No Such Thing As A Fish - 229: No Such Thing As The Great Modesto

Episode Date: August 10, 2018

Dan, James, Andy and Alex discuss gold in the sewers, Robert Burn's homemade ink, and why Sweden's highest point isn't any more.

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covert Garden. My name is Dad Shriver and I'm sitting here with Andrew Hudson Murray, James Harkin and Alex Bell and once again we have gathered round the microphones with our four favourite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order here we go. Starting with you, Alex. My fact this week is that the Swiss flush about $2 million worth of gold down the toilet every year.

Are they hiding it because it's Nazi gold and they're embarrassed about the fact they have it? Some time to mention the Nazi is like three seconds. No this is, it's lots and lots of little tiny gold particles. It's a waste result of the manufacturing process of watches, they think. They're not entirely sure where it comes from. All they know is that they've been analysing the content of sewage and it's got a really weirdly high percentage of gold in it.

Can they collect it? They're trying to come up with a way of getting it that's cost effective but at the moment it's too expensive. How crazy is that it's costing too much to get $1.8 million worth of gold? Except when you think it's like tiny, tiny particles in the water so it's like panning for gold. Can you go panning for gold there? I think they're way too small, it's not like panning for gold in old times where you had

a little nugget so you out of the Gigi's fight. If you have the choice of panning for gold in a nice river in Scotland or maybe in a load of sewage in Switzerland, I know which one I'd choose. Yeah, but one definitely has gold in it. One's got $1.8 million worth of gold. There's gold in then the mountains in Scotland. Is there? Did you not see that?

That was in the news about two weeks ago, maybe a week ago, where they found the largest gold nugget ever in Britain, I think. The guy who was sitting in the river. I think what he does is he lies down, face down in the water and he just kind of looks for it. Like he doesn't do that panning thing or whatever. He just kind of lies there and waits and just tries to see it. It's nice because it's like fishing, but without the fish.

You are the fish in a way. You're in the water. In a way. Are you allowed to keep it if you find a big gold nugget in a river? I can't remember. I think what happens is the Crown Estates can claim it. The Queen's allowed to eat it. If you find it on Crown Estate land or is it just the Queen owns everything, actually?

If you find it downstairs in the, you know, let's say you're rooting around in the toilets of the QI office. And there's no reason to say that, and I don't know why you would look at me when you're saying that. Well, I'm just saying, like we've already decided that that's a good place to find gold. No rivers around here. Right. But if you did find some gold, then technically I think you'd have to offer it to the Queen.

Really? I think so. Unfair. I think the same goes for like bottle tops. If you find them in a metal detector, she's just less interested. A Crown made of bottle tops isn't quite the thing. All these rooms at Buckingham Palace are just full of all bottle tops. Do you know there's loads of gold in British sewers as well?

But it's not from, because we don't have a luxury watch industry the same way that the Swiss do, it's about seven parts per million, which would make it economically feasible as a goldmine, as in a goldmine you get less than that. But the way it gets into the water in Britain is from people doing the washing up while wearing wedding rings, so tiny bit of gold. You can also get this, if you brush your teeth and you've got a gold tooth, tiny bits of gold will come off and make their way into the water. How often would I have to do the washing up before my wedding ring completely disappeared

from my hand? It sounds like you're really hoping to get out of something by doing the washing up. I can say to my wife, I can't do the washing up because then our marriage will be annulled. You've probably several hundred years I'm afraid. Oh, okay. Divorce and some loss of the wedding ring would happen much to that as a result. We've got in our upcoming book, we've got an article on the fatberg that was displayed in the London Museum this year.

What is that book then? It's going to be called The Book of the Year 2018. Okay, and where is it going to be available? You know, places like Waterstones and online retailers that Andy doesn't allow us to say anymore. And... What? I do.

It's going to be on Amazon. I know you can't say that. Sorry, you were saying? Yeah, so the fatberg for anyone that doesn't know is just a giant lump of fat that they find in the sewers, mainly of London, but they've been found worldwide. And yeah, they're ginormous. It takes them days and days, in some cases weeks, to absolutely knock them apart. They have to use pneumatic drills to get them down.

And it was made up 90% of cooking fat that we put down our drains. The others are wet wipes, which is all down to, it turns out, Colonel Sanders and KFC. KFC, effectively, were the first people to let the wet wipe out into the public. The man who invented the wet wipes sold it to KFC, so KFC were the original wet wipe people. But now they're mostly used by parents and stuff, right? Exactly, for children's bums, yeah. They weren't used to wipe the chickens, were they?

But yeah, what's interesting as well is that they found a higher concentration of banned gym supplements in the Fatberg than they did, say, cocaine or MDMA. What, like steroids and things? Yeah, exactly. So the Fatberg might become Muscleberg. That's a German city I want to go to sometime. All German cities are Muscleberg, very well-developed people. So I found a crime from this year where thieves used sewage to steal gold.

This is clever. So it's in Western Australia, where there are lots of gold mines, and what they did is they stole a sewage truck, and you remember sewage trucks, they have those big hoses and nozzles which they can suck up sewage with. And they stuck that into a gold mine site's big pit of gold-rich liquid, and they sucked that all up. Interesting. I didn't know it was refined.

Yeah. I didn't know they would have gold-rich liquid. I don't know how the mining process works. I guess maybe if they're blasting it with liquid, then they sort of have this goldy soup which they could then refine. And if you're going to leave that lying around in the big VAT-labeled gold-rich liquid, you are asking to be robbed, really, aren't you? That's like putting it in a sort of bag with a dollar sign on it.

But it's very impressive, though, to steal a sewage truck, to think of that, because I would have just gone along with a Henry Hoover and tried to take a little bit. I think that would be the great escape level way of doing it, going in as a cleaner every day and just like getting a little bit in your Hoover. Yeah. The largest nugget of gold ever found was called Welcome Stranger. Okay. And I say was because as soon as it was found, it was melted down into gold ingots.

And the second largest was called Welcome, only Welcome, and that was also melted down into sovereigns. But the good thing about that is it was found by one guy with a pickaxe who carried on mining after his fellow miners had gone to lunch. So they all went away and he thought, oh, I'm going to carry on mining. And as soon as he saw the nugget, he fainted. And then when the guys came back from lunch, they saw he was kind of face down in the middle of the hole and they thought he was dead.

And so they climbed down to try and save him and they saw the nugget and they fainted as well. Wow. God, so it turns out the way to find nuggets of gold is just to lay face down. That's true. Why were they called Welcome and Welcome Stranger? That's quite weird names for nuggets. Well, that's a really good question.

I don't know why they're called that. I suppose what you might say, if you found a nugget, you might, oh, Welcome Stranger. Yeah. That's a bit. That's a oddly predatory way of discovering something. The third largest is the largest extant nugget. It's called the Hand of Faith and it's on display in Las Vegas. Do you know what the Netherlands are doing with their old toilet paper?

With their old toilet paper? Yeah, used toilet paper. They're making it into windmills. Shitty windmills. Oh, I wish it was that. No, well, they're turning it into bike lanes. Oh, it is a similarly green. It was a similarly kind of stereotypical Dutch thing.

So do they collect their paper on the side and not flush it down? Is that why? Oh, I don't know how it's collected, actually. That's a really good point. It must be that it's flushed down and they're sort of scooped out and not really bi-degreasing. I think it's scooped out because what they do, once they've got it, I don't know how they get it, but they extract the cellulose from it. So it's tree pulp and stuff, which has a lot of cellulose, which is this tough fiber.

Then they sterilize it, obviously. And then they turn it into big pellets, which they can turn into asphalt. But also, bike lanes are usually colored brown, aren't they, to make them look different to the rest of the road. Right. So they probably don't have to use any coloring. Yeah. A lot of skid marks as well.

I'm all the breaking of the bikes, guys. Watch out for pool destrians. Oh, dear me. And yeah, I'm almost certain that they are, they must be flushing them when they're cleaning the suits because it's not like they'd be saying, please, everyone put aside your used toilet paper and we'll come and get it. No, that does happen. That does happen, Alex.

That does happen. Yes, it does. It does. It happens in Greece. Yeah, it happens in Greece. Really? Yeah. A film.

I don't remember that song. Okay, it is time for fact number two. That is Andy. My fact is that Robert Burns made his own ink out of old beer, lard, elephant tusk, and sulfuric acid. Wow. Yeah. That's very cool.

What a man. I read the source that you sent for this and it noted that these are all things that were readily available in Scotland at the time. Yeah. I mean, old beer and lard, obviously. But why did they get elephant tusks in Scotland? Ivory, I reckon. Big ivory trade.

Sure. Yeah. I mean, that's, I just said another word for the thing. Capitalism, I guess. Yeah. So I didn't know this, but writers basically had to make their own ink for centuries. You couldn't just go down to the ink shop and buy some ink. So there are all these recipes around and researchers from the University of Glasgow have analysed.

It's really cool. They took original Burns poems and they lifted ink away in a way that didn't damage the original poems. Wow. Because obviously the original manuscripts. That's amazing. I wonder how they do that. I don't know.

I wish I did. Because you wouldn't want to accidentally lift off a whole word. No. And you forget what it is. And the really cool thing is they've found different recipes from different stages of his life. So when he was young and poor, he used a particular kind of iron gall ink. And then as he got richer, he used this thing called ivory black, which involved treacle and lard and acid and vinegar and ivory.

And it's a way of telling the real poems from forgeries. Yeah. Which that's amazing, isn't it? They're starting to apply this now to all ancient manuscripts because if they see the recipe someone uses and then someone else claims to have an original, and it turns out it's made from, I don't know, mole and butter and sausages. Sorry, mole as in the animal. Moles.

Human moles. Butter and sausages. Yeah. Yeah. Robert Burns used to have some really cool nicknames. Go on. He used to refer to himself as Spunky. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. He used to call himself the Rant and Roven Robin. That was one of his personal favorites, apparently. But he never called himself Rabi or Robbie, which is what Rabi Burns or Robbie Burns is what many people in the UK would associate as his nickname that we've given him. Yeah. Never called himself that. But he's calling himself these.

These aren't really nicknames. Yeah. They're not really nicknames if you call them yourself. Bit of a thing. No one else is called him Spunky. I don't think that counts as a nickname. Yeah. That's more like an online avatar.

It's a Twitter handle at Rant and Roven Robin. Oh, he would have been great on Twitter. It's very funny, I think. I would have already actually just been tweeting really tedious things about making your own ink. Yeah. Yeah. These recipes are really weird.

So there are lots of recipes that used to exist. Oh, do you know about gall ink? No. Astrix. Goal. Ah, sorry. Goal as in gallbladder, I guess. Yes.

But not as in gallbladder. Gall wasps. Exactly. Is it? Yeah. So there are hundreds of species of wasps called gall wasps. And what they do is they land on an oak tree and they lay their eggs inside the leaf buds. And then that turns into this weird kind of tumor lump on the tree.

And the little grub grows inside and it's all protected from the outside. But those galls can be ground up and they're a massive ingredient for ink and they were for hundreds and hundreds of years. There's only one kind of oak gall which makes the ink and it's basically the most important wasp in history. So all of, you know, Mozart, Darwin, Magna Carta, Beowulf, all of that was written in oak gall ink. Wow.

It was for centuries and centuries. It was the ink to use. So you could say that these wasps are responsible for all those great works, can't you really? I think you can. Yep. Wow. I mean, also the trees that you made the paper from and, you know, the tables. It's a group effort.

This logic is flawed. But, you know, well done, Ross. Yeah. It's not going to be like a hidden figures movie. I don't recognize NASA. What do we make it out of these days? And I don't actually know much about. I don't know, actually.

I think it involves carbon. But I haven't looked it up properly. It's not made out of moles and sausages. Butter, I think. Yeah, yeah. I don't know. It's probably made out of some kind of synthetic resin stuff. Yeah.

Let's go with that. Cool. Capitalism. Did you know that the Secret Service has an international ink library? No. And they keep more than 11,000 specimens of ink and it's for identifying mystery inks when they get, you know, like a poison pen later or something like that. They've got ink stating all...

So it was set up in this... What does that do for them? Or they can find out like when or where it was made and like... Turns out we're looking for the author of Beowulf. Bring in the wasp. But yeah, they've got ink stating back always in the 1920s and it's pretty cool. So, blood's used often in place of ink. I was just looking into different types of methods of writing.

So, didn't Saddam Hussein have a Quran in his own blood? Yeah. This is what I was going to say. Oh, sorry. No, no, but it's extraordinary. I'd not heard of this. So, Saddam Hussein post a assassination attempt on his son became a devout Muslim and so I read this in Atlas Obscura.

He gave, after his 60th birthday, 27 litres of his own blood to a Kaleel. Really an armful. He must have needed a big biscuit after that. So, he gave it to this calligrapher who spent two years putting together a 600 page blood, Saddam Hussein blood inked Quran, which is now locked in a vault in a mosque in Baghdad. But it sits there. It's this bizarre thing. I mean, there's much more blood than you would need to make a news Saddam Hussein there.

You need more than blood to make a person there. That's true. Yeah, no. I'm just saying if someone else finds other ingredients. I don't know. I've watched Jurassic Park and I'm pretty sure they only had some blood. That's very true, actually. Yeah.

But then the problem is that the dinosaurs turned female. So, at some point, Saddam Hussein might turn into a girl and start reproducing on the island. Yeah. I assume we're keeping him on. I don't want to go to the theme park or see the film, to be honest. I think it's a more sensible pitch than the new Jurassic World movie. Okay. It is time for fact number three, and that is James.

Okay. My fact this week is that Sweden's highest point is now its second highest after the top of it melted. Oh, no. Poor, poor highest point. Oh, good for the second highest point. Yeah, that's true. Finally, that bastard's got what's coming to it.

So, is the second highest one not covered in ice? So, you're right. Exactly right. They're basically the same mountain, but they're two different peaks on the same mountain, and the highest point in Sweden has a glacier on top of it, but due to the recent heat wave, the glacier has melted, and now the second highest point is the highest, but in the winter, they expect them to swap places again. Yeah.

So, it must be really confusing for any sort of textbooks that they're going to publish between now and winter, because they don't know. They can't confirm that it's definitely going to get cold enough. And this is, I'll probably pronounce this wrong, but it's something like Kebne Kajsa Mountain, which is in the north of Sweden. Oh, man. So, it's not a good news story in some ways. Well, I didn't put it forward as a good news story.

No, no, no, completely. No, you didn't. I think it's just a thing that happened, and I think it's interesting that a country can have two peaks that are the highest at different points. And there are even worse things about it, actually, because let's say you're Swedish, or let's say you're any nationality, but you want to climb the highest point in Sweden. You've always been able to climb this kind of point, which is the north peak of Kebne Kajsa, and now you need to climb the other one, and actually it's a much more difficult

climb. So, for a safety aspect, they think a lot more people might get injured or killed because they're trying to climb this really difficult peak, whereas before they could do the relatively easy one. Can you wait until, I guess you can wait until winter. I know it's bad climbing mountains in winter, isn't it? It's easier in spring and summer. Yeah, although it's snowy at the top, anyway, of the old one.

How much is it melted by to make it? Is it a matter of sense? Because you could just take, like, a calippo up if you really want the other one to be in the snow. I don't think you're allowed to make your own highest point. Well, that did happen. That's that movie. I think we might have mentioned it before, the man who went up the hill and came down

the mountain, which was a true story of the guy in Wales, who they said that to be a mountain, it had to be a certain height. So we added a little bit on top of it to make it higher. But I think he did that with ground rather than calippos. I didn't actually, I thought that movie was going to be something, sort of some tedious emotional journey, and that was a metaphor. I didn't realize that was literally the story. I think it might also be a tedious emotional journey.

Yeah, it was. Okay, so get this, the lowest, highest point, no, hang on, sorry. There we go. Oh, damn it. The highest, lowest point in the world in any country. Oh, okay. So can I guess? Yeah.

I think is it in Swaziland? Oh, you're so close. It's down there somewhere, isn't it? It's the other one, Lesotho. Lesotho, yeah. It's the other small country within South Africa. It's Lesotho, the enclave country. Yes.

Which is completely surrounded by South Africa. Okay. What is it? Is it like a cave, or does it have to be above ground? Yeah, it's just the lowest. So all of Lesotho is well over 1,000 meters above sea level. The lowest point in Lesotho is 1,400 meters above sea level. And everything else is even higher than that.

Are there any countries that are entirely below that point? Oh, well, Tuvalu. Tuvalu, yeah, all of those places that are going to get. Tuvalu and the Maldives, yeah. So the lowest high point, as opposed to the highest low point. The lowest high point, yeah. Is in the Maldives, which is 2.4 meters above sea level. Yeah.

So Maldives, obviously lots of islands and 99% of the Maldives territory is open ocean. But there was this island called Vilingale, which had an eight foot rise on it, which was the highest point. However, in 2013, a golf course opened on that island, and it has a small mound on it, which was 16 feet above sea level. And the fifth whole teeing off point is the highest point now in the Maldives. That is so good. And it's in a resort, and they do a daily tour.

And all guests who complete the ascent get a certificate. Wow. That's be annoying though, if you're playing golf and you've got a whole sort of expedition trying to mount the whole, there's a flag there. Someone's got here. I've got a Swedish mountains fact. Oh yeah? There is a massive bunker inside.

Is this another golf fact? No. So there's a sort of massive underground bunker inside the Swedish mountains. And it was built as sort of government protection facility for nuclear events and stuff. And it's no longer used for that. And it was sold to a private data center, so they keep servers in there now. And one of the things that's kept inside those servers is WikiLeaks. Huh?

Assange. Yeah. Actually, the digital version of Assange is kept in prison underground. And you look at pictures, it does actually look like an evil villain's lair. It's crazy. But it's inside a mountain. It's made of glass. Wow.

It's cool. That's where WikiLeaks is, guys. It's inside a Swedish mountain. Wow. That's very cool. That is very cool. The highest point in the Netherlands is 4,000 miles from Amsterdam. What?

Yeah. So there's the Caribbean Netherlands. Oh, like the Antilles. Yeah, I think it was called the Dutch Antilles. And then recently they had a weird admin change. But there's an island called Sabre and it has a mount on it called Mount scenery. It's about three or four times higher than anywhere in the Netherlands. That's true.

But actually, the highest point of Britain, I think, if we count everything that we claim, is in the Antarctic. Oh, that's good. Because we claim a little bit of the Antarctic, which has a massive mountain on it. Nice. And the highest point in Australia is not, what is it? Cosciosco. Yeah, it's actually an island off the coast of Australia, which has got a massive peak

on it. And the highest point in Spain is in the Canary Islands, Mount Tiedi. Ah. So loads of countries, the highest point isn't really in that country at all. Who owns, I know, singing the moon with the highest. No one owns the moon. No, but there's the flag. That's not true.

So I've got a certificate. The highest point of Andy's house is actually up above it. I have a thing or two about the big heat wave that we've been going through. So this is quite tied in, your fact to the fact that globally there's been a heat wave. And Ireland very recently through the heat wave and through the drought has had exposed a sort of huge stone that says IR, so E-I-R-E. Sorry, I always pronounce that error, but I don't know how to pronounce it. Yeah, would you say error?

Don't look at me. Would you say error? I don't know. I'd say it is an error. To say what? I think it is error. Error, so I'll just say that. So it's exposed this giant stone error, E-I-R-E, and it's along the Irish coast.

And what it was is during the Second World War, they built this to show the enemies that were flying over thinking that they were going to bomb, let's say, England. Don't bomb us. This is Ireland. This is neutral ground. Wasn't it to differentiate Ireland from Northern Ireland? Oh, okay. Was it Northern Ireland?

Well, I'm just guessing, but I would have thought that pilots would know whether they were over Ireland or... That could be foggy, you know, if you're flying. Second World War, they didn't really have a... You're just assuming everyone in the war was an idiot. It sounds like someone who's used the excuse of fog for making some pretty egregious errors in your life. I don't know what it means to be in her house.

Like, you know, I didn't know I was 50 miles away. It was foggy. Foggy? What can I say? Sorry, just to backtrack a tiny bit. There were huge fires as a result of this heat wave, and the fires knocked out all of the grass and the trees and so on, and it's exposed this giant air, E-I-R-E, to mean Ireland. I've found it on the internet, so let's see how they pronounce it.

Air or error. Brilliant. Is that Pornhub that you don't just like? I have a fact about Sweden, which I definitely know how to pronounce. So, in lots of Swedish mountains, there have been no worms since the Ice Age. They were all wiped out. It's true. Yeah, great.

I mean, bad for the worms. It's bad for the worms, but they've got other places to live, so it's fine. And bad for the soil in the mountains? This is the thing. So, they change the vegetation, and they have very negative effects on particular trees. I think they even affect deer life cycles. I can't remember how. So, the thing is that they are definitely invasive because worm populations apparently are only

capable of moving 5 to 10 meters a year. So, for them to make their way all the way through northern Europe into the Swedish mountains, they wouldn't have done it for thousands of thousands of years. It's not much of an invasion. It's not like the Germans going into Russia, is it? No. So, this is how we know that they're invasive, and they're impossible to get rid of if they established themselves.

So, this could completely change the European landscape over the next few hundred years. Do you know that, due to the heat wave, bears in Dundee in the zoo got an 80 kilo ice lolly to keep them cool? Wow. What's it made of? Ice. Oh, nice. And fruit.

Oh, lovely. That's very nice. That does sound good. It sounds like one of those decoy healthy lollies. Yeah, like when the ice cream man used to come, and we weren't allowed to go, and my mum would instead freeze some orange juice. We had to have that. That's the same thing.

You're kidding. Would she then cut the carton open, as in, how would you get at the orange juice? Did you pour it into a glass? You do it in ice cube trays, right? No. So, we had special ice lolly trays, like ice cube trays, but shaped like ice lollies. I remember those. So, you pour the, yeah, into the molds.

That is a better method than just freezing the orange juice carton, and then hacking it open. Entire litre of ice oranges. What you do is you jab a pool cue into the orange juice carton, and freeze that. Did the bears get it on sticks, or? No. I saw a photo of it, I think, and I think it was hanging on a chain. Wow.

And they could climb on it. That is, wow. I believe they could climb on it. Yeah. On an ice lolly. Imagine a magnum, a big magnum swinging from a chain, and you could just clover on it. Not very grippable. An ice lolly is a solid block of ice.

I think I've just discovered my fetish. I would love to see that Miley Cyrus video where she swings it on a magnum. The highest temperature ever recorded in Scotland was this year, but it was declared invalid because the thermometer was next to a vehicle with its engine running. The coldest temperature ever outside of Antarctica was measured in Siberia, but no one knows if that's right because the thermometer broke due to the cold. Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show. That is my fact.

My fact this week is that when financier William C. Ralston modestly refused to allow a town to be named after him, the town instead called itself Modesto. Modesto or Modesto? Modesto. Modesto. Modesto. I would guess. Should we check on the internet?

Yeah. Modesto. Modesto. Modesto. Modesto. Absolutely nailed it. Really awful. Modesto.

Modesto. It sounds like a very demure magician. It does. The great Modesto. Well, I would say great. But yeah, so this fact was sent to me by at shutter underscore butter on Twitter. It's an amazing fact. So thank you, shutter underscore butter.

And so Modesto is in California. It is a town that has had a bit of fame via the fact that it's the birthplace of George Lucas. And back in the day, he made a very famous movie called American Graffiti. It was a massive movie at the time. I was pre-Star Wars. It sounds like that's what he's going to say. But I think what you're going to say is that might have been based on this term?

It was. American Graffiti took place in Modesto. It was filmed elsewhere, but that's where it took place. Interestingly, George Lucas is so modest that he only introduces himself as the director of American Graffiti. Jeremy Renner, the actor, is from Modesto. He was born there as well. This is a significant town.

It is. And can I just quickly slip in my favorite Jeremy Renner fact from the year? Just used it as like God, he was born there. I've been trying to get this fact out. He's starring in the new movie tag. So in tag, it's only most of Jeremy Renner that appears in the movie. His arms don't appear in the movie. And the reason is he broke them just as they were filming.

And so they were in casts, and so they had to CGI in his arms. You're kidding. So when you watch the movie tag, which is predominantly about, I think, using your arms. Yeah, they're not his arms. They're CGI arms. You saying he was running around with two broken arms in cast? Yeah, he was in cast. Does that mean technically he's still it?

Because he hasn't? It's also a really confusing conversation to have with that. We're going to recast his arms because he's being broken. Get the casting director in here. So on this town's naming thing, there's a huge trope of how towns get their name. So there's a town in Tennessee which is called Difficult. And it all happens when they write to the post office saying, can we have this particular name?

And supposedly when they applied for the name, which was a really complicated name, they wanted to name the town, the US Postal Service replied, your name is difficult. And the people in the town thought, oh, they've just renamed our town Difficult. I never believe any of these stories. There's one in California called Likely and the legend is always that all the residents got together to sign the name for their new town because for some reason they were all living there in a town with no name.

And then they were like, they were like, oh, we're never going to grow their name. And a guy went, yeah, Likely. And then they were like, great name, isn't it? And the same happened for town Yubet. Apparently there's a guy who went, oh, Yubet. And that's why the town is called Yubet. Ridiculous. They're all of this stuff is on the internet.

They need to get more original stories. Yeah. Ding Dong, Texas. Do you know about that? Ding Dong, Texas. Did somebody ring the bell just as they were deciding on the name? They're like, perfect. No, it was named after for Governor Peter Bell and the businessman Zulus Bell

and his nephew Bert. But Zulus and Bert were not in any way related to Peter. So yeah, it was called Ding Dong as a reference. And weirdly, it's in Central Texas' Bell County. Ding Dong. I thought it might have been named after Leslie Phillips. Oh, yeah. Ding Dong.

Yeah. Last of the first. There's only one place in earth that I've found, which is called Earth. Okay. It's in Texas. That's good. And there are various reasons as to why, as always, somebody suggested it's because they have a lot of earth there.

But there's a really good article about it online which points out there are at least two places in America named after every single other planet. Venus and Mercury. Jupiter famously in Florida. Jupiter. There are Saturns. Guess which planet there are not two places named after? Mercury.

It's Uranus. There is one place, but it's more of a tourist attraction than the town. It's a little tourist attraction which contains the Uranus Brewing Company Combat Uranus. There's a guy who calls himself the mayor of Uranus. They sell fudge, which has a label on it saying Uranus. Sounds great. This is a cool place. There's a place called Nitro, which is named after the explosive powder which was made

there in the First World War. That's so cool. That seems like a proper etymology. There's a place in Russia called Asbestos where a friend of mine was born. Wow. And it's where they make all the Asbestos and send it to America. Very cool. I don't know how well this is known in Britain, but in the UK there was a place that had its

name changed, Stains. Well, there's still a place called Stains. Well, technically not just Stains. It's now called Stains upon Thames. It's not much better, is it? I remember this. I remember when they tried to do this. Yeah.

So the reason that they did this is because Ali G internationally had given Stains. Stains Massive. Exactly. Such a bad name that they were always associated. I remember watching Ali G in Australia and thinking, oh, Stains must be... I could see there was laughter, but you just associated it sort of as this place where... Stains is quite nice. Yes, exactly.

That's the gag. He's from somewhere quite middle class and quite, you know. So they wanted to change it, but they didn't really change it. They just added an extra bell on the end. Yeah, exactly. So on the 15th of December, 2011, the Spellthorne Borough Council resolved by 25 votes to 4 to change the name of the town to Stains upon Thames to try and boost the local economy by promoting its Riverside location.

I'm quoting directly from the Wikipedia article that I found this on. I wonder if there's a calculation for how much adding upon Thames adds to a town's net worth as it were, as in Richmond upon Thames is quite sort of classic, or upon any river. I do sort of like Stains with Waitrose, and that would probably help because... Yeah, Stains upon Waitrose. My uncle, when he was a counsellor in Bolton, tried to change the name of Bolton to Bolton Le Mose. Yeah, because there are lots of other places called Bolton in the world, and he thought

it would distinguish our town from the other ones. And also, we're on the moors, as in that's where all the fires were. The moors. Funny, he was trying to bolt on an extra bit to the name. Very good. Was he successful? No, it still couldn't. No, he still got Bolton, isn't it?

Surely Bolton is the most famous Bolton. I don't mean any disrespect to other Bolton's in the world, but... Michael. I am Michael. Famously, people are always getting confused between the town and the person. A misdirected male from an entire town to his house every day. There's a city, Topeka? We've all heard of Topeka, so it's in Kansas, and it's the capital of the state.

It's no, you know... No slouch. It's no slouch. It's no slough. But it changed its name to Google for a month. Did it? Legally and officially. Topeka did.

Yeah, and it was to win a Google high speed internet project, which would have given everyone internet 100 times faster than the national average at the time. No one would ever be able to search for them online, would they? You break the internet if you Google Google? Well, it didn't work. Google went with Kansas City, Kansas instead. But the mayor, he said he didn't really mind not winning, and he said, I've often wondered what difference does it make if it takes you 10 seconds or 1 second

to access information. My life goes a little slower than that. Yeah, he's a very laid back guy. But this is not the first time they changed their name. In 1998, Topeka changed its name. And one of you will really like this fact. They changed it to Topeka True. Really?

The Pokemon arrived in the USA. Yeah. Love it. Yeah. On Modesto, it's the second unhappiest city in the United States of America. What? Yeah. Wow.

The city's motto is water, wealth, contentment, health. And that was selected in a contest in 1911, where the winner won three. Dollars as a prize. Oh. Yeah. And just to say, Ralston wasn't just this local banker. The man who the town was not named after. Exactly.

Ralston was, he was one of the most rich people in California, actually. And he founded the Bank of California. So he was a very important guy in his day. He didn't like to talk about it. I really had to dig deep to find that. There's a town in California called Secret Town. And why is it called that? Do we know?

I can't tell you that. I genuinely know nothing about it. There's nothing on the Wikipedia page. It's two line Wikipedia page article, is it? Okay, that's it. That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over

the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter accounts. I'm on at Shriverland. Andy. Andrew Hunter M. James. At James Harkin. And Alex. At Alex Bell.

That's right. You can also go to our group account at no such thing. Or you can go to our Facebook page, no such thing as a fish or our website, no such thing as a fish.com. We have everything up there from our previous episodes to links to our upcoming live shows to our books. We've got a new book coming out, which you can probably pre-order at this point. We also have our great documentary series that we put up on iTunes called Behind the

Gills. It's on our platform. There'll be a link there. Follows us around on our last tour of the UK. You can get it in America, can't you? Yeah, it's in America now as well, which is very exciting. Hopefully if you're in Modesto, you can probably download it. No.

We'll be back again next week. We'll see you then.