Pod Insights No Such Thing As A Fish Little Fish: You've Hit The Nail On the Head About this episode Dan, James and Andy discuss YOUR facts, including Jack Black and flat pack. James creates a new theme tune. And we name eight more Friend of the Podcast fact custodians.
Transcript 0:13 Speaker 00 Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of Little Fish. My name's Andrew Hunter Murray, I'm here with James Harkin and Dan Treiber. What the hell was that?
0:23 Speaker 01 I don't know if that'd be picked up on the mics.
0:26 Speaker 00 James was just slapping his cheeks. Is that what it was? I wasn't looking, so...
0:30 Speaker 01 My face cheeks for those at home.
0:32 Speaker 00 Yeah, absolutely.
0:35 Speaker 00 And, and welcome to the show. You've had your fireworks right at the top, now let's get into some facts.
0:40 Speaker 01 If that becomes our theme tune, then I might have problems because it still hurts a little bit.
0:46 Speaker 00 We'll do it next time.
0:48 Speaker 01 On my face.
0:49 Speaker 00 Oh yeah, yeah. So you've been sending in all your facts, you've been sending them to [email protected] . We've been sifting through them, winnowing, filtering, and we've got some absolute crackers for you. So, let's get cracking. Who's got a fact?
1:05 Speaker 02 I got a fact here, this is from Stefan Grenz. My fact is, in Japan, baseball players get scouted based on blood type.
1:14 Speaker 01 Ohhh.
1:15 Speaker 02 Yeah. So this is, I'm reading Stefan's email here, this is based on blood type personality theory, which states that your blood type determines your personality traits.
1:24 Speaker 01 It's like their version of horoscopes, isn't it?
1:26 Speaker 02 Exactly that, yeah, and it appears in so many different places. So Stefan says, "As a result, it is common to take blood type into account when hiring people, or indeed scouting athletes, and baseball is very popular in Japan. But, you'll also notice it, and it's something I never did, but now that I look on the images that I've Googled, it's definitely in the English versions, on things like Street Fighter. So when you're picking your character, like Chun-Li, or M. Bison, or whoever, they tell their blood type as well, so that you get an idea of what their personality types are."
2:00 Speaker 01 Were you a Chun-Li guy?
2:01 Speaker 02 Yeah, Chun-Li, or Ryu.
2:03 Speaker 01 Blanca's the one, right? Chun-Li is pretty cool as well.
2:06 Speaker 00 It's like you're all speaking another language. I've no idea what's going on.
2:08 Speaker 02 Oh, really?
2:09 Speaker 00 Well, I mean, partly you are speaking another language because these are all names from overseas, but.
2:12 Speaker 02 Yeah. Well, she's blood type A, just for you to know.
2:15 Speaker 01 That's good to know.
2:16 Speaker 02 Yeah. And so this became massive in this.
2:18 Speaker 01 Do you know what Blanca was? He was, he has green blood.
2:22 Speaker 02 Yeah, he's, yeah, I'm not sure. I didn't look him up. I know M. Bison, I think, is blood type A as well.
2:26 Speaker 01 Okay.
2:27 Speaker 00 And it's not that the rarer the blood type, the better the baseball player will be.
2:30 Speaker 02 I'm not sure. I mean, there's a whole theory about it. It's like there were a series of books that were written in the 70s by a man called Masahiko Nomi, and he wrote this book called Blood Type Humanics. And it's such a big thing in Japan that not only does it determine things like on dates, you would talk about your blood type to see if you're compatible. But also there's a phrase in Japan which is "burahara", which is blood harassment. And you can get bullied at work for your blood type. And so that's what it gets called. I'm getting "burahasod".
2:59 Speaker 00 People are being very negative.
3:01 Speaker 02 Yeah.
3:01 Speaker 00 Oh, negative.
3:02 Speaker 02 Yes.
3:03 Speaker 00 Brilliant. If I just say it after a joke, I think I can carry the room with me.
3:10 Speaker 01 I think in other jobs actually as well, like I remember reading that you go for a job interview and you have to put your blood type on. And I think like, like all these things, I'm always a little bit wary because I'm not from Japan and I, I don't know how prevalent these things are. And obviously there's only so many blood groups and it can't be that if you're really good at baseball, but you have the wrong blood type, they won't get you on the team.
3:32 Speaker 02 Exactly.
3:33 Speaker 01 That doesn't make sense.
3:34 Speaker 02 And also I think there's a real out from Nomi who wrote these books, which is that he says that your blood type only accounts for a quarter of your human personality.
3:43 Speaker 00 Oh, well, there you go.
3:43 Speaker 02 The rest comes from nurture. And so it's, yeah, that's a nice out to sort of say, well, of course it's not going to be right.
3:51 Speaker 01 You're a B negative, but you can hit baseballs very far.
3:57 Speaker 02 Yeah.
3:57 Speaker 01 So we'll have you on the team because it's like 75% good.
4:03 Speaker 01 Here is another sporting one, kind of. This is from Matt Burke and it's a brilliant fact. It is that the world record for the longest darts bullseye, eight metres, is about a tenth as long as the longest throw of a cow pat, which is 81.1 metres.
4:21 Speaker 00 There's someone out there who can throw a cow pat 80 metres.
4:24 Speaker 01 81.1 metres, yeah.
4:26 Speaker 00 That's incredible.
4:27 Speaker 01 Steve Erna, no less.
4:30 Speaker 00 Steve Erna. Cow pats are flattish on the bottom.
4:35 Speaker 01 You have absolutely hit the nail on the absolute head of the importance of shape in cow pat throwing.
4:42 Speaker 00 Yeah, because you could frisbee it, right?
4:43 Speaker 01 Brilliant, so good.
4:45 Speaker 00 That's the most excited I've ever seen James do about anything. I got scared. When he started, I was like, oh no, we've done something wrong, we're in trouble. I think he did something to his head when he did that slappy thing at the beginning.
4:56 Speaker 01 This 81.1 is under the non-sphericalisation and 100% organic rule, which was established in 1970. So you have two different records, one of which is where the pat is moulded into a spherical shape and one where it's done as a flat chip.
5:15 Speaker 00 Okay, so wait, the one that was thrown this far was moulded into a spherical shape?
5:19 Speaker 01 No, it was flat like a frisbee, like a discus.
5:22 Speaker 00 Okay, oh sorry, spherical, I was thinking round, meant spherical, no, got it. Presumably, if you fashioned your cow pat into a javelin, in much the same way that that guy made his own poon knife, you could throw it even further.
5:34 Speaker 01 Yeah, so you'd have to freeze it?
5:36 Speaker 00 Oh, you'd have to freeze it. Is that in the rules?
5:38 Speaker 01 Well, you've hit the nail right on the head yet again. No, it's not in the rules. No one's thought of freezing the cow pats yet, I don't think.
5:45 Speaker 00 I think that's a Fosbury slot moment waiting to happen. Yeah. Yeah.
5:48 Speaker 01 Yeah, could be.
5:48 Speaker 00 Yeah. Here's a fact from Dave Shaw. The only UK number one that doesn't contain its own title in the lyrics is...
5:57 Speaker 01 What? Must be loads.
6:00 Speaker 00 Dave says not.
6:02 Speaker 01 I think there have been some without any lyrics at all.
6:04 Speaker 00 There have, there have been some which haven't got any lyrics at all.
6:06 Speaker 02 Can we try and guess it if you give us the name of the band? Or is it?
6:10 Speaker 00 If I give you the name of the band, you'll absolutely get it.
6:12 Speaker 01 Is it Living in a Box by Living in a Box? Because they do say Living in a Box quite often in that song. Was it No, No, No, No, No Limits by Two Unlimited? They do say that in there as well, don't they? Yeah, yeah. Is it Doop by Doop? Oh no, they do say that in there as well.
6:28 Speaker 00 Shall I tell you?
6:29 Speaker 01 Give us a clue. An era.
6:31 Speaker 00 The seventies, I think.
6:33 Speaker 01 Bohemian Rhapsody.
6:35 Speaker 00 Oh, he's got it. Yeah, that's it.
6:37 Speaker 02 Oh, that's it, is it?
6:40 Speaker 00 Wow, that was like someone throwing a cow patch and hitting a bullseye 80 metres away. Yeah, so okay, so Dave says, the only, this is, this is what makes the fact amazing. There's a plot twist halfway through this fact, which I love. The only UK number one that doesn't contain its own title in the lyrics is Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody. It does, however, include the title of the song that succeeded it.
7:03 Speaker 01 Oh yeah, it does.
7:04 Speaker 00 Which is?
7:05 Speaker 01 Mama by ABBA.
7:06 Speaker 00 Mama Mia.
7:06 Speaker 01 Mama Mia by ABBA.
7:07 Speaker 00 Mama Mia. How weird is that?
7:10 Speaker 01 Yeah, there's a theory that it's the only one that does that, but actually there's loads. And I found loads of them, but I can't remember any of them.
7:17 Speaker 00 That contains the following song?
7:19 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
7:19 Speaker 00 What?
7:20 Speaker 01 But then most, they're all like songs with like one word in the title, like Yes or.
7:26 Speaker 00 Love, love would be one.
7:27 Speaker 01 Yeah, exactly.
7:28 Speaker 00 Oh, okay, Dave, you've been hearkened, I'm afraid.
7:31 Speaker 01 I wish I could remember all of them, but yeah.
7:34 Speaker 00 It was worth it to get there, though.
7:35 Speaker 02 Yes, wonderful.
7:36 Speaker 01 It's a good fact. It's a classic fact, that one, I would say.
7:39 Speaker 00 Dave has to devastate that, Dave has to. You don't, I've been in meetings before where James has said, ah, yes, this is a classic. And yet, oh no, that's not, that's actually not what we're going for on QI.
7:52 Speaker 02 All right, let's have another fact. This was sent in by Python Boy, Boy, as in B O I. And it is in the movie adaption of the Goosebumps series. Jack Black plays the author while the author plays Jack Black.
8:06 Speaker 01 Nice.
8:07 Speaker 02 This is very subtle. I would argue that it's not entirely true.
8:10 Speaker 01 You're gonna get a Schreiber ring.
8:13 Speaker 02 Arguably, okay. At the near end of the movie, I don't want to give away too much, but. You don't want to spoil the Goosebumps movie, Dad. Which I have seen 13 or 14 times. Jack Black is.
8:25 Speaker 01 Have you seen it since your kids were born?
8:26 Speaker 02 No, actually, they're not into it. Real bummer in my house. So Jack Black is playing R.L. Stine and he's walking in a school hall and R.L. Stine comes into shot and. The real R.L. The real R.L. Stine.
8:39 Speaker 01 I remember that.
8:40 Speaker 02 And he's acknowledged as Mr. Black. Now, okay, he's got the surname. We hear Mister, we don't hear the name Jack, but also Jack Black is Jack Black. He's a, he's in Tenacious D, he's an actor. Yeah. So, yes, it's a lovely little swapping of surnames, but.
8:56 Speaker 01 But R.L. Stine's character is not necessarily the Jack Black that we know.
9:00 Speaker 02 Exactly. Exactly. So he's not playing him. But yeah, it's a nice little nod. And it just reminded me how much I love R.L. Stine. So I was quite excited to see this fact. He's sold more than Stephen King in terms of books. So he's sold over 400 million books worldwide. That's a pretty astonishing amount.
9:19 Speaker 01 That's like one for every chest that you can.
9:26 Speaker 02 Well, I'll send, I'll send this to the boffins at fun.com and see if they agree with this number.
9:33 Speaker 02 We'll have to wait on that.
9:34 Speaker 01 Interesting. I mean, they are great books.
9:36 Speaker 02 They're very good. He pumped them out very, very quickly. And they're short. They're small books, so I can imagine there'd be more of them. They're for kids. Yeah. They were great.
9:44 Speaker 01 Not much goes into Stephen King's ones in fairness, so.
9:48 Speaker 00 Just trying to sound some beef with.
9:50 Speaker 02 Yeah, I know, the King Community.
9:52 Speaker 00 Yeah, yeah.
9:53 Speaker 02 But this is quite a cool little fact. I believe we have mentioned this in the past, but before he was writing Goosebumps, he was a writer generally and he had to take on paid gigs. And one of the books that he wrote was the novelisation of Spaceballs. So the movie with Mel Brooks, which was the Star Wars parody. Now, one of the conditions of Star Wars and George Lucas was that you can do the movie as a parody, but you can't do any merch. And this was the only thing that was let through is merch. And so he wrote it under the name Jovial Bob Stein. And you can get copies online for on eBay and so on, as I have.
10:24 Speaker 00 For a few hundred pounds only.
10:26 Speaker 02 Only a few hundred, um, which is really good deal, actually, Fenella. And, uh, yeah, so, yeah, that's the, that's the fact.
10:36 Speaker 00 Great, really good fact.
10:37 Speaker 01 Okay, here's another pop culturey one.
10:40 Speaker 02 Yep.
10:41 Speaker 01 This is from Brenton Innis from Perth, Western Australia. Uh, and Brenton says that while many people named Tony have won a Tony, only one person named Oscar has won an Oscar. And actually, I can't remember who that is. Is it Oscar Hammerstein? Maybe, I think. Uh, but I forgot to write that down. But anyway, that's not the important part of this fact. The important part is that in 2022, a granny won a Grammy.
11:09 Speaker 02 A Grammy won a Grammy.
11:11 Speaker 01 A granny.
11:11 Speaker 02 A granny.
11:12 Speaker 01 Like grandmother. You might say Grammy.
11:14 Speaker 02 Yeah.
11:15 Speaker 00 Yeah, yeah, yeah, right.
11:16 Speaker 02 Yeah.
11:16 Speaker 01 Uh, at the age of 95, when singer Angela Alvarez became the oldest winner of a Latin Grammy Award.
11:23 Speaker 00 Beautiful, beautiful. She sounds like she might be a Latin Grammy as well.
11:27 Speaker 01 Yes, she does.
11:30 Speaker 01 Uh, but I actually found another Grammy who won a Grammy. Have you ever heard of the, um, guitar style called Cotton Picking?
11:40 Speaker 02 Maybe, yeah.
11:42 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's like, I guess it's kind of American.
11:45 Speaker 02 Blue Crossy?
11:45 Speaker 01 Yeah, well, not quite the one that I'm talking about, because this is named after someone called Elizabeth Cotton.
11:50 Speaker 00 Beautiful.
11:51 Speaker 02 Oh, dear.
11:52 Speaker 00 Beautiful.
11:55 Speaker 00 I didn't see that coming.
11:56 Speaker 01 Yeah.
11:56 Speaker 00 From a clear blue sky.
11:58 Speaker 02 That was an assassin shot. Wow.
12:02 Speaker 01 I feel like that could be a new thing for these things that are named after people or whatever.
12:07 Speaker 00 Yeah.
12:07 Speaker 01 Is that we try and slip them in without each other noticing.
12:10 Speaker 00 Absolutely. That's really good.
12:11 Speaker 01 Um, Elizabeth Cotton, she won, um, for her album Elizabeth Cotton Live at the age of 90 in 1984. Uh, and then actually in 1967, she released a record created with her grandchildren and with one great grandchild as well. Who was in that album. Uh, and she was a self-taught left-handed guitarist who played a guitar upside down.
12:35 Speaker 00 Amazing.
12:35 Speaker 01 Okay. Do you know what I mean? So, and that was, her style was really unusual because she played it upside down. And that was why it was known as cotton picking.
12:41 Speaker 00 Brilliant.
12:42 Speaker 02 Cool.
12:42 Speaker 00 Great Grammy.
12:44 Speaker 01 Yeah.
12:44 Speaker 02 Yeah. I wonder if, um, an Emmy has ever won an Emmy.
12:47 Speaker 00 Ooh.
12:47 Speaker 01 Very good question.
12:48 Speaker 02 We need to check out.
12:49 Speaker 00 Yeah.
12:49 Speaker 01 Yeah.
12:49 Speaker 02 Yeah. I'm gonna name my next kid BAFTA.
12:53 Speaker 02 Fingers crossed.
12:55 Speaker 01 I'm gonna change my name to Chortle Award.
13:00 Speaker 00 Here's another fact. This one comes from Alex Thorpe. Thank you, Alex. And it's that. You should hire Novak Djokovic to build your flat pack furniture and Rafael Nadal to disassemble it.
13:12 Speaker 02 Okay.
13:14 Speaker 00 There is a reason for this.
13:16 Speaker 01 I, I, I can have a guess.
13:17 Speaker 02 I've got a guess as well.
13:19 Speaker 01 We should say something funny then. We both know the answer.
13:24 Speaker 00 Do you?
13:25 Speaker 02 Uh, I'm, it's just a guess.
13:27 Speaker 00 Go on, what's your guess then?
13:28 Speaker 01 Shall we say at the same time?
13:29 Speaker 02 Yeah.
13:29 Speaker 01 Start with, um.
13:31 Speaker 02 Nadal?
13:32 Speaker 01 Nadal is left-handed.
13:35 Speaker 00 Okay, screw you guys. You're not allowed to get, you're not allowed to go into my notes before we do the show. And gazump me like that. Um, so Nadal is left-handed, basically.
13:45 Speaker 01 And Djokovic is Serbian.
13:48 Speaker 00 So when you're tightening a screw, you're, you guys are right-handed, aren't you?
13:53 Speaker 01 Yes.
13:54 Speaker 00 When you tighten a screw with a screwdriver in your right hand, you're using a muscle called the supinator.
13:59 Speaker 01 Cool.
13:59 Speaker 00 Which is, which is much stronger than the pronator, which is used to unscrew. Now, if you're using your left hand and a screwdriver, it's the opposite way around, right?
14:09 Speaker 01 It feels like someone else is making the wardrobe.
14:12 Speaker 00 That's right.
14:14 Speaker 00 If you're left-handed and you're tightening a screw, then you're using your pronator, and you're not quite as good as it. And if you're using your, but if you're using your left hand and you're unscrewing, then you're using the other muscle. So that's why it works out. So I'm left-handed. This is why I don't enjoy putting together flat pack furniture, but I do love taking it apart. I like unscrewing things more. It feels like a more natural action to me than screwing things up with my left hand. Weird. And I'd never considered that before.
14:39 Speaker 01 Yeah.
14:40 Speaker 00 So I love that fact.
14:41 Speaker 02 Never heard that. That's wonderful.
14:42 Speaker 00 Thanks, guys.
14:42 Speaker 02 And that's supinator.
14:43 Speaker 00 Supinator.
14:45 Speaker 01 Yeah.
14:51 Speaker 01 Dan, give us one more.
14:52 Speaker 02 Okay.
14:54 Speaker 01 Actually, I'm not hosting. I'm DJ.
14:56 Speaker 02 Dan, do what James says.
15:00 Speaker 02 Okay. Well, this is from Joe Bartlett, who says that Qantas once spent $100 million to repair a crashed plane purely for PR reasons.
15:10 Speaker 01 Interestingly, I thought that they'd never had a crash, Qantas.
15:13 Speaker 02 Well, there we go.
15:14 Speaker 01 They did not advertise that.
15:15 Speaker 02 There we go. Hello. You've hit the nail on the head. This is because in September 1999, Qantas Flight 1.
15:25 Speaker 00 It's really frightening when anyone does it. I've just gotta say.
15:29 Speaker 02 Boeing 747 flying from London to Sydney via Bangkok overran the runway into a bog and it crashed into a radio antenna as it went. There were no serious injuries or fatalities, but the plane was a write-off. At least it would have been for most other, or indeed any other airline. Qantas, however, has an excellent safety record with zero hull loss. So they've had accidents, but they've never lost a hull. And they decided they wanted to make sure that that record stood.
15:57 Speaker 01 You know what? Like just to say, in my head, they've never had a crash.
16:00 Speaker 00 Hmm.
16:01 Speaker 01 I didn't realise they had a little asterisk there saying, oh yeah, we have, but just not the hull.
16:05 Speaker 00 We've never had a hull loss is a much less enticing offer. In fact, it makes me think about all the other things that are not the hull on a plane.
16:12 Speaker 01 Yeah, I'll have a ticket in the hole, please. That'll be an extra $129. What?
16:20 Speaker 02 So they decided they were going to repair it no matter what the cost. And in the end, the total repairs were estimated at 100 million. Uh, the exact figure was never disclosed. However, that is more than the value of the aircraft at the time.
16:33 Speaker 00 I'm not surprised.
16:34 Speaker 02 But it was worth it for the reputational value of maintaining the flawless safety record.
16:38 Speaker 00 I feel like that's a handyman arriving at the runway with knowledge that he's got the whip handle over these people.
16:43 Speaker 01 Hmm.
16:44 Speaker 00 Saying, I can charge these people whatever I like.
16:46 Speaker 02 Yes.
16:47 Speaker 00 You know how when a handyman comes over, sometimes they'll, they'll look at you, size you up and thus add a, add a, add a zero.
16:52 Speaker 01 No.
16:52 Speaker 00 They'll be like, this guy's left-handed. He cannot make flat pack furniture. I can charge what I like.
16:58 Speaker 01 Okay, have we got time for one more?
16:59 Speaker 00 Yeah, why not?
17:00 Speaker 01 Okay, this one is from Seth from Limerick. And Seth said, the once was a mangold.
17:09 Speaker 01 No, he didn't. That's silly. Seth said, all golfers wear one glove. Why? No idea. However, Lucas Glover, winner of the 2009 US Open, does not wear a glove. Crazy.
17:23 Speaker 00 Really?
17:24 Speaker 01 Yeah, I knew this in fact as a golf fan. He doesn't wear a glove. Yeah.
17:29 Speaker 00 Does he not get very sore hands?
17:31 Speaker 01 Well.
17:32 Speaker 00 Why do they wear the gloves?
17:33 Speaker 01 There's a few different reasons. One, it definitely can help you not get blisters for sure.
17:38 Speaker 00 Okay.
17:38 Speaker 01 But if you, if you're used to it, then your hand will get enough calluses or whatever that you're not going to get blisters.
17:44 Speaker 00 Yep.
17:45 Speaker 01 So it should be fine for everyone. And also the early gloves would develop because the gloves would have like quite rough leather grips. And also if it rains, you couldn't really get a grip on them. But these days they're made of synthetic materials, very grippy. They're not going to do you any harm. So actually it's no real big deal for Lucas Glover not to wear gloves.
18:05 Speaker 02 Okay.
18:06 Speaker 00 If you fashioned your cow pat into 100 golf balls, I reckon you could get them to go even further.
18:11 Speaker 01 Than 81 yards.
18:12 Speaker 00 Yeah.
18:13 Speaker 02 Are they frozen?
18:14 Speaker 00 Yeah, they're frozen.
18:15 Speaker 02 Hmm. They'd shatter as they got hit, I imagine.
18:18 Speaker 00 Who cares?
18:20 Speaker 01 The people measuring?
18:21 Speaker 00 As you're hitting, sorry. Okay. Yeah, that's a problem.
18:25 Speaker 01 Well, which of the fragments am I gonna measure? Who cares?
18:29 Speaker 00 Your problem, not mine. I mean, we're at the Cowpad Olympics here. Like, no one's getting out of the Cowpad Olympics and going up to the real Olympics, okay? You're stuck here. You're not impressing anyone with your, oh, which fragment should I measure? Malarky.
18:47 Speaker 01 Yes, so there is a player, Aaron Rai, who wears two gloves.
18:51 Speaker 00 What's his name? Aaron Rai?
18:52 Speaker 01 Aaron Rai, yeah.
18:53 Speaker 00 On the same hand, or?
18:56 Speaker 01 He wears one at each hand. And the reason is, he's English and he played in English conditions as a child, which means you need to keep your hands warm. And so he would always wear two gloves and he's kind of kept it going.
19:08 Speaker 00 Yeah, I've always wondered about the glove thing. But it's just one? Normally, it's just one.
19:12 Speaker 01 Normally, just one. It started with a guy called Sam Snead in the 19... When was that? Probably in the 1930s. And he did it and he was one of the best or was the best of his era. And then everyone started doing it. And now, I think because I play golf a lot and I always have done and I've always wore a glove, if you don't wear one, it just feels weird.
19:31 Speaker 00 Hmm. Well, I thought you were gripping the shaft with both hands, as it were. Come on, grow up.
19:39 Speaker 01 I'm gonna show you on this ruler how I hold it. I hold it like that.
19:42 Speaker 00 Right.
19:43 Speaker 01 My palm is holding... The left palm is holding it and the right is more just the fingers.
19:48 Speaker 00 I see, okay.
19:49 Speaker 01 Anyway, tune in next week for our second lesson of how to play golf with James and Andy.
19:55 Speaker 00 It's going bloody slowly. Oh, magnificent. All right, well, that is enough of your facts. Thank you so much for them. If you'd like to send them in and see them get a harkening or a shribering, maybe there'll be a murreying out there one day, it's possible. Just email them in to [email protected] . We love getting them. I read every single one. They're always so much fun to get. Please do send them in. But now it's time for some fact custodianships, because if you join Club Fish and you join at the highest tier of friend of the podcast, then we will dedicate one of our facts to you and what's more, we'll give you a shout out on an episode of Little Fish. So it's time to do some of that now. Who has got a fact that they'd like to dish out?
20:34 Speaker 01 I have one. This was ours and it is now under the custodianship of Mark. Mark, your fact now is that in a very particular time and place in history, you could avoid castration by shouting, "Soho!" What an interesting one.
20:53 Speaker 00 Joe Freecard.
20:54 Speaker 01 What is it all about?
20:56 Speaker 00 What is it all about?
20:57 Speaker 01 I know that the word Soho was used as a hunting cry.
21:01 Speaker 00 This was your fact, James.
21:02 Speaker 01 I know it was. I'm trying to go through the rolodex of my brain to work out exactly what it was.
21:09 Speaker 00 This is a shanty law.
21:11 Speaker 01 Oh, okay.
21:12 Speaker 00 We're in West Africa?
21:13 Speaker 01 In Africa, yeah.
21:14 Speaker 00 Uh, I think modern day Ghana, I think.
21:17 Speaker 01 I buy that, yeah.
21:18 Speaker 00 Uh, and it's if you saw a member of the King's Harem naked, you would be castrated.
21:23 Speaker 01 Oh dear.
21:23 Speaker 00 So you had to shout Soho before going into a room and that would give everyone time to get dressed. So it's a preventative. If you've already seen them naked, that's it. You're getting castrated, I'm afraid. But if you shout Soho before you go in, you're all right.
21:35 Speaker 01 That's really interesting. I suppose you could kind of shout anything like, "I'm coming in."
21:40 Speaker 00 Yeah, true. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
21:42 Speaker 01 But there must be a rule for this. I honestly have literally no memory of this.
21:46 Speaker 00 Yeah, it's wild. Yeah. Whereas I do remember the next fact that was about to be dished out, if you're doing it, Dan.
21:52 Speaker 02 Yeah, sure. This is now under the custodianship of Andrew Shakespeare, which is Matthew Ricard, the man labelled as the happiest man in the world, is unhappy that people call him that. Yeah. He won the award. I think it was sort of pressed on to him by scientists who studied him and he's not in the game for that kind of thing. So I think it led to a lot of interview requests and he thought there were more important things to talk about. And he's written some books and he's a name that still pops up occasionally in the news.
22:23 Speaker 01 Still happy?
22:24 Speaker 02 Still happy.
22:25 Speaker 00 That's pretty good.
22:25 Speaker 02 Yeah. I don't think he's defending the title. I think.
22:30 Speaker 01 You probably also don't graduate from the Calpat Olympics to the Happy Olympics.
22:34 Speaker 00 No, no way, no way. Here's another one. This goes out to Spool T. Spool T, maybe a pseudonym. Your fact now and forever is that the route for the Hong Kong Ultra Marathon is to run up and down the same stretch of road 25 times.
22:52 Speaker 01 Yes, I reckon that Soho Theatre show may be that one. Don't know, might be wrong.
22:57 Speaker 00 Yeah, this was a really fun fact. It's just, it's basically about the shape of Hong Kong, isn't it? And the land that they've got available to, to do marathons on. Dan, you're from Hong Kong.
23:05 Speaker 02 I am. What road was it? Do you, do you happen to know?
23:08 Speaker 00 I think it was the main.
23:09 Speaker 02 Main road.
23:10 Speaker 00 Main road to Hong Kong. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
23:12 Speaker 02 Right.
23:13 Speaker 00 Is there a seafront bit?
23:14 Speaker 01 There is.
23:15 Speaker 02 There's many, yeah.
23:15 Speaker 00 It might be up and down the front.
23:16 Speaker 02 It's an island, Hong Kong Island.
23:18 Speaker 01 Could be all the way around.
23:19 Speaker 00 Could be all the way around.
23:20 Speaker 02 Yeah.
23:20 Speaker 00 25 times.
23:22 Speaker 02 Yes.
23:22 Speaker 00 No, it's up and down. It's up and down specifically.
23:24 Speaker 01 I have a feeling it was like a promenade or something.
23:27 Speaker 00 I think it is, yeah. Yeah, there you go.
23:29 Speaker 01 How interesting.
23:30 Speaker 00 Lovely stuff.
23:31 Speaker 02 How interesting, as you said, James. But what a boring race to run.
23:36 Speaker 01 Okay, the next fact is now under the custodianship of Lisa Goble. Lisa, your fact is that the meter is wrong.
23:46 Speaker 01 That's another fact. She's just being contrary, I think. She said that the man who first made it, called Meshan, later realised it was 0.16 millimetres inaccurate, but everyone said they'd finished it and couldn't change it now.
24:02 Speaker 00 Magnificent.
24:03 Speaker 01 And this is the original piece of metal, I think, that they used to standardise the meter. And if memory serves, it was 1/40,000th of the circumference of the earth or something.
24:17 Speaker 00 Oh, you're so close. It was 1/10 millionth of the distance from the equator to the North Pole.
24:21 Speaker 01 Oh, okay. That was nowhere near.
24:24 Speaker 00 Well, but you were, you were right, right, that it was one fraction of a set distance.
24:27 Speaker 02 Yeah, it was definitely a measure.
24:28 Speaker 01 Thinking about it, I was going off kilometres, not metres anyway. So I was, I was totally miles off.
24:33 Speaker 00 No, but you got the principle.
24:34 Speaker 01 Yeah.
24:35 Speaker 00 Yeah, but it was wrong anyway. So that's why we're going back to yards on this podcast. Yards and feet, which have never let us down.
24:41 Speaker 01 But I think now they don't even use the physical meter anymore. Do they not use like the vibrations of some atom or are they all like the plank length?
24:49 Speaker 00 Clever dick method like that, you know? Yeah, boffins.
24:54 Speaker 00 Rare for us to be anti boffin, but I don't mind it. Um, let's have another one.
24:58 Speaker 02 Uh, this is for Jamina and your fact is St Andrews Aquarium has three meerkats called Churchill, Admiral and Sheila's Wheels.
25:07 Speaker 00 Jamina, I hope you're listening somewhere that this cultural reference makes any sense to you because you may well be overseas and Churchill Admiral and Sheila's Wheels might not be a thing where you are.
25:17 Speaker 01 You know what? I, is this my fact? I think it is, isn't it?
25:20 Speaker 00 Yeah.
25:21 Speaker 01 Um, I got this fact when I went to St Andrews Aquarium and last week I went again.
25:28 Speaker 00 No.
25:29 Speaker 02 Did you go to the meerkat enclosure?
25:31 Speaker 01 I didn't even remember seeing it. I was with friends. I was only there for not very long. But yeah, I went there and I found that out.
25:38 Speaker 00 Imagine the meerkats are going, oh my God, he's here. He's back, he's back. He doesn't remember us.
25:43 Speaker 02 Yeah, they also had a Viva and Direct Line, um, but they both died.
25:48 Speaker 00 How long do meerkats live? I think maybe all of these meerkats might no longer be with us.
25:52 Speaker 01 Yeah, I imagine probably like an insurance payout there when they died.
25:56 Speaker 00 That's very nice. Cause these are insurance firms for international listeners, for Jamina. Anyway, lovely fact.
26:04 Speaker 01 Sheila's Wheels was, um, I wouldn't, it doesn't exist anymore, does it? Or does it? I don't know. I've not seen adverts for it for a while.
26:10 Speaker 00 I was with Sheila's Wheels until quite recently.
26:11 Speaker 01 You had to be a woman.
26:13 Speaker 00 Yes.
26:14 Speaker 01 That was the whole point of them.
26:15 Speaker 00 Yes, that's why I was kicked out. That was a very, very unpleasant and upsetting meeting. I don't want to talk about it.
26:22 Speaker 01 But that was the thing, wasn't it?
26:23 Speaker 00 Wasn't it?
26:24 Speaker 01 Yeah.
26:24 Speaker 00 Was it?
26:24 Speaker 01 Yeah.
26:26 Speaker 00 Dan's gone.
26:32 Speaker 00 Was it real?
26:33 Speaker 01 It was. That was literally the whole point. And there's a big argument about it because it's like, the reason it was cheaper because women crashed their cars less.
26:41 Speaker 00 Right.
26:42 Speaker 01 And so, like, if any man got an insurance with them, probably that'd be a fraudulent insurance.
26:48 Speaker 00 Yeah, I'm finding out now I've committed insurance fraud.
26:55 Speaker 00 Okay. Let's have a, just before I turn myself in, can we have a few more?
27:01 Speaker 00 This next one goes out to Holzer. And it's that, it's a Dan fact, is that the only ancient Egyptian socks that we know of belonged to Tutankhamun. The only ancient Egyptian socks.
27:11 Speaker 02 Which means, I think I added on the night, he was a socks and sandals guy.
27:17 Speaker 00 Of course.
27:18 Speaker 02 Yes.
27:18 Speaker 00 Of course.
27:19 Speaker 02 And I remember, so that was Soho Theatre that we did this show. Yeah, I remember that now specifically.
27:25 Speaker 00 Yeah, interesting. So maybe some of the older socks.
27:28 Speaker 02 There were so many weird things in his tomb that seem out of place to what your idea of ancient Egypt was. I feel like there was trumpets and yo-yos and all that kind of stuff. Probably not yo-yos, but.
27:39 Speaker 00 And a 90-degree erection on Tutankhamun.
27:42 Speaker 02 Okay.
27:44 Speaker 00 That's one of the facts we said on the night, that he was buried with a 90-degree erection.
27:48 Speaker 01 What was he using the socks for?
27:54 Speaker 00 Lovely, lovely stuff.
27:57 Speaker 01 This sock is a little bit stiff. Oh, that's probably because it's so old.
28:01 Speaker 00 That's because it's old. Let's have a couple more.
28:03 Speaker 01 Okay, here's one. This fact is now under the custodianship of Stefan Lowkamp. And Stefan, your fact is, oh, I feel like I should let Dan do this one.
28:15 Speaker 02 Finnish budget meatballs have so little meat in them that they had to be renamed Balls.
28:20 Speaker 01 So, the reason I wanted you to do that is because you used to do that in our live show, right?
28:25 Speaker 02 It's one of my favourite facts. I remember when you told it to me, Andy, I just, it just made the world a better place to live in.
28:31 Speaker 01 Not if you lived in Finland.
28:32 Speaker 02 No, because you're eating balls.
28:34 Speaker 00 Balls for dinner?
28:35 Speaker 02 Balls for dinner. That became a kind of behind-the-scenes catchphrase.
28:39 Speaker 00 Your catchphrase.
28:39 Speaker 02 My catchphrase, yeah.
28:40 Speaker 00 Very funny it was too.
28:43 Speaker 00 Cheved me up every time I heard it. Funny.
28:45 Speaker 02 It's weird.
28:46 Speaker 01 I remember when you met the Queen that time, like, Dan do your catchphrases.
28:52 Speaker 01 Balls with animals?
28:54 Speaker 02 And President Banana was the other one on stage. There used to be when we were explaining the kind of facts that the audience were in for if they didn't know who we were. That was one of the ones that I always used.
29:05 Speaker 00 Yeah, yeah. Congratulations to Stefan Alokam.
29:08 Speaker 02 I wonder if it's still the case that you get, so you go to supermarket and it's just a can of balls that you buy.
29:14 Speaker 01 Go to your supermarket if you're in Finland.
29:15 Speaker 02 Yes, please.
29:16 Speaker 01 Take a photo of your balls and send them to podcast at qi.com.
29:21 Speaker 00 I'll need something to look through while I'm on remand for car insurance fraud.
29:27 Speaker 00 Let's have one more fact. James, you generously gave that one over to Dan. You do the last one.
29:32 Speaker 01 Okay, so this is under the custodianship of Graham Wallace, and it is the fact that a friend of Queen Victoria's once had to apologize to her after her pet Jaguar killed three of the Queen's pet deer.
29:46 Speaker 00 Wonderful.
29:48 Speaker 01 Amazing fact.
29:49 Speaker 02 Yeah.
29:49 Speaker 01 Do we know who it was, Andy?
29:51 Speaker 00 Yes, this was Lady Florence Dixie.
29:54 Speaker 01 Oh.
29:55 Speaker 00 Who was a 19th century adventuress. This is one of Anna's facts. And it's about Lady Florence and she owned a Jaguar and apparently was pretty lax with it on the leash.
30:06 Speaker 01 Gosh.
30:06 Speaker 00 I know.
30:07 Speaker 01 You don't get many Jaguars in the UK normally. They're from Americas.
30:12 Speaker 02 Yes. They sound dangerous. Like I know in the wild, I imagine they absolutely are, but can you tame one? If you're putting a muzzle over that, what's happening?
30:21 Speaker 01 You know, I read like just literally yesterday or the day before, I read an article about a dentist of a Jaguar who managed to give them anesthetic, but it was a voluntary anesthetic. So rather than blowing a dart at the Jaguar, the cat sort of came up to them and said, okay, can I have my anesthetic, please? And they could put a normal syringe into them.
30:45 Speaker 02 That's crazy.
30:46 Speaker 01 And so that's because they could train them. And it's like, this is the first time it's ever been done. It's really unusual because you would think like a cat can't be tamed really.
30:55 Speaker 02 Yeah.
30:55 Speaker 01 Like my cat can't be tamed.
30:57 Speaker 00 But maybe the bigger the cat, the more tameable.
30:59 Speaker 02 Maybe.
31:00 Speaker 01 I just wanted to try. Let's get the biggest of the wild cats.
31:03 Speaker 00 Yeah, like tigers, I suppose, are really easily.
31:06 Speaker 02 Like in He-Man, that was a very tamed beast.
31:10 Speaker 00 Not familiar with that.
31:11 Speaker 02 Hmm, okay. That's just for the two other people who remember that show.
31:15 Speaker 01 Battle Cat.
31:16 Speaker 02 Battle Cat.
31:17 Speaker 00 Oh, that's just made sense of an old improv show I used to know called Battle Acts. Oh, no, hang on.
31:22 Speaker 01 That'll be Battle Axe.
31:23 Speaker 00 Battle Axe, yeah.
31:24 Speaker 02 Let's move on.
31:27 Speaker 00 Right, thanks to all our new fact cast audience for today. That's Graham, Stefan Holzer, Jamina, Lisa, Spoolty, Andrew and Mark. We hope you enjoy your facts and we hope all of you listening have enjoyed this episode of Little Fish. We'll be back in a week with another one. We'll be back in several days with another big fish. And if you're a member of Club Fish, we might be throwing you a Drop Us A Line before too long, our special audience feedback show. Everything for Drop Us A Line and all the facts for Little Fish have come from the Fish inbox, the fin box. The email for that, please write in, is [email protected] . Until we see you again, it's goodbye from Dana James.
32:05 Speaker 01 Bye, Andy.
32:06 Speaker 02 Yeah, see you, Andy.
32:06 Speaker 00 And it's goodbye from me. Bye, Dan.
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