No Such Thing As A Fish - 511: No Such Thing As An Honest Washing Machine
Episode Date: December 28, 2023In Andy's Mailbag Special, Andy, Dan, James, Anna discuss your facts, including underwater cars, over the top diving, teeth, toilets and Torquay. Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live show...s, merchandise and more episodes. Join Club Fish for ad-free episodes and exclusive bonus content at apple.co/nosuchthingasafish or nosuchthingasafish.com/patreon
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Hello and welcome to No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the
QI offices in Hoban.
My name is Andrew Hunter-Marie, I'm joined by James Harkin, Dan Treiber and Anna Teginski and this is an upside down Christmasy end of year
episode Lord of Miss Rule style. I'm in charge.
The lunatics have taken over the asylum.
Exactly that and instead of us telling you our facts, you are going to be telling us your
facts. No, we will be telling us your facts. Now we will be telling you your facts.
That's it.
We will be telling each other your facts, but you are allowed to listen.
That's...
Yeah.
Basically, we have the same address, podcastedcure.com, people write in with all sorts of stuff,
and if you remember a clubfish, you'll hear every month,
and it's the kind of things people write in with them, one of our bonus episodes. But also,
you send in a huge number of brilliant extra facts. So we have gathered around here,
we have a massive pile of different facts from all of you, some of the absolute best ones
that have been sent in over the last year or two. You know, because we can all dip into the
inbox, we might have seen a couple of them, a lot of them, we'll have never seen before.
Yeah, so would someone like to begin? I got a fact here.
Yeah, I got, all right, this is from Haley Darden.
It says, a team in Darwin, Australia,
drove a car named Mudcrab, seven kilometers underwater across the harbor.
They got bogged down nearly a dozen times and dealt with the threat of crocodiles.
In doing this, they broke two world records, longest underwater drive and the deepest
underwater drive. Wow deepest underwater drive.
Wow.
Very cool.
I didn't, sorry, it's a, what kind of car?
It's called the mud crab.
And it's, I guess, an amphibious and drive sideways.
Yep.
That's cool.
That's called a can drive underwater.
Very much, don't try this with your own car.
Warning, right?
Yeah, this is, I bet there's a few alterations
they've made to their regular car.
I think it's a mature car.
There's an old, I think it's a Mitch head burg joke.
There's something like that, which I will absolutely butcher.
But it's something like, I went on a date with a girl.
It didn't go very well.
She was annoyed that I didn't open the doors for her
and rather I swam straight to the surface.
That's a very good joke.
That story reminds me of that story we had in one of our books of the year. Our books we did about the news of the year.
If you want to catch up on the news of 2018, why don't you go to Amazon and buy it? But one of the stories was about those two
Australian women, I think this is right, who were following their satnav and just, it
was somewhere in Australia and they just followed their satnav into the ocean. Just get
it in the satnav and they messed up and they just went, right, must be right. And their
car got stranded in the sea.
Jim, remember we mentioned on the podcast, there was a president who had an amphibious car
and he used to take, so wasn't at the White House.
It was Johnson.
It was Johnson, that's right.
And he would take his friends out in the car and they would go a bit downhill where there
was a lake at the bottom and then he would fake losing control.
Oh God, what did I do?
And then they would go in the lake but they obviously drive on.
Very, very cool.
If there's ever a weird, wacky thing a president did fact, it's always LBJs.
Yeah. It's amazing. I had time to...
What was the greatest war in Vietnam?
Yeah, it's where I was going.
It's amazing. In the last decade or so, we've had such straight down the line president
suddenly, but in the Ado National Park in South Africa, if you're driving along there,
Dung beetles have the right of way.
So if you're driving along and a Dung beetle crosses the road,
you have to just sit there and wait for it.
How good is everyone's eyesight in this area?
Sorry, that's incredible.
They are small, but they do push large bowls of Dung.
That's a good point.
Yeah, fair enough.
And there must be a lot of traffic down to a lot of cost.
Stop big.
Is that, can you get out the car and check?
No, just a normal beetle, okay, get back in.
A normal poo, yeah.
A little bit.
Yeah.
It's just a poo in the middle of the car.
I'm sure, I can't see the beetle, but it must be there.
Pretty sure it's not moving.
If you'd be break up to it, you would hear breakups there.
It was like, why'd they leave you?
Why'd your boyfriend leave you?
He waited five hours.
It got five hours because there's a random piece of poo
saying them the right thing.
If you do go like driving in any of these places
like I drove in Yellowstone,
I think in a few other places like that,
you do have a lot of traffic jams
because as soon as there's an animal there,
everyone stops and you just kind of sat there at the back.
And the first two or three people can all see the animal,
but of course then it wanders off and they drive off and everyone else who's in the traffic
jam never gets to see it.
And the elves, the elves of Iceland, we've spoken about before, I believe.
Well, they believe a lot of people in Iceland believe there are elves and they believe they
live in rocks and so if a rock finds its way into the middle of the road and it's a believed
a home of an elf, you can't move the rock, you have to drive around, literally maybe going
off road in order to get around it until it's removed safely by the proper authority.
I'm sorry, we'll move on to the next fact, right?
This is actually a bit of an audience feedback one, some Dave Clemer.
We mentioned the Treaty of Versailles and the rights to champagne or naming champagne
or cross-the Treaty of Versailles.
Yes, so Dave said, I didn't know about that, but it was not shocking, given the presence of two other items I knew about, with the extreme military significance in the Treaty of Versailles. So Dave said, I didn't know about that, but it was not shocking given the presence of two other items
I knew about with the extreme military significance
in the Treaty of Versailles.
One of them was the patent on aspirin,
which Bayer, German pharmaceutical firm,
was required to give up.
The second is the concert pitch for orchestras being standardized
such that the A above middle C is 435 hertz.
Yeah.
That was in the Treaty of Versailles.
I think this is on QI this year, isn't it?
Yeah.
It's amazing.
It's amazing.
It might be on your TV in about 80 months' time.
LAUGHTER
But yeah, they British used to tune their instruments
to a different...
Actually, everyone came to the British way, did they?
I can't remember.
Because they were the first one.
I can't remember.
It was something like that.
That wasn't really upset the Germans. This
is actually the platform on which Hitler built his rise to power. Was that frequency thing?
30 years of hurts was the... Thank you. Just a quick fact about that. So if you play
I can play the trumpet for instance, and when you tune to the orchestra, you play a B flat
because everyone plays whatever their notes is tuned to,
and then it all comes together, and you can hear
if you're slightly flat or slightly sharp.
But B flat is also the way you tune a voovozela.
That's how many orchestra's?
I think there is one voovozela concerto
that someone wrote once. That's incredible.
But no, that's so once. That's incredible.
That's so good.
That's the sad thing, isn't it?
So few professional Vuvisaylists.
Yeah.
Get a chance.
I wonder when last time officially an instrument
has been allowed into the main orchestra of the year?
It's interesting.
Yes, yes.
One of the later weird brass instruments.
Weirder than a French horn.
You'll see a Thereman, often.
But that's not part of a classical orchestra.
Yeah, it's quite neat.
What's the nice?
I've never seen, I watched a piece once.
I can't remember who it's by shame on me,
but there was a part for cutlery.
Lovely.
So the percussionist had a load of cutlery there,
and they would either rattle it or they would drop it
or whatever.
Was it a tuning fork?
Brilliant.
There we go.
There we go.
Fire to it.
There's someone with a one coming back.
Like Jackson, there you go.
All right, here we go.
This is from Tom Whittfield.
The world record for highest jump into water
is held by Rick Charles at 172 feet.
Can I ask, was that how high the water was?
Or how high he was before he got in the water?
How would highest jump into water?
I just thought it might be someone like, for instance,
I've been to Lake Tits Kakao, which is the highest
navigational lake in the world.
Right.
If I jumped into Lake Tits Kakao, I'd say.
You've grown in the freckles.
I see what he was saying. Right. It's just a fun bit of whimsyicaca, I'd say. You've grown in the freckles. Yeah, I see what he's saying.
Sorry.
It's just a fun bit of whimsy from James, though.
No, I love fun bit of whimsy.
You know me, I get comedy.
I just sometimes like it to be expanded on a little bit.
So sorry, that's 20 feet higher than the statue of Liberty.
An air hat to be pumped into the pool to break the surface tension.
Otherwise, he would have gone splat.
When was this amazing?
I think it's in the 70s or so, because there's footage of it.
So I follow the YouTube link that Tom put in the email.
It's unbelievable, because he's basically on a ladder,
which is tall in the Statue of Liberty.
You see so far, right?
That's hard to get up the ladder.
I was impressed that he got up the ladder at all.
I mean, it's stunning.
We're on the second floor of this building,
and I struggle most things.
What's interesting is someone very, very recently, and I've heard the term, the highest jump
into a body of water ever, broke the record just a few days ago.
So maybe this is an old email and possibly it was right at the time.
Right.
And he doesn't have water.
It's incredible.
You see the footage.
He's standing on the edge of a cliff and he throws something.
I don't know what it was.
It looks like a giant fish, but I don't think it is into the water.
And as soon as it hits and breaks this hench and he jumps and goes in and it's the new
world record.
Oh, really?
Okay, well, it must be my turn to read a fact.
I'll take the one closest to me.
This is from Sam Kavayaro.
And Sam says, I was reading an article about the early human species that coexisted with
homo sapiens and they mentioned the estimates of how many Neanderthals were alive at any
one time, giving an upper limit and my brain immediately decided to find a relatable reference
scale and came up with a nearby city that had similar population.
So I thought you might not have a sense of what the population of Olympia Washington is.
Correct.
I think that's the capital of Washington, isn't it, Olympia?
I don't even know whether that's true or not.
I simply have not heard of Olympia Washington before now.
It's not the biggest.
It's not Seattle.
So I looked up a UK comparison.
At the estimated most populous, they were as many in the Andathales as modern humans
living in Turkey.
What? most populous they were as many in the Andathols as modern humans living in Torque. That would be an excellent episode of Fulsey Towers.
That's right. Wait, how many was it? 52,000.
That is unbelievable. Wow.
Actually that would be a cool premise for something. Like the Neanderthals are here,
they all live in Torque. And it's about the modern day Torque.
Yeah. Yeah. And it's just like the modern day Turkey. Yeah, yeah.
And it's just like the amusing cultural clashes that you get.
Do they remove all of the current population of Turkey,
so the population stays at 52,000
or does the population balloon to 104,000?
I think everyone in Turkey is sort of bought out of their homes,
and it's like, we need to house exactly this number of people.
So where can we put them up?
You all go to Exeter.
Exactly, exactly that.
Yeah, yeah.
Wow, yeah.
So yeah, there were also a thousand more Neanderthals in the world at the peak than there are currently inhabitants of the county of Rutland.
Very nice.
So I mean, I reckon that I have more knowledge about the city of Olympia and Washington than I do about the county of Rutland
I have my noise the smallest county. I look very near it and I can tell you
The different stream the people there and the Andethals
Rutland is a it used to be a proper county and I believe it's now a unitary authority
So much like the Neanderthal it's actually sort of faded into the past.
Really?
I thought it was to the county.
Actually, interesting, the people of Rutland
do bury their dead with flowers and trinkets.
Are the rumours to have mastered fire?
Wow.
And actually, if you get yourself tested,
you are often, you're up between one and three percent Rutland.
I don't know that.
I got no one here.
David Saunders, the British basketball league, is having to change its name
as no one can Google it
because the acronym is shared with a surgical procedure that's become very popular in recent years.
A Brazilian butt left.
That's brilliant.
The leaked new logo looks more like it's advertising the surgery than the basketball.
It's true.
I've seen the new logo and it's a big, it's a big bulb was big.
I'll put it that way.
It does, it looks a bit like a band that's been, uh, been lifted.
That's cool.
Do you think having a big Brazilian butt would help you in the basketball?
I don't know.
Of course.
You don't be buried.
Space hopper you're way along the court on that thing.
Yeah.
You do?
If I want to sign your ass in the basket ball.
I think that's a travel violation, yeah.
But do you think like if Kobe Bryant was jumping and doing a basket,
he might say to someone,
can you smell my ass?
That was a thing, right?
That was a, yeah, yeah.
Tell me how my ass tastes.
That's right.
I'm so sorry.
It's like a scrant, man.
Right.
Because you're up your bum to the other guy's face, right?
That's the key.
Yeah.
What was the story?
It was that Shakilo J.
Yeah, that's the key. Yeah, that's the like, I was that Shakilo G. Yeah, that's the key. Yeah, that's the key.
I just had such a flashback to when I was a kid, you know, when you used to get so embarrassed,
your mum, seeing along the really wrong words to modern songs.
And I just felt that shiver hearing you saying that.
You know what?
It was in the same episode that we mentioned that as the, that's players were one of them
farted and put the other one off.
Oh, yeah.
So that's why I'm conflated in this.
See?
I think that's a good, I think that's...
Don't listen to these guys, okay?
I think that's a really good, like, punk line for you
in whatever sport you are.
Can you spell me out?
Can you spell me out?
When I've played Scrabble over Christmas,
I can't say it to my head loss.
He is spelled by us.
LAUGHTER Oh my god, brilliant. I got scared to my head loss. He is spelled by us.
Oh my god, brilliant.
Stop the podcast. Stop the podcast.
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On with the podcast.
On with the show.
Here's one. Ludwig Umeyer. In Cuban and other cigar factories, it used to be common
to have a person to read aloud to the cigar role as well they worked. Oh yes.
And the Monte Cristo cigar brand got its name because the count of Monte Cristo was an
extremely popular choice for the workers to listen to. That's interesting. I heard the
story one I think, yeah. I think we told that on the show at one point.
I didn't mean sorry, okay.
But that's a great extra detail.
Yeah, that's the bit that I think is amazing, really,
the Monte Cristo bit.
It's such a long book.
It is long, yeah.
You could go to so many to girls while listening to that.
It's a long but quite exciting, and also it's not very,
I would say, you don't really need to remember what happened
at the start, so you could like swoop in and swoop out of it,
because it's just him and his adventures, isn't it?
It almost feels like a second half
is a bit like a comic book.
There's like a 300 page like Russian in Paris
in the middle bit, which is-
Yeah, I know, but that's,
but you don't need to know what's happened before.
It's just like there's a rich dude
having a bloody whale of a time.
Yeah, on Cuba, Fidel Castro,
once ate 18 bowls of ice cream and a single sitting.
Okay.
Yeah, he just liked ice cream.
As like, oh, that wasn't a challenge.
It wasn't a challenge, he really liked Ty Scream.
There was a big thing in Cuba,
which we might have mentioned before about milk
and stuff like that,
and being able to feed the country with amazing cows
and stuff like that.
So it was partly an advertising thing
about how great our milk is,
but it was also partly, he just loved Ty Scream.
Right.
His sister passed away.
Yeah, really. She was a double agent basically
She to begin with loved Castro and and then when he took over and then he continued to sort of go in a direction
That was bad she went hang on a second. I thought you were gonna be good when you got into power
And he wasn't and so she left Cuba. I can't remember where she went and you have became a spy and wow
Really a big pod in his downfall. Sorry, he didn't have a downfall.
Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry,
I lost it 10 US presidents. Sorry.
Like, she was the worst spy, yeah.
I guess that's where the double agent bit comes in.
She's actually doing a fucking work.
Yeah, you know, make sure I bring him down.
Next week, honestly, he's coming down.
One of the first facts I remember discovering for QI was in a cigar magazine about Kennedy.
When he placed the embargo on Cuba, his last move before that was to order a couple of suitcases
of Cuban cigars, wasn't it?
We were half a cent over to him and then the gates came down.
I love that they would discover that fact in Cuba while someone's reading out a biography
of JFK
and one of the role-eases.
Yes, he did what?
In the fact of the factory workers.
Shall I take another?
Yeah, yeah.
From the middle, again, this is the closest to me.
So Rebecca from Ottawa, I think not the band,
probably the province.
We don't know if we'll find out, I guess.
Not the Ottawa thing.
Final cap? No, not a Final Cat. That's something really famous, they say. Sorry, I don't better be able to find out, I guess. I guess. Well, did Ottawa sing? Final cap? No, not Final Cad, that's something really famous, they say.
Oh, I'm sorry, I don't know.
Final Cad, when they called Europe?
Yeah.
Ottawa, Ottawa, not Ottawa.
They did D-I-S-C-O.
D-I-S-C-O.
But unfortunately, slightly different names, so renders that whole bit.
So Rebecca, who is a person who lives in Ottawa, an Ottawa, you might say.
Right, I do think there's a shop in Ottawa called Osserman Ottomans, like a furniture shop.
Yeah, that should be, shouldn't there?
There should be, yeah.
Osserman, Rebecca writes, thought you might enjoy this new story from Canada about a sad goat.
She goes on to put the headline which is Mysterious Screams on BC Island, British Columbia,
I imagine, it's her now to be from a sad goat Royal Canadian Mounted Police say.
And yeah, there was basically a lot of sounds off in the bottom of a ravine in British Columbia, in Quadra Island,
and the mounds you say didn't come from a person in distress, but rather a sad goat.
It sounded apparently a bit like, help, help!
Oh, that's great.
Do we know why the goat was so sad?
Yes, the mama goat's babies had been removed and she was calling for them.
Oh, and that is sad.
That's taken a sad turn.
I'm now, yeah, I'm now signing with her on the internet.
Could have been just removed temporarily to go to nursery.
Yes.
Do you think that's what it was?
It's hard to sell.
Thankfully, officers confirmed all was well and and nobody, besides the mama goats,
was in any kind of distress.
Huh.
Poor old, poor mama goat.
Don't know how much we did enjoy that.
So you're looking around everyone's faces.
It is de-distressing.
It was I.
Okay, never mind.
It was nice idea for a chat.
I go on here, which is from Iver Cardis.
And it's from Chapter 5 of a very British murder by Lucy Walsley.
And so this is an extract, I think, word for word.
During the First World War, trainee soldiers were frequently set the initiative test
of hiding and spending the night in Madame Tussaud's Chamber of Horrors.
This caused such inconvenience that Madame Tussaud was forced officially to ask the war office
to stop the practice
Huh, how many soldiers would fit in Madame Tussauds chamber for us before it became unmanagerably. Yeah
Like before it's just a military training ground
What is the chamber for us? Is it one room? Is it a whole building?
It's a sort of labarantine basement full of you know spooky people is relatively small though
Yeah, it's tight isn't it? Yeah, yeah people jump It's relatively small though. It's tight, isn't it? It's corridor doors. It's corridor doors.
People jump out of it, you.
People grab you.
Yeah, I actually really don't like those
when actors are jumping out at you.
I get why people do, but I just find them really easy.
You love horror films.
Yeah.
But it's like a live horror film, isn't it?
It's not really.
It's just people trying to scare you.
That actually, now you say it,
that is like horror film.
I don't like it because I find, but I find both of them equally scary, you know? I don't like ghost rides, all things like that, because I have such high hopes and they're always disappointed because they're never scary enough.
Except the ghost ride at all to the towers.
I'm absolutely terrified of all of them. I'm shouting to the people behind me in the ghost train. Can you smell my ass?
I'm really...
Oh dear. In the after world war one.
Okay, well, war two.
In well war two, would Kitchener have been a, no, not Kitchener?
Who was it?
Who's an American general?
A general writer.
I don't know.
I can't remember who it was.
It might have been Gammal Kay Anyway, in America, it goes back to France
and he sees that there's a war grave
that the locals have been looking after
for years and years and years.
And what he doesn't have the guts to tell them
is actually they'd mistaken it.
It wasn't a war grave, it was a toilet.
And they'd had this kind of like latrine
which all the soldiers had used and they'd put something on there to kind of say this
is the latrine and the locals when they came back, sorry, I thought it was a grave and
for 25 years they were putting flowers down and looking.
Do they put a headstone down to mark the latrine?
That would be a weird thing to do, I loved it.
It wasn't that, it was more like, you know,
you put a stick with some flat,
so the people would know that it was a literary.
Oh, no.
Oh, no.
Whoever it was, it was in his memoirs
that he went back there 25 years later
and this is what I'd think of.
Why did he go back to the toilet?
I want to have one final poo to remind me of the good old days.
Back to the area where he was stationed.
Well, it's awful is that if you squatted and took a poo there, you'd probably be arrested
for desecration.
Yeah, yeah.
You have such a holy mo- and yet you're the only one doing the right thing.
Yes, which shout as they dragged you away in chains.
Yeah.
That's great to hear.
And here you go.
Here's one from Matilda H. In 2018,
Ikea released an advert designed to be urinated on.
I think what I might have said this.
Yes, I remember this.
We did do this.
It was a pregnancy test.
It was.
Yes.
And it got you a discount on your baby.
Well, I don't know.
Give you a free baby.
You got a crib discount on a crib.
Yes, it's baby furniture. But I mean, not how much furniture a baby needs beyond the crib.
They don't need a writing desk or a...
A baby shades long.
A shades short, yeah.
Yeah, it said a positive pregnancy reading would get you a discount of 50%.
And according to the agency, getting the technological aspect of the ad took some work.
However, they quote in the email,
the pregnancy test strip was used as a starting point,
it makes sense, which relies on antibodies
that bind to the pregnancy hormone,
H-T-G, resulting in the color change.
And did you have to take along the,
now quite year-end magazine, or whatever it was?
Yeah, I don't know.
Were they waterproof posters that they put up?
I guess. But it's not a poster. You can't laugh people going around peeing on the posters.
Just as releasing an effort, don't know what I'm coming in.
Yeah, it's a secret about the TV.
You were trying to get a pissy tummy.
So many people were electrocuted, right?
It's campaign. They had to end it.
Oh, that's great. That's a great fact.
Here's a good one. I guess this is from Haley Inzli.
Mast-produced tomatoes in cans,
they're all familiar with those.
Yeah.
Oh, they're existence to Galapagos tortoises.
Is it a riddle me this?
Yeah, that is a riddle me this, isn't it?
What is it?
Would you like to have a riddle?
Is there any chance we can get it?
No.
So, famously on the beagle, all the giant tortoises
that were brought back were eaten
as food, right?
So, you've got a giant turtle that's been eaten, but you've not got the turtle, but you've
got the shell.
Is it possible that any of the fruit and veg that was on the boat was then stored inside
the empty shells and it kind of kept them fresh enough that they thought that we should
be storing.
That's really good.
That's very plausible.
Can I have another guess?
I'm assuming that that's not right.
Yeah.
Tomatoes you get in a tin are a very special species
that not the normal tomatoes you get
because they work better in tins.
And these species of tomatoes were,
the seeds went through a turtle in the turtles poo
and grew out of turtle poo.
Very good.
You know, James actually closest here. Oh wow. I'm going to give James the point. Yeah, wow. Very good. You know, James is actually closest here.
Oh wow.
I'm going to get James to the point, because that's...
Yeah, wow.
So, okay, I'll tell you what it is.
It's sort of a bit like that.
Okay.
When you pick a, oh, and you should all
want to be saying, tortoises throughout.
Sorry.
No, this point.
When you pick a tomato, that short section of stem
that comes with it, you know, that little spidery bit,
is the calyx, and there's a tiny bit of stem
breaking off from a joint which is called the pedicel, right? So for many years, these sharp
stubs meant you couldn't put them into automatic harvesting bins because you'd end up with sharp
stubs in the can, right? But an American botanist called Charles Rick, two first names, discovered a
tomato plant with jointless pedicels, but he couldn't get them to germinate. The only
solution he found as a last ditch was to feed the seeds to some tortoises, the seeds
then germinated quickly. He bred from them. Within a couple of years, all mass produced
10 tomatoes could be machine harvested. So I think Jackson, I think that's amazing.
But also Charles Rick, what amazing lateral thinking going. The only way I can do this is
to feed it through an animal. Must have tried various different things.
Yeah, even different animals before then I would think.
Yeah, yeah, that's incredible.
Oh, you're right.
I got one here from Jeff Houghton.
Check out a guy by the name of Francis Warton, a backwoodsman I think,
British Columbia, who in the night...
Backwoods, rather than backwoods, right?
From the backwoods, not even a backwoodman.
Yeah, British Columbia, who in the 1960s,
shot a deer, used its teeth to make his own dentures,
then used them to eat the deer with its own teeth.
Wow!
Limey.
That's incredible, if true.
I've got a question.
Yeah.
Do deer have K-9 teeth?
You wouldn't have thought so, would you?
I would have thought they're mostly mullivaced
for all the plants they eat.
Yeah.
They're mostly sort of live prey.
But you can sharpen, right?
Presumably that's what he was doing.
He probably shaved them to size.
Yeah. Which animal's teeth would you most like to have in your mouth?
Great question.
Well, what about the sheep's headfish that we mentioned the other day,
which has the teeth of a quite human teeth?
I wouldn't want those. I would want...
Okay, well...
I mean, shark's teeth? Where they grow on the conveyor belt? Sorry, just wouldn't want those. I would want... Okay, well.
I mean, shark's teeth, where they grow on the barebell.
I guess, sorry, just on Anna's point.
I guess the question is, are you doing it to improve yourself
or has some evil demon come to you saying,
you must have another animal's teeth?
In which case, Anna's idea is quite clever
because you're like, well, basically,
I'm just getting human teeth.
That...
You're tricking the demon though.
Yeah.
I think the demon will say, and it can't be the sheep's head.
That's a nice try.
Yeah.
That wasn't in the contract.
I can.
You know how blue whales have that sort of...
Beline.
Yeah.
No, no.
There's huge plates of...
You can only...
Beline.
Yeah.
Well, the system whereby you can only get krill through.
Yeah, because...
It's called Beline.
There we go. I do. I's got bleed. Yeah, there we go
I
Get bleed. Oh, what's that?
It's what blue whales have. That's a nice idea. Yeah, so then every meal every dinner party I go to is I have the guy who can only
Krill's coming
K to hundreds of thousands of krill for one vegetarian one vegan and the krill guys
Nothing little piece all of it
Guys, don't I've just realized I don't think you have any canines. Oh, really?
Holy moly.
Look at all the canines.
Normally, you've got two in the middle, two on the sides, then two canines, right?
Where are your thirteenth out?
They're completely flat.
Dan, work.
You're the newly evolved human.
Because we don't need our canines anymore,
because we have cutberry. So, well done.
I find it's really hard to bite things these days.
Yeah, you can see Anna's canines right there.
No, honestly, this is incredible.
So, when you go to the pub and you buy a pack of crypts
and often you want to open it up so that everyone can eat it,
you might bite into it.
For years, I could do that.
And then, suddenly, five years ago, I can't bite.
I can't get through it. Someone's coming shave Joe Teeth in the night. Well there you go.
We've learned an interesting fact today and here's another one from Jeff Partica
who opens within a mission. He says, I may have a fact-sharing problem. Thanks for letting us
know, but I'd be remiss if I didn't share at least one. I myself do not hunt with this fact being one good reason. In any given year, Michigan,
Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania combine to issue over 2.5 million deer hunting licenses,
which, if an organized group, will be the largest standing army in the world. Knowing
some hunters, though, generally speaking, organized would not be the word I do for them.
Isn't that the idea of Americans being able to bear arms?
Certainly.
In case the government goes rogue, there is an automatically astounding army there.
I think that's one of the arguments, isn't it?
Yeah, yeah.
Or in case the deer finally get their act together, a little bell on mass.
Yeah, yeah. Claim back there teeth.
I haven't done one for a while.
Yeah, I've never been there.
This is from Noah DeCurning from the Netherlands.
Today I found out that the timer on your washing machine doesn't just feel wrong, it often
is.
The timer on your washing machine is an estimation based on the weight of your laundry or
invertecumbers load sense and it adjusts itself as it goes.
It's incredible.
Oh my god.
Is it Noah?
Yeah.
Noah, you've saved the world for the second time today because that is...
My mind is blown.
I've wandered this for years.
Haven't we all?
Because how often have we looked at the last minutes of the washing machine, especially when your desperate...
It's just before you go to bed and your desperate to take it out?
And apparently, because I did see this one, I looked into it, the last minutes are specifically
the ones where the timing messes up quite a lot.
Yeah.
Because there's less water, so there's less heavy, maybe.
It's because the cycle, what's happening in the cycle in the last minutes is they're
spinning it around.
So it's to do with water.
It's trying to shed the excess water. So depending on the density of your wash,
the water can be much greater than the washing machine is estimated at the end.
So yes, it'll spin for longer and longer, and that's why they're that agonizing.
Would you go in eight minutes? You go in eight minutes later.
Seven minutes, whatever. That's great fact. That's incredible.
Go just say, Dan has lined up loads of facts before him,
like he's sort of doing monopoly money collection over here.
No, they just happen to be facing me.
Oh, I'm just kidding.
I mean, arguably see all these bits of paper in front of you.
We can all thrice those.
Can I read out a, can I read out a fake?
What, that was just about to.
My god, twenty line up to you.
You've done loads, you've done loads.
It's like his one, his one from Dominic Brown.
I don't know, he's a Preny intense host.
That's why you're here. It's about time someone started cracking the whip. No, I love this. His one from Dominic Brown. I don't know, he's a pretty intense host, that's why I'm just kidding.
It's about time someone started cracking the whip.
No, I love this.
This is from Dominic Brown.
The US Navy has an army, which has an Air Force.
That's great.
I was looking this up, Trump found out a bit more about it.
It turns out that the US Army also has its own Navy.
I don't know.
I don't know.
They've got, they've got,
I can't remember, it's called Army Watercraft Systems and they have got 130 boats or ships or
vessels or whatever it is.
Right, it must be quite confused.
I go on here, Chelsea Pyle, my husband told me this.
It's not like a very expensive house.
It doesn't, isn't it?
My husband told me this interesting fact and I found an article to explain it.
When Mount St. Helens erupted in 1980, the sound of the explosion
could be heard as far away as Canada.
So we kind of all know that right, like it sort of went.
Where's Mount St. Helens, sorry.
The light near Canada, right?
Is it?
I mean, it is, isn't it?
What color?
Is it in the North, West?
Oh, the USA, yeah.
Oh, OK.
OK.
It's in Washington.
OK.
Oh, that's next door.
There's still a distance, though, right?
The point of the next sentence. Some are 100 miles away that you can hear this eruption. Yeah, but still. Oh, that's next door. There's still a distance though, right? The point of the next sentence.
That's a hundred miles away that you can hear this eruption.
Yeah, right, there you go.
The sound of the explosion could be heard as far away as Canada.
But to those closest to the epicenter, it made no sound at all.
Oh, I see.
So what?
Yeah, that's pretty amazing.
Is this like a trick because they were under offer or something?
Oh, how is that possible?
They were in a mud crab vehicle.
Setting a world record.
Is it like being in the eye of a star?
Yes, so right.
Oh, I'm sorry.
I was just saying yes.
Is it like that?
I was just saying yes it is.
Because it's weird, because sound...
I don't feel like sound acts like the I was storm
I guess which is where it's whirling around you. It's not like James talks and if I'm sounding right in front of him
I can't hear it but if I step to the side and now James is mimeing at me
If sound gets too loud it creates a shockwave rather than a sound wave
The sound gets too loud. It creates a shockwave rather than a soundwave. Oh, yeah.
Oh, maybe it's that it.
That's very good.
Do you not have the reason?
No, I mean, I'm clicking the link here with my finger on the sped-up paper.
It's not open.
Sorry, that's my flop. I should have...
Oh, dear. Someone asked me to.
This is from Hannah Killing or Kylin.
Kylin, I think. Kylin, okay.
This is from Hannah Kylin. During the World War,
spies mainly women were discovered because what would have given them away?
So they trained in language, they trained in culture and manner.
What would have given them away?
Specifically something specifically female.
You know what, I thought it was going to be at first.
There was a woman who was arrested because they had some weird writing on their buttocks.
And what had happened was they sat on a train
and they were worried about the dirty seats.
So I'd put some newspaper underneath their bum
and then the print had gone onto their bum cheeks
and it had been like backwards writing
so they didn't really know what it said.
So they assumed that she'd been dispatched
into the country with a secret message.
And then the resistance.
Exactly. And it just said, could you smell my ass? So they assume that she'd been dispatched into the country with a secret message. Exactly, right on my butt.
And it just said, could you smell my ass?
Was it they ordered pints instead?
And in Germany, you don't order pints.
No, I guess like famous examples are a spy once was outed when she was giving birth
and she started swearing in her actual name.
Yeah, lovely.
That kind of stuff.
No, we talked about the spies, the German spies who were caught in the UK,
because didn't they have a letter? Was it sausages at their back?
Yeah, yeah.
And then we're French spies who were given away,
because they smelled of garlic or something.
So it's too crude.
Yeah, there was an Australian spy who was throwing a boom around.
There was a Mexican spy with a big sunburgring.
It was what basic story where a guy was, they thought he was a spine, they just couldn't
get him, they kept trying their interrogating, doing all the tricks to get him to do it,
and he was just flawless. And then supposedly one day when crossing a road, one of the people
who was trying to out him was behind him and went, watch out a car! And he looked the wrong
way. Brilliant. But like, you need a lot of witness. How does that hold off and go?
Yeah.
Everything else is...
Anyway, the answer here is that they knitted wrong.
So this is from a book by Debbie Stoller called Stitch and Bitch.
And the idea is that Americans knit in a very cumbersome time-consuming way.
He said these are Hannah's words.
Still like yes.
Where they let go of the yarn and then loop it around the needle.
Whereas Europeans never let go of the yarn and can make the stitch as much faster.
Wow.
So they would be outed for their knitting.
Wow.
So this is American spies in France, presumably, or in Germany, or whatever.
Yeah, very, very.
Wow.
Great fact.
Yeah.
Because in this thing, people used to knit codes in various wars.
Didn't they, like, more code,
interknitting, you'd have specific lumps in your knitwear.
I don't know how much it was done and how much there was a lot of fear mungering around.
Oh my god, is that person wearing a jumper actually transmitting
more code to their friend?
But you could definitely knit code into stuff.
Remember that also that where they used to shave people's heads and tattoo them?
There's back in like, there's a bit of a gage in some broken times.
Yeah, and the hair would grow back and so it's fine.
Exactly, there's a problem with that
and with the pregnancy one.
Yeah.
You have to wait quite a long time
between setting it up and getting the pale.
The message will be out of date by the time.
You would think so.
You would think so.
Wait, what was pregnancy one?
Well, like, for instance, the idea that Dan mentioned,
which was, when a woman gives birth, she'll swear in her own language.
Sorry, yes.
If you weren't sure someone was an agent,
and you had to wait for them to get pregnant,
and then wait nine months, and then, yes.
Yeah.
And how are you going to impregnate them as well?
Then what, it's not pregnant?
Probably the normal way.
Yeah.
She got pregnant in a peculiarly British way.
All right, this is from Jeremy Kurekken and he says, my hometown, Rochester, New York,
forgot it had a nuclear reactor and it found out when they were about to tear it down.
And the wrecking ball has just swung back.
I've just thought of something.
And there's more detail on this and it's amazing actually.
I'll just read it to you.
So, Kodak may be a sinking ship, Kodak the company, a humorously written piece here, but
apparently it's a nuclear sinking ship. For more than
30 years the company kept a small reactor running in its basement in Rochester and it was
used for research and powered by 3.5 pounds of uranium.
I think the camera...
The camera people had their own nuclear.
Believe so.
That's amazing.
And it's the kind they make bombs from.
Apparently. Apparently.
Wow.
They took precautions.
The reactor was locked away in a concrete bunker.
It never leaks.
And I'm just going to skip through and try to find out why Codak would keep getting you
to reactor.
Is that originally what photobombing was?
It was much more dangerous, yeah.
So good.
So starting decades ago, Codak had an interest in neutrons,
subatonic particles that can be used
to determine the makeup of a given material
or create an image of it without damaging it.
Yeah, I see that.
Okay, so you can fire neutrons at something
and get an image of it.
And to do that, you need to create a nuclear reactor
in order to generate a bunch of neutrons, I guess.
What else are you gonna do?
Oh, that's incredible.
Can I do one?
Yeah.
Elizabeth Royce writes,
there's a bridge in West Virginia,
which was only fixed after the Soviet Union intervened.
This is great.
So I sort of looked up what's going on here,
and basically it was not cool about it
on the Blue Ridge Country website.
It's called Vulcan this place, this tiny town.
Very few people living there.
They had no safe way to drive out of town
because there was a bridge that collapsed in 1974. The only way you could get in and out was
to drive up the Kentucky side of the tug, which I guess is the river, and walk across a narrow
swinging bridge. Children had to crawl under parked railroad cars at the railroads bridge to get to
school. Once you had lost a leg doing that, so just like horrible situation and, you know, just a
nightmare, they can't get in and out of town and
It's kind of called John Robinette who was the self-appointed mayor apparently wrote to the Soviet Embassy in
1977 in Wattington DC describing Velcon's plight and requesting foreign aid for a bridge
And the Soviets dispatched a journalist
Who reported back saying yes, of course we'll fund your bridge. If America can't do this, we will pay for it. Nice.
Because of the PR, PR coup.
Within hours of that journalist visiting,
a word came down from the governor saying,
yeah, we'll build a bridge, we'll build a bridge.
And there we go, they get the promise,
and eventually the bridge was delivered.
According to news reports,
Valken residents celebrated with illegally imported Russian vodka.
Nice.
The American flag hung high. That's a good story.
Mia Tappin says,
a lone word is a word borrowed from another language.
A calc is a direct translation of one word
into another language.
See, subtle difference.
Remember that.
The word calc,
and bear in mind, I'm spelling this C-A-L-Q-U-E.
The word calc is an example of a lone word
because it comes from the French word calc. And the word lone word is an example of a loan word, because it comes from the French word calc,
and the word loan word is an example of a calc,
because it's directly translated from German as a
lean word, meaning loan word.
That's so good.
I love that.
Yeah, that's amazing.
Here's a fun one.
This is from Dan Maynard.
Hey, I have a fun fact about Aussie Osborne.
I tried sending it to James on Instagram,
but not sure if you'll see it.
Sorry, that's not the fact.
I don't really know how Instagram works, I'll be honest.
I am on it.
No such thing as James Harkin.
He is, I can prove that because I watch him post it from Ad Tribal Land.
Jesus, guys, the self-plugging is off the charts.
And are there anything you want to...
I've got nothing, thanks.
Well, downright.
If you don't already know the story, in 1972,
Black Sabbath were recording volume four
in a mansion in Bel Air.
Ozzy went and adjusted the thermostat
and continued on with the day.
Next thing, the cops turn up,
sirens blaring, and here, everyone thinks it's a drug raid
in the house and proceeded to flush away
and snort as many drugs as possible.
It turns out Ozzy had not adjusted the thermostat. He had in fact hit the emergency call button and alerted the local police. They were just there to check if everything was okay.
Suppose there's no crime, there's no criminal offensive having taken drugs.
That's even like five minutes ago. That's really interesting.
And I think no one's ever properly tried that in court.
Because I think that is in theory that is true.
But it's difficult to say that something's never been
in your possession if you've taken it,
especially as it's in your body.
But if you've taken every bit of it
and it's just physical and in the other system,
is it still possession?
Possession is illegal.
And if it's in your stomach arguably, you'reing it and it's very difficult to say it's in my stomach but at no stage did I ever possess it.
This is quite a fun one. Chuck Norris once helped deliver a baby on a helicopter. No he didn't.
This is from James Wetter. It happened in 2013. There was a woman in the hours of silly.
Yes. When you're pregnant and you're about to give birth you go to the mainland.
There was a woman in, you know, the hours of silly. Yes.
When you're pregnant and you're about to give birth, you go to the mainland.
Yeah.
But she went into, she went into labor and then gave birth in mid-air on the helicopter.
Okay.
And Chuck Norris happened to be on that helicopter flight.
On board, the helicopter was Lieutenant Commander Chuck Norris.
Oh, yeah.
It was the observer on board of helicopter.
Come on.
And, yeah, the baby was born mid-air. And they took off with seven passengers on board and helicopter. Come on. And yeah, the baby was born mid-air.
And they took off with seven passengers on board
and landed with eight.
That's so cool.
And then in 2022, it happened again.
Chuck Norris again?
No, don't think so.
I'm not sure.
That's it.
Here's one for you, Andy.
If you're in a certain town in Switzerland,
whose name escapes me.
Once a year, you can get a helicopter ride
for six euros 50, riddle me this.
Is this normally, of course, it would cost you
a lot of money to get it.
Right, okay, and where is this?
Is this Switzerland somewhere?
How does this for me because I'm cheap?
No, no, it's because you like infrastructure.
Oh!
And, you know, vehicles and stuff.
Are you hitching a lift?
I've given too much away.
You hitching a lift because it's flying under,
what do I like?
A finicular.
A two-of-finicular railway.
It's a head of boss, and every one.
Refusing to get in it, surprises.
Think finicular, that's a link here.
OK, so rather than a finicular helicopter,
whereby it's attached to a tower and the rotors
provide the power to lift it rather than... But you're going by helicopter. I've got it. I think I've
got it. Is it a is like a rail replacement bus service except it's a finicular replacement helicopter?
Exactly. Is that the challenge more than the finicular? Precisely. So once a year, they have to put the finicular into maintenance,
but they still need to get to their village.
And so the government puts on a rail replacement helicopter.
And of course, they can only charge you the amount
that you would charge if it was a train.
That is so good.
I would just wait at the bottom.
No, thank you.
I don't need to get out.
I'll just wait for the finicular to be back in service.
Thank you.
There's a fact I said ages ago, and when I say fact, it's something I said out loud that I'd love to confirm.
And I still haven't confirmed it.
And I promised I've been looking, which is that there was
a story that Chuck Norris, the actual Chuck Norris actor,
as opposed to the helicopter pilot.
But all his movies are, I arguably, I think,
a bit B-movie-ish, not very good.
You'd watch it for the fighting, right?
He's got kids.
He doesn't want his kids to watch his movies
because it has fighting.
So the story is that Chuck Norris edits out the fighting scenes
from his movies and then lets his kids just watch the shivnias from it.
That's not a whole movie.
That's not a nice one.
Chuck Norris, but I read it in an interview with him once
and I can't find it anywhere.
So I'm still looking. I'm still on the hunt.
Oh wow. That's a great effect.
This is a good one from Dylan Difford.
In May 2005, the British Department of Trade and Industry was briefly renamed the Department
of Productivity Energy and Industry, but the name was reverted after one week when it was suggested
that this made Minister Alan Johnson, if you remember him, the productivity, energy and industry secretary, all penis.
I can't imagine Mr Johnson had any fun.
No, indeed he did.
Very good.
I think this is the shortest one we've got.
Correct.
From Stuart Marsh, the company that makes square fire extinguishers is called oval
I've never seen a square in the forest. I think I looked it up when that fact came into the inbox and it's
what an odd thing to have. They're real. They're real amazing. Do we know why?
Okay, here's an idea. You put them on a ship and then they won't roll away.
Yeah. idea, you put them on a ship and then they won't roll away. Yeah, very good.
So you fall over.
Yeah, nice.
And the only reason I can possibly take on from you.
Easier to stack in the warehouse.
Yeah.
But if I was shopping for a square fire extinguisher and I was a ship captain, I wouldn't open
up the website that was over.
This is from Amy Apple, and apparently
it was also sent in by John Turbo.
Yeah.
And Turbo was my nickname when I was younger.
It was.
And John's your brother's name, so is there something sort of?
The fact is that a few years ago, Nicholas Faisal,
a biology that University of Alasand in Switzerland,
and his colleagues, developed a fascination
with the penises of Seroutine Bats,
which is a species found in woodlands
and the attics of old buildings.
Seroutine Bats sport abnormally long penises
with wide, heart-shaped heads.
When erect, the members are around seven times longer
than the females vagina,
and their bulbas heads are seven times wider than the vaginal opening of the soft detail, isn't it?
Anyway, Faisal wondered, as you would, how does this work? How can they use that for
copulation? Long and short of it, as it works. The mug of white. Basically, they hang
upside down the male climbs onto the females back back and gets her neck as bats do.
But then he uses his erect penis to push the female's tail membrane to the side,
located above her, and then he just puts his penis on her vagina and copulates there.
So it's more of a...
It's more like a clalacal kiss.
It's a clalacal kiss, yes, if a nice way of putting it.
God, they do have massive penis as bats.
Do you remember I showed you a photo?
No!
I got sent a picture by Colonel John Blastredsnell
when he was out on his expedition.
Oh, wow!
Look at this big bat, and I opened it.
It was a bat that strung up with this giant, fluffy penis.
It was huge.
It was huge.
Wow.
I'm still, it's still like burnt in my memory
as a terrifying image. Holy dick pic Batman.
Okay, that's it. That's all of your facts. Thank you very much for listening and thank you for sending
them in. If you would like to get in contact with us about the things that you have said over the course of this podcast
If I ask you mouthpieces, you can get in contact with us online. I'm Andrew Hunter M. James.
I'm on threads at no such thing as James Harkin, but I haven't done any threading.
Okay.
Exciting.
Damn, threads. I'm on Instagram, on At Shriberland.
And Anna, if people want to contact us,
yes, you can contact the podcast by going to
At No Such Thing on Twitter or by emailingpodcastacui.com.
That's right.
Or you can go to No Such Thing as a Fish.com
where we have lots of stuff.
We have merch, we have various few other endeavors
that we're up to.
We also have a portal there to Clubfish, the exclusive members lounge,
which is a really fun place to be, isn't that right guys?
It sure is!
If you liked what you just heard for the last 40 minutes or so,
every month or so we do a Troppers Align, which is of a similar bent.
Yeah, yeah, there's bonus stuff. There are ad free episodes.
There's a thriving fan community called Discord.
It's on a thing called Discord.
I know what Discord is.
Don't write it.
It's the place where you would probably find out first
about new gigs that we're doing.
Yeah.
There's some tempting schmutter on display at Clubfish.
So get a nice things of fish.com.
Thanks very much.
We'll see you next time.
Goodbye. fish so get a nice such things at fish.com thanks very much we'll see you next time goodbye