closed down. And it actually closes down at the end of this year. So get there quickly if you need to, Andy. And the closing was announced in October 2025, but it's obviously taken a while to wind down. The factory was churning out over a billion wooden toothpicks a year at that time. So God knows why it's closing if it's churning out that many.

• 16:16Speaker 02

  Maybe the demand has dropped off. I don't know.

• 16:19Speaker 01

  Maybe you can get plastic toothpicks these days.

• 16:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:22Anna Ptaszynski?

  You can, yeah. The modern... Thank God, plastic was invented a couple of years back to allow for that.

• 16:27Speaker 01

  I guess they're probably making them in another country which has more accessible and cheap wood.

• 16:32Anna Ptaszynski?

  I think it must be that.

• 16:34Speaker 02

  Good point. Yeah, yeah.

• 16:35Anna Ptaszynski?

  But they do have, at this factory, the world's largest wooden toothpick.

• 16:39Speaker 01

  Is that... No, that's just like a tree, right?

• 16:42Speaker 02

  It has to be usable as a toothpick for it to be a toothpick.

• 16:46Anna Ptaszynski?

  Actually, I don't know if it is usable. It's 11 metres tall. It doesn't say how thin, but it does have to be quite thin, doesn't it?

• 16:51Speaker 02

  If it's sharp enough at the end, you can use it as a toothpick that just doesn't go all the way in. Do you know what I mean? Like if the end gets absolutely to a level of a normal toothpick.

• 16:59Speaker 01

  It could taper to a normal toothpick level.

• 17:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:02Speaker 01

  And then in that way, though, you could just get an enormous telegraph pole and stick a toothpick up the top.

• 17:06Speaker 02

  That's true. That's true.

• 17:07Speaker 01

  It's basically the same thing.

• 17:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 17:09Anna Ptaszynski?

  Stupidly, I didn't look it up to see how thin it was.

• 17:13Speaker 02

  I do like the fact that it's the world's largest toothpick factory and they have the world's largest toothpick. I think that's pretty cool. That's pretty cool.

• 17:18Anna Ptaszynski?

  Yeah. And this person also goes on to say, by the way, Fliisa in Norwegian, while a place name also translates to the wooden splinter.

• 17:27Speaker 02

  That's crazy.

• 17:28Anna Ptaszynski?

  And I think, well, he says coincidence? Probably not.

• 17:31Speaker 02

  Probably not.

• 17:31Anna Ptaszynski?

  Probably not. So they probably named it after the toothpicks. But who knows? Maybe it's one for the book.

• 17:36Speaker 02

  Oh, I don't think so. No, no, no.

• 17:38Anna Ptaszynski?

  Okay, too good. Yeah. On that note, let's segue into the bit where we give you some facts. So this is the part where we take some custodians to custode various facts we've said on the podcast over the years. And these go to people who are members of our highest tier, the Friends of the Podcast tier. So without further ado, shall we start dishing out facts?

• 18:01Speaker 02

  Hmm, I'll go first. This one goes out to Michael Medlin. What a brilliant name, Michael. Michael Medlin, this is a Christmasy fact for you. And it's that when it gets really cold, Christmas trees can turn to glass.

• 18:18Anna Ptaszynski?

  So cool.

• 18:18Speaker 02

  So cool. So the Christmas trees, but I suppose they could also be a Christmas ornament? Because they're often made of glass.

• 18:24Anna Ptaszynski?

  Yes.

• 18:25Speaker 02

  And it's about the sap. When it's really, really cold in these northern forests, their cells might rupture. So the molecules kind of freeze, so they don't rupture.

• 18:37Speaker 01

  And glass is like a technical term of like something that's not quite solid and not quite liquid.

• 18:42Speaker 02

  Yes, people say that stained glass is a liquid. And I can never remember what the latest agreement or disagreement was.

• 18:48Speaker 01

  It's not a liquid. So it's a bit thicker at the bottom. But that's because if you made something that was a bit thicker, you wouldn't put the thick part at the top. It was hard to make flat glass. But glass is a, it's a state of matter. It's not quite solid, not quite liquid.

• 19:02Anna Ptaszynski?

  Yeah, not a solid. So you're halfway there when you say it's a liquid. No, you're not.

• 19:05Speaker 01

  You're just wrong. Um, here is one that is now under the custodianship of Lassie Havelund. And Lassie, your fact is that one of the contenders for the 2015 Christmas charts was a prog rock album by Pope Francis.

• 19:22Speaker 02

  So cool.

• 19:23Anna Ptaszynski?

  Very cool. This is quite a classic Downey type fact, isn't it?

• 19:25Speaker 01

  He loves a Pope.

• 19:26Anna Ptaszynski?

  He loves a Pope doing a pop culturey unexpected thing.

• 19:29Speaker 01

  He loves a wacky Pope.

• 19:30Speaker 02

  Prog rock as well.

• 19:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, but then what would you expect? You wouldn't expect the Pope to go into, you know,

• 19:37Speaker 02

  J-pop?

• 19:37Speaker 01

  J-pop. No, that's probably the most unlikely.

• 19:40Speaker 02

  It's the most prog rock, if I had to pick a popular genre. But I would have thought it would just be classical, classical bangers, you know, plain song or plain chant or whatever it's called.

• 19:49Anna Ptaszynski?

  Here's a fact for Lizzie, and this is the fact that Czech deer still avoid crossing the iron curtain between Germany and the Czech Republic.

• 19:56Speaker 02

  Nice.

• 19:57Speaker 01

  Amazing.

• 19:57Speaker 02

  Because the commies.

• 19:58Anna Ptaszynski?

  Quite confusing that the Czech Republic is, was bordering, um, West Germany, obviously, which is why there was a border there. Um, but, because obviously Czechoslovakia was on the east of Germany. But it's when, you forget that east, east Germany was only northeast Germany, wasn't it? So actually, the whole of Bavaria is all east Germany, but that was West Germany.

• 20:17Speaker 02

  Because West Germany was L-shaped?

• 20:19Anna Ptaszynski?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 20:21Speaker 02

  Yes, that is confusing, and that is something I have not considered enough.

• 20:24Anna Ptaszynski?

  They didn't do it right. I don't know how they screwed it up. It's like the West, um, really did one over on the east there.

• 20:29Speaker 01

  And Berlin wasn't like the bit on the border or anything, was it?

• 20:33Anna Ptaszynski?

  No, that's way in the east, wasn't it?

• 20:35Speaker 01

  Well, you always think, because there was like checkpoints there and you had to go from east Germany to west Germany. But actually, that was just like a little island.

• 20:41Anna Ptaszynski?

  Yeah, its own little conclave, enclave, whatever you call it. But yes, these poor deer.

• 20:46Speaker 01

  Anyone over the age of 50 will be like, yeah.

• 20:48Anna Ptaszynski?

  Yes, I think, I think.

• 20:50Speaker 02

  Obviously, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 20:52Anna Ptaszynski?

  So that's a good fact. Enjoy that, Lizzie.

• 20:53Speaker 02

  Great fact. Here's another one that goes out to Christina L. Forus. Christina, your fact now and forever is that if every car in Monaco decided to go for a drive at the same time, they wouldn't fit on the roads.

• 21:07Anna Ptaszynski?

  That's such a great fact.

• 21:08Speaker 02

  It's a fun fact about the, I suppose, the fact that Monaco is quite small and Monaco people drive a lot of, have a lot of cars.

• 21:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:16Speaker 02

  Um, more cars per capita than anywhere else.

• 21:20Speaker 01

  I was thinking about this the other day. I was in a theme park in Spain and like, you're in the, um, in the queues all the time. And I wondered if they deliberately make sure that the queues are a certain length so that everyone isn't just wandering around the theme park. And we know that some people are going to be in the queues.

• 21:37Anna Ptaszynski?

  What do you mean? How do they make sure the queues are a certain length?

• 21:39Speaker 01

  Well, like, they might slow down the number of people who get on so that the queue gets to, so they get to like 30 minutes or something. And then you know that you'll have a certain number of people queuing at any one time, which means like the concession stands won't get too busy and all that kind of stuff.

• 21:54Anna Ptaszynski?

  I think you're crediting theme park designers with even more foresight than they have.

• 21:58Speaker 01

  I think theme park design is like one of the most academic things that you can get into, really.

• 22:05Anna Ptaszynski?

  That's good. That's a good, um, yeah.

• 22:07Speaker 02

  It's nuclear fusion people who don't quite pass the final exams, they're told, well, we do have some jobs at Thorpe Park.

• 22:14Speaker 01

  It's like, oh, you're, you're a rocket scientist, are you? Oh, dear. Oh, you're a brain surgeon, are you? Oh, dear. Yeah. I, I make sure people have to stand in queues for 45 minutes so other people can get hot dogs.

• 22:28Anna Ptaszynski?

  Really doing God's own work. Great fact.

• 22:32Speaker 01

  Okay, here is one that is now under the custodianship of Michael Hargreaves. And Michael, your fact is that the Pennsylvanian town of Centralia, or Centralia, has been on fire. Sorry, I just read these for the first time. Has been on fire since 1962.

• 22:49Anna Ptaszynski?

  No one's bothered to put it out.

• 22:51Speaker 01

  Is it still on fire? Can anyone check?

• 22:53Speaker 02

  I'll check now.

• 22:53Anna Ptaszynski?

  It must be.

• 22:55Speaker 01

  What was it like a seam of coal? I guess these things usually are.

• 22:58Anna Ptaszynski?

  It was above, yeah, they, they set a fire, they set some rubbish on fire, but it was just above a seam of coal mines that they didn't know existed, I think.

• 23:04Speaker 02

  Centralia is on fire still.

• 23:08Speaker 01

  Great.

• 23:08Speaker 02

  Although Centralia has been mostly abandoned due to it. Apparently, as of 2017, it still had a population of five.

• 23:15Speaker 01

  Okay. Well, if you're one of those five, do write in.

• 23:17Speaker 02

  Do write in.

• 23:18Anna Ptaszynski?

  Well done. Love those five people. Stick it out. Someone, the fire engines will come eventually, won't they? You know?

• 23:25Speaker 02

  Brilliant.

• 23:25Anna Ptaszynski?

  So good. I was actually reading, I'm reading such a good book called Sovietistan about all the Stans. And it opens with a, um, first-hand description of the, of going to the gates of hell in Turkmenistan. You know, that fire that's been amazing, huge fire that's been blazing for about 55 years. But I love those everlasting fires on earth. It's crazy they exist.

• 23:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 23:47Anna Ptaszynski?

  Here's one for Rachel Gilbert. Rachel, enjoy this fact. This fact is that the first recorded traffic casualty was a Roman pig who was run over by a chariot carrying an ornamental phallus.

• 23:59Speaker 02

  Great fact.

• 24:00Anna Ptaszynski?

  And actually, it's not that unlikely. Once you're in Rome, most chariots probably carried ornamental phalluses, didn't they?

• 24:05Speaker 02

  But it was a big one, I think. I think the point was this was the whole load in the chariot was an ornamental phallus, which was, it was for a festival. That's it. It was for a festival and, um.

• 24:16Speaker 01

  Huge porking in town might be the headline.

• 24:19Speaker 02

  That's very good.

• 24:20Speaker 01

  Which, um, you know, gets both aspects in.

• 24:23Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 24:24Anna Ptaszynski?

  No porking signs everywhere.

• 24:27Speaker 02

  Lovely.

• 24:29Anna Ptaszynski?

  Yeah.

• 24:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, I like it.

• 24:30Speaker 02

  Oh, that's really good.

• 24:31Speaker 01

  Can you remember where we parked?

• 24:36Anna Ptaszynski?

  I'll never forget.

• 24:39Speaker 02

  Wow, you guys are on fire with these parking porking jokes. Honestly, I'm just sitting back and watching in admiration. This one goes out to Marin Berthelsen. Marin, your fact is that, ah, well, it's a sad one because time has moved on since then, but your fact is that one in three people in the UK has seen the Queen in real life. We're talking here about the true Queen, Queen Elizabeth II.

• 25:07Anna Ptaszynski?

  They're never going to come on the show now, King, Prince Charles and Camilla.

• 25:10Speaker 01

  I did think that it would be a really awesome thing to have like a Queen tribute act called Camilla.

• 25:16Speaker 02

  That's so funny.

• 25:18Anna Ptaszynski?

  Very good.

• 25:19Speaker 01

  I, I basically, I thought of that joke the other day and I thought, if I ever do an hour of stand-up, it'll all be built around that one joke. Because I think it's very funny.

• 25:27Speaker 02

  You've got your tent pole there. Now you just need to fill the ring.

• 25:31Anna Ptaszynski?

  You've got your ornamental phallus. Just fill it right up.

• 25:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, but that's, uh, that's true. I mean, I, I saw the Queen in real life.

• 25:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, same.

• 25:39Speaker 02

  You did too, and.

• 25:40Anna Ptaszynski?

  And I did, yes. And we're discussing at the time, when I was a baby.

• 25:44Speaker 01

  Dan touched the Queen and we all went, you're not supposed to touch the Queen.

• 25:47Speaker 02

  It's famous. But Australian, Australia, there was an Australian, was it an Aussie PM or, and it might have been an American PM.

• 25:53Anna Ptaszynski?

  No, it was an Aussie who was all like, all right, mate, just like, I'm cool. I'll just treat the Queen like any other bloke.

• 25:58Speaker 02

  Or a piggyback or something. It's incredibly inappropriate. And he's just a shailer. Who was it? Was it Roddell Turnbull or one of the?

• 26:07Anna Ptaszynski?

  I can't remember.

• 26:08Speaker 02

  It was about 20 years ago, I think.

• 26:10Anna Ptaszynski?

  It wasn't Julia Gillard. We know that.

• 26:13Speaker 01

  Okay, is it just one more?

• 26:14Speaker 02

  Just one more.

• 26:15Speaker 01

  Okay, well, this week, the last fact custodian is David Addis. And David, your fact is that people used to hang their fridges from the ceiling.

• 26:28Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 26:29Speaker 01

  People used to hang their fridges from the ceiling. And then I see originator Andrew Hunter Murray. What are you on about?

• 26:36Speaker 02

  Very proud of this one. People used to have these cool boxes for food, but obviously rats would get into them if you kept them on the floor.

• 26:42Speaker 01

  What about bats?

• 26:43Speaker 02

  Chew their way in. There's a big bat problem. Yeah. Um, so they would hang them from the ceiling from a bit of rope or wire or something. And then that meant you could store your food, nice and cool.

• 26:53Speaker 01

  What era are we talking? Can you remember?

• 26:55Speaker 02

  This is 17th and 18th century fridges. So we're, we're way before powered fridges. This was, you've got a cold box, basically, reasonably cold box. Uh, yeah, this was all about early refrigeration.

• 27:06Anna Ptaszynski?

  Great fact. Well, enjoy that one, David. And thank you so much. Do you want to say something?

• 27:12Speaker 02

  Can I just say quickly, 1992, it was Paul Keating who touched the Queen, um, by putting his arm around her. And, um, there was a later bit in 2000 where John Howard was accused of, but denied touching the Queen.

• 27:28Speaker 01

  I'm looking at the John Howard picture because you've got the BBC news up here. And he's doing the thing where you put your arm around someone, but you deliberately don't touch them. You kind of hover.

• 27:36Speaker 02

  He's hovering. He's gesturing her over here. And they have got a picture of the previous PM, Paul Keating.

• 27:41Speaker 01

  He's doing a little tickle.

• 27:42Speaker 02

  Yeah. And he was nicknamed the Lizard of Oz as a result by the British press.

• 27:46Anna Ptaszynski?

  Oh, harsh. He was just being friendly.

• 27:49Speaker 02

  It's a cracking headline.

• 27:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's good.

• 27:51Anna Ptaszynski?

  I suppose so, yeah.

• 27:52Speaker 01

  But then he did, um, stick his long tongue down her ear because a fly flew in there.

• 27:58Anna Ptaszynski?

  Sorry?

• 27:59Speaker 01

  He's a lizard.

• 27:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, if anyone in the encounter was a lizard, it will be a British royal. We know that.

• 28:08Anna Ptaszynski?

  Okay, I think we should wrap up on that and say thank you so much to everyone who has sent in your facts that we read out at the start of this show. And thank you also to our friends of the podcast who are now custodians of various facts. And so those people this week are Michael Medlin, Lassie Havelund, Lizzie, Christina L. Forus, Michael Hargreaves, Rachel Gilbert, Marin Berthelsen and David Addis. Please take care of those facts as, as best you possibly can. If you want to get one of your facts read out on this show, all you've got to do is write in to podcast at qi.com and he will read it, decide if it's good enough. We might read it out. And if you want to receive one of our facts, join the top tier, friend of the podcast. You'll not only get a fact to

• 28:51Anna Ptaszynski?

  look after, you will get a certificate with that fact written on it that you can frame on your wall and brag about to all your mates. Thank you so much, everyone, for listening to this episode of Little Fish. Join us again next week for another episode or join us at the end of this week for a Big Fish, No Such Thing As A Fish episode. And we'll see you in one of those locations or somewhere else along the road. Goodbye from me. Goodbye from you.

• 29:19Speaker 01

  I'll be honest.

• 29:20Anna Ptaszynski?

  Yep.

• 29:20Speaker 01

  The intro wasn't great. You haven't pulled it back.

• 29:25Anna Ptaszynski?

  I felt like I was close. Where did I lose it?

• 29:27Speaker 01

  It was halfway through.

• 29:28Speaker 02

  Yeah. So about five minutes ago.

• 29:33Anna Ptaszynski?

  All right. Well, I'll leave James to edit all those words into an order that is a decent valediction and see you again. Ta-ra.