Pod Insights No Such Thing As A Fish Little Fish: Unencumbered By Any Knowledge About this episode Dan, James and Andy discuss YOUR facts, including reaction times and daylight saving times. We learn why Andy doesn't fancy the secret to everlasting life. And we name eight more Friend of the Podcast fact custodians.
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Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 The Greatest is the first authorised script series about the life of Muhammad Ali, offering unprecedented access and going beyond the amazing victories and moments that made Ali a legend, both in and out of the ring. From Ben Watkins, the creator of Cross, and executive producer Michael B. Jordan, discover the man who became the legend in a story never told before. Starring Jalen Best as the Muhammad Ali. New series, November 4th, only on Prime Video.
0:40 Speaker 01 Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Little Fish, the show where we put down our facts and we get the facts that have been sent to podcastandqi.com by you. Andy has gone through the mailbox, he's taken out the very, very best facts that you've sent and we're going to go through them today. I'm James Harkin, I'm joined by Daniel Schreiber, Andrew Hunter Murray and a whole bunch of facts. Who's got one?
1:05 Speaker 02 I've got one.
1:06 Speaker 01 Go for it.
1:07 Speaker 02 This is actually a very nice, rare example of a double-headed fact. So it's the same, it's one fact but two people have sent it in.
1:16 Speaker 01 Oh, right, okay.
1:17 Speaker 02 So, there's a place near Chicago, the Argonne National Lab.
1:22 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:23 Speaker 02 Have you heard of it? It's a nuclear, nuclear research, US research laboratory.
1:26 Speaker 01 I'm gonna say it straight away, it's named by Mr Argonne.
1:31 Speaker 02 Oh, how did I not see that coming? It's named after a forest, the Argonne Forest, not the chemical element. Anyway, that's, actually, that is not the main fact.
1:42 Speaker 01 Oh, really? Because my heckles erupt for those at the moment, I'm looking out for them wherever I'm going.
1:47 Speaker 02 So there's a forest surrounding the lab.
1:50 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:51 Speaker 02 Which is called Waterfall Glen, right?
1:52 Speaker 01 No.
1:53 Speaker 02 Oh, jeez.
1:54 Speaker 01 Named after Mr Waterfall? Or named after someone called Glen?
1:59 Speaker 02 Seymour Waterfall.
2:00 Speaker 01 Okay.
2:03 Speaker 02 Was a local forest commissioner and apparently the waterfalls are truly rubbish. Like, there is water going downwards, but they're not good waterfalls. And that's because they're not meant to be waterfalls because it's named after Seymour Waterfall. So we're off the blocks.
2:14 Speaker 01 Yeah, no, very good. You're gonna have to do better than that, Andy, I'm afraid. First facts of the show.
2:19 Speaker 02 I really thought I'd get it nice and fast.
2:21 Speaker 01 Nah.
2:22 Speaker 03 It's insane. It really is a whole new show that we're making now that you forced into our existing show. It's just.
2:27 Speaker 02 I'm actually a bit worried because we're gonna record a drop of the line after this.
2:30 Speaker 03 Yeah.
2:30 Speaker 02 Genuinely, I'd say 30% of the content people have sent in is just names of things that you think are named for an obvious reason.
2:37 Speaker 03 Yeah.
2:38 Speaker 02 I don't know what we're gonna do because we've got too many to make it a good show.
2:41 Speaker 03 Well, if you want to spend your hard, hard-earned money hearing us discuss names, patreon.com slash clubfish, everyone. Can I do a fact?
2:50 Speaker 01 Yeah, please. A normal one, please.
2:52 Speaker 03 This has been sent in by Stephen Martinez, who says in 2012, a man named Niles Gammons was arrested for drunk driving in Urbana, Ohio at 1:08 a.m. He was arrested and released on bail. An hour later, at 1:08 a.m., the same cop arrested the same man for drunk driving. Daylight savings.
3:15 Speaker 01 Yeah, it must be right.
3:17 Speaker 03 Daylight savings.
3:18 Speaker 02 It's always the criminal.
3:19 Speaker 01 Daylight savings. Okay, hear me out, guys. Daylight savings cop.
3:25 Speaker 01 Only comes out twice a year to deal with little things like this.
3:30 Speaker 02 That's really good. It's the longest hour. Is what is the series name, The Longest Hour?
3:34 Speaker 01 And the second series, The Shortest Hour.
3:36 Speaker 02 It doesn't exist.
3:37 Speaker 01 It just doesn't do anything. Just him asleep.
3:40 Speaker 03 And you play the same episode twice, right after each other.
3:44 Speaker 02 That's brilliant.
3:44 Speaker 03 On the hour. Yeah.
3:45 Speaker 02 Is it shot from different angles, like Rashomon?
3:47 Speaker 03 Oh, like Back to the Future 2. Like, does he see himself?
3:50 Speaker 02 Or Kurosawa's masterpiece Rashomon. Yeah, yeah. I mean, we've all got our cultural Overton window, haven't we?
3:56 Speaker 03 Wow. Yep. Okay. Slam on Zemeckis, who delivered one of the greatest series ever.
4:00 Speaker 02 It's a brilliant film, Back to the Future 2.
4:02 Speaker 03 Thank you. And your one as well, I'm sure.
4:07 Speaker 01 Okay, here's a fact from Eric. Eric says, despite the absurd difference in distances, it takes four times longer for a character to appear on your screen after you tap your keyboard than it takes to send that keystroke across the Atlantic.
4:22 Speaker 03 Oh, wow.
4:24 Speaker 02 So when you say a character, I was thinking like daylight saving comp.
4:28 Speaker 03 Yeah.
4:29 Speaker 02 A letter.
4:30 Speaker 01 Yeah, a letter, like, or a number, in fact, or a symbol.
4:33 Speaker 02 Yeah. When I type that.
4:35 Speaker 01 When you type that, it basically comes onto your screen in about 200 milliseconds. And that's because there's a load of, like, according to Eric, invisible code that happens between your finger and the screen. So it has to basically, it's not just you press that and your screen automatically knows what you're pressing. It has to turn the press into some zeros and ones, which then goes into your computer, which then turns it into the actual character itself.
5:01 Speaker 03 Yes.
5:02 Speaker 02 And you're saying that goes across the Atlantic?
5:04 Speaker 01 That goes from your finger to your computer in about 200 milliseconds. But just for the information to go across the Atlantic in an undersea cable, it takes about 50 milliseconds.
5:17 Speaker 02 Stunning.
5:18 Speaker 01 Which is amazing.
5:19 Speaker 02 Because I've never noticed a lag after typing H.
5:23 Speaker 01 Well, the reason is, your reaction time is longer than 200 milliseconds. People have done like tests online where you kind of check people's reaction times. And it seems like the average is about 273 milliseconds. So anything quicker than that is kind of pointless.
5:40 Speaker 02 Okay.
5:41 Speaker 01 There's no point going faster than that because no one, unless you're like a Formula One driver or an elite gamer, in which case your reaction time might be about 100 milliseconds. Admittedly, elite gamers do use computers quite a lot.
5:54 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah. Are they better at responding to emails and Formula One drivers?
5:58 Speaker 01 They would be better. They would notice the email arrived quicker.
6:01 Speaker 02 Yes, it does fine me well. Thank you. You know. Do you want another one?
6:05 Speaker 01 Yeah.
6:05 Speaker 02 This one comes from Natalie from Toronto, who says, I just paused in my workday because I came across this fantastic fact and had to send it your way. There's a town in Ontario called Barry, right?
6:18 Speaker 01 Oh, it's not named after someone called Barry, is it?
6:21 Speaker 02 No, no, no.
6:22 Speaker 03 You see what you've done to yourself. You see who you've become on this show.
6:29 Speaker 02 And it's got different council wards in it, you know, ward is a little administrative area. And in Barry, it's just, it looks like it's just ward one, two, three and four. So anyway, there's a, there's a ward called Ward Four in the town of Barry. And the former Ward Four councillor for Barry is a guy called Barry Ward.
6:44 Speaker 01 Yeah.
6:47 Speaker 02 And I looked, I looked up Mr Ward and he's a regular contributor to Barry Today.
6:52 Speaker 01 Barry Today?
6:53 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's about the town of Barry, not about people called Barry.
6:56 Speaker 01 What is Barry Today? Is it an online thing?
6:58 Speaker 02 It's a website about Barry.
7:00 Speaker 01 Oh, okay.
7:00 Speaker 02 Of the town of Barry.
7:01 Speaker 01 It's not a newspaper or anything like that?
7:03 Speaker 02 Well, I think it's a news website.
7:04 Speaker 01 Okay.
7:05 Speaker 02 What's the difference these days?
7:06 Speaker 01 You know what I read about today? This is the reason I ask you. In America, they used to have a lot of newspapers where you could only buy them if you bought another newspaper, which this newspaper was inside of.
7:18 Speaker 02 Oh.
7:18 Speaker 01 So you know, if you get like a Sunday broadsheet newspaper in the UK, it will have supplements in.
7:24 Speaker 02 Yeah.
7:25 Speaker 01 Well, in America, for some of them, the supplement would be an actual different newspaper and they wouldn't even be related to each other. Your normal newspaper that you buy might be a right wing newspaper and the supplement one might be a left wing one.
7:36 Speaker 02 Ah.
7:37 Speaker 01 And it was because basically there was a problem with like newspapers were dying out in the seventies, obviously they're still struggling. But in America, they came up with some new laws that meant that people would share printing presses and share printing costs. And so one newspaper would print it, but they would be forced to print another newspaper as well and put it inside their paper.
7:56 Speaker 02 That's really clever. Cause if you live in a little town, maybe all the copies of the Times that go here also have the Barry Gazette, for example.
8:04 Speaker 01 Yes, exactly. Exactly. It's really clever. And it also, for some people, they liked it because it meant that you get different viewpoints. So if you get the Daily Mail and the Guardian at the same time, then you can see different parts of it.
8:14 Speaker 02 Yeah.
8:14 Speaker 01 The last one of them, which is in Las Vegas, I think is about to shut down because there's some legal thing going on right now.
8:21 Speaker 02 It's a shame.
8:22 Speaker 01 Yeah.
8:22 Speaker 02 Natalie from Toronto has a bit of praise for you, James.
8:25 Speaker 01 Thank you. Was it about that fact that I just said?
8:28 Speaker 02 It wasn't, but it was about your Toronto knowledge.
8:30 Speaker 01 Toronto, you mean?
8:31 Speaker 02 We do in fact pronounce the city Toronto. I was very impressed that he knew that.
8:36 Speaker 01 Yeah.
8:37 Speaker 02 And my accent is so strong that I've had to change my pronunciation to Toronto when talking to British people in order for them to understand me.
8:44 Speaker 01 How interesting. I've never been to Toronto, but I've just heard people.
8:48 Speaker 02 You sound like you're born and bred there though.
8:52 Speaker 03 All right, well, let's move away from praise for James. Let's get to another fact here. This is from Jonathan Hughes, who writes, "This may be a good fact for James." Thank you, Jonathan.
9:03 Speaker 01 I actually like him what this show's become now.
9:06 Speaker 03 This is a sort of complicated tennis fact, which it is kind of interesting. Since 2021, Carlos Alcaraz and Yannick Sinner have played each other 16 times on tour. Alcaraz has won 10 of the matches and Sinner 6. Alcaraz has won 26 sets and Sinner has won 23 sets. And in that time, they've played 3,302 points. So who's won more points, Andy?
9:29 Speaker 02 If Alcaraz has won more games, 10-6, I would presume Alcaraz has won more points.
9:34 Speaker 03 They're both tied on the exact same points, 1,651.
9:38 Speaker 02 Exactly.
9:39 Speaker 03 Exactly. And it's the quirk of tennis that that can happen. Like, you play tennis, James, and you play tennis, Andy.
9:46 Speaker 01 Andy plays it more than I do.
9:48 Speaker 03 Yeah. And the other one, yeah.
9:51 Speaker 03 The other Andy Murray. I didn't mean Anna and the other one.
9:56 Speaker 03 She's been gone so long, I forgot her name.
9:57 Speaker 01 She's really good at tennis.
9:58 Speaker 03 She's really good at tennis. But you can, you could effectively have a very close game, but lose it 6 love, 6 love, right? It's just that you might have got down to a ju- yeah, exactly.
10:07 Speaker 01 The same happens in all sports, I would say. Like in snooker, for instance, you can lose lots of really close frames, but then win ones where you win by 100 points. Or in football, even, your goal difference, you could be right at the top of the table, but have a negative goal difference because all the games you've won were 1-0, but all the ones that you've lost were 0-10.
10:27 Speaker 02 Right, yeah, yeah, yeah. Sounds like that player Sinner is the prisoner of Alcaraz.
10:34 Speaker 03 Very nice.
10:35 Speaker 02 Yeah?
10:35 Speaker 03 Yeah, nice, yeah.
10:37 Speaker 02 Yes. I don't know anymore, because sometimes when I make a joke, it goes really badly.
10:41 Speaker 01 I actually think, Andy, that you would be perfect in like a tabloid sports department.
10:47 Speaker 02 I would love, yeah.
10:48 Speaker 01 Because you're not going to get bogged down with knowledge. You can just go for the puns without worrying about whether they make sense or not.
10:56 Speaker 03 Absolutely.
10:57 Speaker 01 And in this case, it made perfect sense.
10:58 Speaker 03 It made perfect sense. I would be flipping immediately to your article and Barry today just to get that Murray gold.
11:05 Speaker 02 Thank you. Well, that's very nice. Oh, thank you. Let's have, let's.
11:08 Speaker 01 Yeah, enough compliments about Andy.
11:12 Speaker 01 Daniel Studenmund of Binghamton, New York, writes about the famous mathematician Harold Scott McDonald Coxeter, who we've mentioned on the show before, actually. But he said he was named, so not to be mistaken, for a ship. He was very nearly named Harold McDonald Scott Coxeter, or HMS Coxeter, but they decided to flip around his middle name. So he's not HMS, he's HSM. And Daniel says he wanted to give Coxeter some love after you rudely mispronounced his name in the episode of Little Fish. And I think I might have done it again, guys.
11:52 Speaker 01 It must be Coxeter.
11:53 Speaker 02 Coxeter, I guess so. That's so weird. I had a fact about ship naming that I didn't mention just now, which is that Barry, the town, is named after an English general called Robert Barry, who commanded a ship called HMS Cockburn, I suspect Coburn, and also HMS Brilliant, which is a nice name for a naval ship, I think.
12:14 Speaker 03 That was a good name.
12:15 Speaker 01 That is good.
12:15 Speaker 02 HMS Brilliant.
12:16 Speaker 03 Yeah.
12:17 Speaker 01 Can I tell you more about Harold Scott McDonald Coxeter?
12:20 Speaker 02 Yes.
12:21 Speaker 01 So I went on to his entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. And here is a paragraph from the end of his article. "A gaunt, bird-like, ascetic-looking man, he attributed his longevity to his vegetarianism, standing on his head even at the age of 90 for 15 minutes each morning, a daily exercise regime of 50 press-ups, a nightly cocktail of Kahlua peach snaps and soya milk, and an abiding fascination with his subject."
12:52 Speaker 02 How interesting.
12:53 Speaker 01 What a guy.
12:54 Speaker 02 What a guy.
12:55 Speaker 01 Kahlua peach snaps.
12:57 Speaker 02 Coffee liqueur, isn't it? Coffee, peach, and what kind of milk?
13:00 Speaker 01 Soya milk.
13:01 Speaker 02 I've got to say, that feels like the one rogue element that would not keep you alive.
13:06 Speaker 03 That's the toilet visit element, isn't it?
13:08 Speaker 02 Yeah.
13:09 Speaker 01 That could be why humans have never lived past like 120, because this is the trick, but no one can stomach the Kahlua peach snaps and soya milk.
13:17 Speaker 03 Paul McCartney stands on his head for five minutes every day as well.
13:20 Speaker 01 Does he?
13:21 Speaker 03 Yeah.
13:21 Speaker 02 Lightweight.
13:22 Speaker 03 Lightweight.
13:22 Speaker 02 Yeah.
13:22 Speaker 03 Yeah. I've never tried it.
13:25 Speaker 02 Is it, is it as good for you to stand on your head as it is to hang upside down? Which I know is good for you.
13:30 Speaker 03 Is it?
13:30 Speaker 02 I think so. I think Dan Brown does it, doesn't he?
13:32 Speaker 03 He used to do it to alleviate the writer's block that he had, right?
13:36 Speaker 02 Right.
13:36 Speaker 03 Um, he would hang by upside down boots from a pole. I don't know if that was just author fluff to...
13:42 Speaker 02 Might have been author fluff.
13:43 Speaker 03 Yeah.
13:44 Speaker 02 To make his interviews better. But you think Paul McCartney does do it?
13:47 Speaker 03 Yeah, he does it for at least five minutes. That's all I get to see before I'm dragged out of his garden. But he, he's definitely, he's definitely clocked five.
13:54 Speaker 01 And what does he do? Does he have like boots holding him upside down or does he use his wings?
14:01 Speaker 02 See, I know the signs now. After 12 years, I've learned. Give James enough rope.
14:09 Speaker 01 But also unencumbered by any knowledge about the Beatles.
14:12 Speaker 03 That's what's most surprising. You've made more Beatles gags on our show than anyone else and you've never heard them.
14:19 Speaker 02 James has memorized a list of all the Beatles songs.
14:22 Speaker 01 I've done that for so many different subjects.
14:24 Speaker 03 Yeah.
14:25 Speaker 01 Just in case it comes up.
14:26 Speaker 03 Quite right. Quite right. Uh, shall I give you another one?
14:28 Speaker 01 Yes.
14:29 Speaker 03 This is from Dan Gudgeon. Over 90% of the UK's unique species don't live in the UK.
14:38 Speaker 01 What?
14:38 Speaker 02 Riddle me this.
14:39 Speaker 01 What do you mean by unique? As in endemic to here?
14:43 Speaker 03 90%, okay. So it's British territories?
14:45 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's just overseas territories in the UK.
14:51 Speaker 03 Where have we still got? Where has Britain still got?
14:53 Speaker 02 Oh, loads of places.
14:54 Speaker 03 List them. Give me one.
14:55 Speaker 02 St Helena.
14:56 Speaker 01 Isle of Man.
14:57 Speaker 02 Falklands.
14:58 Speaker 03 Yep.
14:58 Speaker 02 Chagos still, although we haven't, we haven't signed the, signed the deal yet, but like...
15:02 Speaker 01 The silly Isles.
15:03 Speaker 02 Yeah. I don't know if these are all territories as opposed to dependencies or crown dependencies, like there are all sorts of categories. But the UK's overseas territories are around the world and some of them are, you know, a tiny squib of land, but then a huge bit of ocean around that.
15:15 Speaker 01 Australia.
15:18 Speaker 03 Commonwealth. Thank you for listening, everyone.
15:25 Speaker 01 We are hoping to tour there again one day.
15:26 Speaker 02 We are, we are. Yeah, but and it's from the government website, the biodiversity there.
15:32 Speaker 01 Yeah, really good.
15:33 Speaker 02 I found some species which exist only in these overseas territories. Kangaroo.
15:42 Speaker 02 The Virgin Islands mute frog. The broad nosed seven gill shark.
15:46 Speaker 01 Named after Andrew Broadnose, of course.
15:49 Speaker 02 That's right. And Stephanie Sevengill, they were a married couple of. It's a double barrel name.
16:00 Speaker 01 Okay, I've got one more here. This is from Mr. Geeky. And Mr. Geeky says, as you almost certainly know, many sea creatures have uni hemispheric sleep. That is, one half of the brain sleeps while the other one remains awake.
16:13 Speaker 02 Okay.
16:14 Speaker 01 Yeah, we all knew that, right?
16:15 Speaker 02 Dolphins.
16:17 Speaker 01 Come on, guys. Most land mammals sleep with their whole brains at once. Humans, for instance.
16:23 Speaker 02 Yeah.
16:24 Speaker 01 But Mr. Geeky says fur seals do uni hemispheric sleep when in water and full brain sleep when on land.
16:33 Speaker 02 What? I. Wow, that's so cool.
16:37 Speaker 01 Isn't it?
16:37 Speaker 02 So they've got no predator.
16:39 Speaker 01 Oh, they have predators.
16:40 Speaker 02 In one place.
16:41 Speaker 01 In the water.
16:42 Speaker 02 Yeah.
16:43 Speaker 01 Yeah.
16:43 Speaker 02 So that's why they're half. Killer whales eat them, don't they?
16:45 Speaker 01 Yeah, they do.
16:46 Speaker 02 But then they're safe on land, so they can have a full night's sleep.
16:49 Speaker 01 Gosh. And actually, like tourists in South Africa will go and see these fur sharks being eaten by great, by great white sharks.
16:58 Speaker 02 Fur, can you say fur seals?
16:59 Speaker 01 Fur seals, what did I say?
17:00 Speaker 02 Fur sharks. Fur sho- fur sharks sound kind of, kind of cute, actually.
17:06 Speaker 01 That's a trick, isn't it? You get close enough to stroke them and they'll have your hand off. Fur seals, yeah, if you go into South Africa, you can see the great white sharks eating them. And that's because it's the majesty of nature. People like to see this. Obviously, it's not great for the seals.
17:21 Speaker 02 Yeah.
17:22 Speaker 01 But they have come up with a new way of dealing with it called mobbing. And basically, a load of seals will harass this great white shark as it's coming up. And they say, no, no, no, no, no, and kind of nibble around this face. And it really works.
17:37 Speaker 02 It's very brave.
17:39 Speaker 01 Yeah.
17:40 Speaker 02 That's very brave. Yeah.
17:41 Speaker 01 It's amazing.
17:41 Speaker 02 Seals are braver than I thought they were.
17:43 Speaker 01 I think the thing is with them is like, it's either that or you get eaten.
17:46 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah. I'd be tempted to just sort of distance myself from the group and say.
17:51 Speaker 01 Or hang out with a slower seal.
17:53 Speaker 02 Exactly, yeah.
17:54 Speaker 03 But where are you? If you're away from the group, you're susceptible to have no one help you.
17:58 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
17:59 Speaker 01 You want to be in the middle of the group, really.
18:01 Speaker 02 This is why I was fired from that union.
18:07 Speaker 01 And Arthur Skaggle has got himself another enormous pay rise.
18:14 Speaker 01 More biting satire.
18:17 Speaker 01 Okay, that is enough of your facts. As amazing as they are, every, I say this all the time, but your facts are so good, we can't help but be excited when they come into the inbox. And so send us some more. Send them to [email protected] and Andy will winnow out the best for the next episode of Little Fish. But we must do one more thing. And that is hand out custodianship of some of our facts to people who are members of the Friend of the Podcast tier on Patreon. So Dan, can you give us a fact, please?
18:49 Speaker 03 Okay, here we go. This fact is now under the custodianship of Laurel Evans. And your fact is that in 1710, the boys of Winchester College rioted over insufficient beer rations.
19:01 Speaker 01 Very nice.
19:02 Speaker 02 Very good. And it'll be, it's presented as a nice story now, but they'll probably have killed and eaten three teachers. Eight groundskeepers. Yes. I went to Winchester, I visited Winchester College quite recently.
19:13 Speaker 01 Did you?
19:14 Speaker 02 Yeah, well, I went past it. I didn't go in. Okay. But it's very, it's obviously, it's one of the oldest, sort of posher schools there is. Yeah. It's right next to the house where I think Jane Austen died.
19:24 Speaker 03 I'm not believing you on any of these people who died in certain houses anymore. Not after Rod Hullgate.
19:30 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah.
19:31 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah, that's true.
19:32 Speaker 03 Yeah. Did she definitely die there?
19:34 Speaker 02 I didn't even know that she definitely died. She might still be trading. Not sure. Let's have another one.
19:39 Speaker 03 Well, anyway, you, so you drove past it?
19:41 Speaker 02 I walked past it.
19:42 Speaker 03 Great story.
19:44 Speaker 03 It's a good.
19:47 Speaker 01 Are you gonna up your game now Anna's back Andy? She will not suffer these half anecdotes.
19:51 Speaker 03 She won't accept these in the way that we do.
19:55 Speaker 02 That's fair. Let's have another fact. How about this one? This one goes out to Julie King Humphries. Terrific name. And your fact now, Julie forever, is that the first man to discover the clitoris in 1559 was Columbo.
20:13 Speaker 01 Was this your fact then?
20:14 Speaker 02 This was my fact, yeah. I think we did this at a live show. I feel like an up the creek memory coming into my head.
20:19 Speaker 01 As it were.
20:20 Speaker 02 Could have been.
20:22 Speaker 02 Could be so.
20:23 Speaker 01 How did you find it? Was it difficult to find?
20:29 Speaker 02 I sometimes forget that when you ask me a question, it's pointless what I'm saying in between.
20:34 Speaker 01 I don't even listen to the answers.
20:36 Speaker 03 It's just fluff to get you to where you need to be.
20:39 Speaker 02 James is playing tennis against the wall here. You can't win.
20:43 Speaker 02 Yeah. Yeah, good fact. He was a old scientist, wasn't he? Columbo.
20:48 Speaker 01 Okay, here is another fact. This one now is under the custodianship of Matt Janaway. Matt, your fact is that for 200 years after the tomato reached England, they were grown entirely for ornamental reasons.
21:03 Speaker 02 Funny.
21:04 Speaker 01 Yeah, because they're a member of the nightshade family.
21:07 Speaker 02 Yes.
21:07 Speaker 01 So we had nightshades in Europe, which were very poisonous. The tomato came over and when it's growing, it looks like it might be one of these poisonous plants. So we thought it might be poisonous as well.
21:19 Speaker 02 Yeah.
21:19 Speaker 01 And no one really trusted it. I mean, reasonably, right?
21:22 Speaker 02 Yeah, completely. Was the same true of potatoes as well?
21:25 Speaker 01 Yeah, the same family.
21:26 Speaker 02 So it's potato and patata and tomato and tomato were all thought to be unsafe.
21:29 Speaker 01 Well, just the two that are actual words.
21:32 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
21:33 Speaker 03 You know, those aren't four things, right?
21:36 Speaker 02 I keep being up sold at the supermarket. I'm just trying to buy tomatoes and they sell me tomatoes. They're twice the price, but they are imported from America, so.
21:45 Speaker 03 All right, let's get to another one. Congratulations, Sally Baker, because you are now the custodian of the fact that NASA is planning on giving the moon a moon.
21:55 Speaker 01 Hmm.
21:56 Speaker 03 This was another one of my facts, and I guess this was so long ago, I don't know if it's now got a new moon. I think we would have heard.
22:03 Speaker 02 We'd have heard.
22:04 Speaker 03 Yeah.
22:05 Speaker 02 NASA went a bit quiet for a while, but they've come roaring back. So I imagine they're still working on it.
22:08 Speaker 01 When the astronauts went to the moon very recently, do we know which one they went to?
22:16 Speaker 02 This one goes out to Mark Waddy, and it's that the man who played Sherlock Holmes, Basil Rathbone, spent the First World War dressed as a tree.
22:28 Speaker 02 Basil Rathbone, very famous actor, most famous for being Sherlock Holmes. And during the First World War, he needed to be crawling towards enemy lines for reconnaissance purposes.
22:37 Speaker 03 Oh, wow.
22:38 Speaker 02 So I think he was a moving tree, which, what is the point at that point?
22:41 Speaker 03 Well, no, because, okay, so if you go to the Imperial War Museum, I don't know if you've been, but they have a fantastic exhibition on all the ingenuity and all the amazing innovations for the wars. And you can see that tree there. The idea was that during night, they went and cut down an existing tree, and they'd remodeled it so that in the daylight, it was still there, but it was this new hollow tree, and they would have soldiers in there. And yeah, so you can see a tree in that museum, which is very, very clever.
23:10 Speaker 01 Okay, here is another fact. This one is now under the custodianship of Oliver Porter. Oliver, your fact is that Abraham Lincoln hid important documents in his stovepipe hat.
23:22 Speaker 03 I love this fact. It's such good storage space that you just, no one would ever to think of. How did we not just naturally know that he did that?
23:28 Speaker 01 I think what's great about it is because we all associate him so much with that hat.
23:32 Speaker 03 Yeah.
23:33 Speaker 01 And just to learn that there was an extra thing that was happening under there is really exciting.
23:37 Speaker 03 Yeah.
23:38 Speaker 01 But I think, did he not always wear his hat? Or was it that he didn't always have a beard? That was the main thing.
23:43 Speaker 02 He had the beard in the last few years of his life, I think.
23:45 Speaker 01 Some child wrote to him saying, you'd look quite nice with a beard, and he grew it.
23:49 Speaker 02 I think that's it. But no, I think the hat was for a while.
23:53 Speaker 01 And he was like, six foot five or something.
23:56 Speaker 03 He was a tall guy.
23:56 Speaker 01 And then he had the hat on top of it. So.
23:59 Speaker 02 He must have been about seven foot tall with the hat.
24:00 Speaker 01 Yeah, it must have been awful.
24:03 Speaker 03 Do you think?
24:03 Speaker 01 Well, just getting through doors.
24:05 Speaker 02 Yeah. Yeah, the president, aren't you? So you can probably have a door rebuilt.
24:10 Speaker 01 I think instead of building the lintel of the door higher, I would make a little ditch at the bottom of the door so that you go lower.
24:17 Speaker 02 That's a really good idea.
24:18 Speaker 01 A little ha ha.
24:19 Speaker 03 Much cleverer.
24:20 Speaker 02 Who's the most hatted world leader you can think of these days?
24:23 Speaker 03 Alive, right now.
24:25 Speaker 02 Actually, it's probably Trump on the baseball caps. Because he wears those a lot.
24:29 Speaker 01 Yeah.
24:29 Speaker 02 I've never seen Keir Starmer wearing a hat.
24:31 Speaker 03 No.
24:31 Speaker 02 Macron, no. Friedrich Merz, no. Narendra Modi, don't think so.
24:39 Speaker 01 No. Putin doesn't, Zelensky doesn't. Yasser Arafat was the first person who came into my head, which shows where my cultural timings come from.
24:48 Speaker 02 Yeah, you've been. James, I'm gonna say it. We've just done a main show and we've done this show. The number of references you've made to John Major.
24:54 Speaker 01 I know.
24:55 Speaker 02 Really, really quite old school references.
24:57 Speaker 01 You know what? I've been out of the country for a few weeks and I think it's reset my timings. So I've forgotten about all of modern culture.
25:05 Speaker 02 It's like you've had a bonk on the head. Well, there's anyone answer for that? It's another bonk on the head. Come here.
25:10 Speaker 01 Now, you see, the problem is in my 1980s and 90s mindset, bonk means having sex with someone.
25:17 Speaker 02 Yeah, what do you think? Yeah, yeah, what? Yeah.
25:18 Speaker 03 That's what Andy suggested.
25:25 Speaker 02 Another fact?
25:25 Speaker 03 Yeah. This one is going out to Dayton Caneely and your fact now is that monorails were originally horse drawn.
25:33 Speaker 01 Very nice.
25:34 Speaker 03 This was the, uh, my horse jobs period of no such thing as a fish. I was obsessed over the number of jobs that horses used to have that slowly went out.
25:44 Speaker 02 They used to be, they used to do everything, didn't they?
25:46 Speaker 03 They used to do, used to carry vacuum cleaners everywhere. They used to, uh, they used to be used in theatre, uh, when they run on treadmills. You know, there was a lot of horse jobs back in the day.
25:55 Speaker 02 Yeah.
25:56 Speaker 03 And that's uh.
25:57 Speaker 02 It's sad now.
25:58 Speaker 01 Yeah, now you just see them. If you go to like one of those farms that children are allowed to feed the animals, you see them there. And occasionally in horse racing, but we don't really agree with that.
26:08 Speaker 03 No.
26:08 Speaker 02 Any more, any more horse jobs you want to talk about?
26:10 Speaker 03 I can't remember. I thought I had a lot of horse jobs, but I can't remember them now. I was just.
26:14 Speaker 02 It's very weird. You just mentioned the three that were in the archive.
26:16 Speaker 03 Oh, wow. Okay.
26:17 Speaker 02 You've got perfect recollection of headline fact and then supplementary facts coming off the back of it.
26:21 Speaker 03 I just, I just remember my horse job period.
26:23 Speaker 02 No one else does. No one, no one thinks, oh, that classic bit of fish where dad just talked about a horse job for 18 months. That didn't happen.
26:29 Speaker 01 I remember in the eighties, we used to have horses that we'd bring around. What do you call those people who would collect old bits of iron and stuff?
26:39 Speaker 02 Oh, um, rag and bone men.
26:40 Speaker 01 Rag and bone men. Around where I used to live, you used to have horses taking those guys around.
26:43 Speaker 02 You did it. In your memory?
26:46 Speaker 01 In the eighties, yeah, yeah.
26:47 Speaker 02 Your living memory?
26:48 Speaker 01 Yes.
26:49 Speaker 02 Rag and bone men.
26:50 Speaker 01 Absolutely. I'll tell you what as well. We had rag and bone men when I was in my twenties in Bolton.
26:55 Speaker 02 What?
26:56 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah. They were mostly like when the travelling community would come in and they would come around the ginnals and just ask if we had any, any bits, but they would shout rag and bone.
27:05 Speaker 02 Um, that's stunning. I didn't think rag and bone were still trading that late. I associated with the forties, fifties.
27:11 Speaker 01 Yeah. I mean, they were definitely, they were on the way out in the eighties and nineties.
27:15 Speaker 02 They weren't recruiting heavily, were they?
27:19 Speaker 01 And then of course there's rag and bone man, the singer.
27:22 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah. But he's not, that's just a name, isn't it?
27:25 Speaker 01 No, that was his original job.
27:26 Speaker 02 Get out.
27:30 Speaker 01 No, it's not.
27:35 Speaker 02 That's very good.
27:36 Speaker 03 Have you been on a horse, Andy? I know James has.
27:37 Speaker 02 I have been on a horse.
27:38 Speaker 03 Have you?
27:39 Speaker 02 Do you know what? I've been on a horse the same number of times James has, which is once.
27:42 Speaker 03 Same here.
27:43 Speaker 02 All right.
27:44 Speaker 01 Guys, just don't go on about it all the time.
27:48 Speaker 01 One last one, Andy.
27:49 Speaker 02 Yes. This one goes out to Marker Anderson. The great smog of 1952 was so bad that blind people led sighted people home from the train station.
28:01 Speaker 03 Really good.
28:02 Speaker 02 Amazing. It's because the air used to be so filthy in London and there were these increasingly severe smogs over the 40s and 50s.
28:08 Speaker 03 Yeah.
28:09 Speaker 02 I think 1952 was when it got so bad that no one could see anything for about three days.
28:13 Speaker 01 P. Supers.
28:14 Speaker 02 P. Supers, exactly.
28:15 Speaker 01 Yeah.
28:15 Speaker 02 And just like people were falling into the Thames and it was really bad, you know, people were, people were having a horrible time of it. And I think that's when they thought, maybe we shouldn't burn coal in right in the middle of the city. Maybe we should move it out.
28:26 Speaker 03 I was reading Michael Palin's diaries recently and while they were doing Python, there was huge electricity cuts due to union things. And so it's all these tales of while they're writing that everyone would be writing by candlelight in 1969 slash 70.
28:42 Speaker 02 Yeah.
28:42 Speaker 01 Wow. Can I just say, there was a lot of power cuts when I was a kid as well.
28:46 Speaker 03 Yeah, but I don't know, for some reason, that feels weird to me that London would be going through that in the 70s as a decision, as opposed to a genuine power cut. They were turning it off as a matter of action.
28:56 Speaker 01 I see. When they did the three day week, maybe.
28:58 Speaker 03 Yeah.
28:58 Speaker 02 Hmm. James, what was the general strike like?
29:04 Speaker 01 There was definitely strikes going on when I was a kid. I remember like all the kids TV shows, they would stop being shown during like the, the summer holidays because there was industrial action and they'd just show other crap instead.
29:17 Speaker 02 Why? As in, children also have to suffer through this industrial, there's no reason why you guys should get to watch Rainbow while we're having a hard time.
29:24 Speaker 01 I just remember, I just have really solid memories of not being able to watch cartoons because there was industrial action happening in the country.
29:30 Speaker 02 Mr. Ben, he was in the union.
29:32 Speaker 01 Yeah, he was in all the unions.
29:36 Speaker 02 That's the best Mr. Ben joke you hear on a modern British podcast. I have no idea what that means, but it's about you're in the presence of greatness. I assure you.
29:45 Speaker 03 It sounded awesome.
29:46 Speaker 01 Okay, guys, that is enough. That is enough of our facts and of course enough of your facts for the day. We have one more thing to say and that is thank you so much to Marker, Dayton, Oliver, Mark, Sally, Matt, Julie, Laurel and Katie. Thank you so much for becoming custodians and thank you for becoming friends of the podcast. We really do appreciate anyone who goes onto our Patreon and joins on any level and even the people who come and join up for free. It's really good way to support the podcast, but another way to support the podcast is listening and coming back on Friday for a new episode. So for now, it's goodbye from me, it's goodbye from Andy.
30:23 Speaker 02 Bye.
30:24 Speaker 01 And it's goodbye from Dan Schreiber.
30:25 Speaker 02 Oh yes, goodbye.
30:26 Speaker 01 We will see you again on Friday. Bye.
30:29 Speaker 02 A lovely tribute to the two Ronnies there who you will remember very well, James.
30:34 Speaker 01 I do remember them.
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