No Such Thing As A Fish - 30: No Such Thing As A Song In The Sound Of Music

Episode Date: October 11, 2014

Episode 30 - In their first ever live podcast recording, Dan (@schreiberland), James (@eggshaped), Andy (@andrewhunterm) and Anna (#getannaontwitter) discuss cow-based computer code, who won the Bone Wars and how northern accents beat the Nazis.

Hey everyone! Welcome to episode 30 of No Such Things as a Fish. We recorded a live podcast last night, our first live podcast, and we've decided to put it out tonight for some reason, and basically unedited, so it's pretty long. But yeah, hope you enjoy it. We really enjoyed it so much, in fact, that we are going to do another live podcast. Tickets are going to go on sale for that on Monday. Tickets will be available at www.chortle.co.uk or at nosuchthingsafish.com. It's going to be in Camden, London, so keep an eye out for that, and hope you enjoy this one. We ran it on QI a few years ago, which was, there's no such thing as a fish. You can't have no such thing as a fish.

No, seriously, it's in the Oxford Dictionary of Underwater Life. It says it right there, first paragraph, no such thing as a fish. Hello. Welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you this week from the Aces and Apes Bar in Topnell Park. This is our first ever live recording. My name is Dan Schroiber. Please welcome to the stage the three regular elves, Andy Murray, Anna Czazinski, and James Harkin. Once again, we have gathered round with our four favorite facts from the last seven days, and in no particular order, here we go. Fact number one, and beginning with you, James.

Okay, my fact this week is that the first BBC radio presenter with a northern accent was given the job to make it more difficult for the Nazis to impersonate newsreaders. So why were the Nazis impersonating newsreaders? It was they thought that if they could pretend to be newsreaders over the radio, then people would believe anything they said, and they'd be able to say, oh, we've got such a strong army, and people would just believe it. So they let raid the BBC? It was just propaganda, really. They would pretend to be BBC newsreaders.

Okay. More whore whore and people like that. Yeah. It's also why we've got James on the podcast. It's James the Nazi. No, this was a guy called Wilfred Pickles. He was the first Northern newsreader from 1941. He was from Yorkshire, and a lot of people didn't believe the news when he read it out, because he had a northern accent. Apparently. What did they think?

They thought, that's a Nazi trying to do a British accent. No, I don't know what they thought, really. They just thought this guy is uneducated. He can't possibly know what the news is. That's what they, I read this thing about in the early days of news reporting, particularly on radio, that they never, it was all male presenters, and they said that they wouldn't allow female presenters on, because they didn't want them to have to go through reading bad news, like upsetting news stories.

Yeah, they just thought, oh, they're not going to like that. That would be, it's too emotional. And it's true, it's a BBC thing where they announced that. They said, well, we're not going to allow women to know that. They'll be too upset when they hear this bad news. No, it's terrible, right? They did have one in 1933, the first female newsreader. She was called Mrs. Giles Barrett.

I don't know what her real first name was. It doesn't seem to come up. Have you seen a picture of that? Mrs. Giles Barrett. Yeah, as named after her husband. We were assholes to women back in the day, weren't we? We still are, but like, I mean, doubly so. That's terrible.

There were complaints. She was there for two months and the BBC took her off the air for technical reasons. Oh, jeez. Technically, her gender is wrong. Did you know that all newsreaders were originally anonymous? No. So they didn't give their names on air.

It was just the voice of the BBC news. And so we have the Nazis to thank for named newsreaders, because during the war, people said that they should be able to listen and kind of authenticate who they were listening to. So the first one was Frank Phillips. And he said, in July 1940, Battle of Britain time, this is Frank Phillips from the BBC so that, again, you couldn't be impersonated.

But so today, we might have Hugh Edwards just being a man on a screen. Oh, wow. We still identify features. That's kind of what he is to me. Yeah, yeah. Isn't that weird, though, that none of them identify themselves? Do you guys know about the very first ever BBC news report

on the radio? No. OK, it's great. It basically was on the 14th of November, and I forgot to look up the date. That's on the 14th of November. So we're coming up to the anniversary. Very exciting.

And basically, he read out the news. It was a guy called Arthur Burroughs, and he read it out. But he read it twice, once quickly, and then once slowly, and then asked the listeners, which did you prefer? Just for future recordings, though, which way to go. And then, which did they go with? Are we having Sloane? It's not been recorded.

I don't know the answer. So we don't know if now we have quick news or slow news? Yeah, I have no idea. I have no idea. Also, it's really weird, because when they started doing the news, they did it post 7 PM, and Lord Wreath joined. So Lord Wreath, if you don't know his name, he's the guy who, in the BBC, they have a big kind of saying,

which is to entertain, inform, and educate. That's the Lord Wreath philosophy for BBC that everyone's tried to stick to. He joined a week after the very first broadcast of a radio announcement telling the news on the BBC. And he had this thing where he said, we don't want anyone to be doing news bulletins before 6 PM, because the newspapers will be hurt as a result of it.

And so no one was allowed to do anything in terms of announcing any news, to the point that when they played horse-racing on the news, they couldn't have commentators commentating on the horse race. So you listen to hooves and people cheering at like 4 PM, and then at 7 PM, they go, and Blitzer won. They would wait till the 7 o'clock news was there a pause in between the end of the hooves,

and Blitzer won, yeah. So you were speaking of radio, though. Do you know what they did in 1955 when ITV started? I think it was 1955, wasn't it? And what the BBC did to try and jeopardise ITV's chances? No. They didn't, it wasn't actually on TV, because radio was a more popular medium at that time.

They killed off Grace Archer in The Archer's Gasp, 20 million people tuned in. The population of Britain was 40 million at the time. Half the country tuned in to listen to Grace get killed off in The Archer's Gasp. The Archer's fans really hate you, don't they, Dan? Not my word, yeah. We make, so outside anyone who listens to this podcast

might know that we also, the four of us, work for QI, and one of the QI things is a radio show called Museum of Curiosity, and Museum of Curiosity is played at 6.30 every evening on a Monday, and Archer's follows immediately, and we get the shit ripped out of us by The Archer's fans. They hate us, and they just, they don't even, they just, they say how much they hate us,

and then they do hashtag The Archer's. And so everyone, why do they hate you? They catch the last five minutes of Museum of Curiosity, and we're usually talking about pubic lies or something like that. And this, it doesn't come up on The Archer's apparently. No, it doesn't. There was a great, there was a fantastic one this week, though. There was someone who actually tweeted,

what is this garbage, I absolutely hate it, hashtag The Archer, someone wrote back going, I know this program sucks, they should cancel it. The Archer's is terrible. Lovely confusion. I have a fact about Lord Wreath. Oh yeah. John Wreath, as he was then.

When he applied for the post of General Manager of the British Broadcasting Company, he did not know what broadcasting was, and he wrote in his diary that when he was called to an interview, he quotes, still hadn't the remotest idea as to what broadcasting was. I hadn't trouble to find out, and they gave him the job. God, I think it's really different.

When, so do you know where remote controls were for, what was the main attraction of them? How they were marketed? Remote controls. What for TV? Yeah, is that all we're calling them? You don't have to get up and walk over to the thing, presumably.

It is that, but their main strategy in the marketing was it was after ITV came about and adverts came about, and remote controls were just volume controls, and they looked like one of those rotary phones, so they were like a dial, which you just dialed up or down, and it was so you could mute the adverts. So adverts came onto TV, and immediately, they marketed something that could make them shut.

There was one really early remote control that was done by light. The problem with it was that when the sun shone on it, it would turn the channel over. There's a great, I was talking about this in the office a few days ago, and I can't verify this fact, and I really want to, if anybody knows this show, I'm known as the dubious one on this show.

Not just on this show. Just in life. The way I do any research for this show is to put in the fact and then put plus yeti. That's my kind of research for this show. That's how bad I am at it. But I read a fact in a book years ago when I first moved to England,

and it was a fact that when they did live TV dramas, they would have a thing where obviously it was black and white, everything had to be done live as they were going along, and the actors, if they forgot their lines as they were doing this play live, they would mime-speaking, and then the other actor would mime-speaking back at them so that while the production were quickly trying to find cards

that could show them what the next line was, the people at home were going, what the hell's wrong with the TV? Our sound's gone again, and get up and hit it, and then by the time they remember the line, they'd be like, we should go to the shops, and then they're back into the play, but I can't prove this as a fact.

So if anyone listening or anyone in this room tonight knows it, please let me know. Don't wait up for the post. Accents? Oh, gone. No, what was yours? I've got some accent stuff to talk about. Foreign accent syndrome. Oh, yeah. What's that?

It's a real thing. So it's not just mad people making it up. You know, when someone wakes up, you'd make a terrible psychiatrist accent. Yeah, I would. But yeah, it's a real thing, so it happens if you have a particularly bad migraine, you can get a foreign accent syndrome,

but it's not where you wake up with a specific foreign accent, it's just where you wake up with an accent that sounds kind of like a foreign accent. So there's an interview with this woman, Julie Mathias, who just had a migraine and now speaks in this bizarre kind of Scandinavian Indian South African hybrid, and I think it's really horrible for her. Is it? It must be tough, right?

Also, catgrass syndrome. Do you know that one? It's where you believe that one of your loved ones has actually been, has died and been replaced by a robot or something like that. Well, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. What? No, like, we all had it, like that time when my dad died and was replaced by a robot.

Yeah, but that actually happened. Yeah, but for people with a syndrome. But if you Google this and look for examples of it happening, there's like one, pretty much one or two examples on the BBC News. The most famous person to have it done was called Alan Davis. Really? Yeah. And I always wanted to run that on QI, but thought, no, not really. It's mental illness.

Just in case it's actually him. Yeah. All right. Can't believe you're mocking me on QI. Do you want to hear something cool about the Queen's accent? Yeah. So they've done a study on her without her. Okay, they've listened to the Queen's speech from three,

from different decades. So they listened to loads from the 1950s and then they listened to loads from the 1980s and they found that she no longer speaks the Queen's English. So they measured loads of her sounds. Surely by definition what she says is the Queen's English. That's true. But it was a study at Macquarie University on Australia

and they said that her accent has drifted a bit. So she sounds a bit like some younger and I'm using their words. She sounds Jamaican now. She sounds Jamaican. They said she has cockney influences now. Really? Apparently, yeah. I mean, you can't tell.

Apparently, most of the changes, it was 12 or 13 vowel sounds. She says, you'll get me. Why can't we tell if she has it? Machines can hear it, apparently. Computers can hear it. Machines? You're a father. My dad, yeah.

You're a dad, yeah. But they were so happy to study her because, and these are the words, she hasn't lived in different communities that might alter her accent. No kidding. So you reckon she got it off TV or something? I don't know, maybe. She's a huge fan of, I think, the Archers.

It's a miracle Museum is still going. You should say your tweets to me. She didn't do a speech in 1969. There was no Queen's speech on TV. And the reason was she had already done one interview that year in the summer for a documentary. And it had changed her accent so much that she couldn't bear. No, she just said, that's enough.

You get one dose of Queenie a year. And that was it for 1969. So she did a great job. That's great. We used to speak rotic English, didn't we? Which is how the Americans speak English. So the way Americans speak is the way that is proper English. Is the English that we were speaking in the 17th century.

Yeah, we don't pronounce our r's, and that's wrong. And that's because spelling hasn't kept up with the way we speak. What do you mean don't pronounce our r's? Like where? Oh God, I'm not going to be able to think of any examples now. So you know if we say, I've just got the word summer set written down here. So if we say summer set, they'd say summer set. Summer set.

Although that actually just sounds like a summer set. Since I'm my forte. Say summer set, Dan. You've got a summer set. Yeah, exactly. Like cover and garden. Well, there's no R in Coventry. He's got it wrong.

This is the biggest contentious. I have a messed up accent. I know I have a messed up accent. The main tweet outside of Archer's hatred towards me that I get is people listening to our show saying, why are you saying Covent Garden? Like I get so much shit from my accent. What about the child who listens to the podcast? Oh, there's a child who listens to our podcast.

They're three, four years old. Yeah, three, four years old. The godmother wrote into us to say that James, every time you talk, my little goddaughter, she smiles and she's so happy. How nice. Yeah. And then when Dan comes on, she frowns and looks disappointed and stops listening. Really splitting accent.

Okay, let's go back to the point in hand. I want to speak about Wilfred Pickles. So this was a guy with a northern accent who read the news. He also was the host of the first British quiz show to give away prizes. It was called Have a Go and the jackpot was three pounds. That's good, isn't it? Well, it was more than I suppose, but still. It's not who wants to be a millionaire, is it?

Who wants to own three pounds? But they got an audience of 26 million. If you think about what break-off got, what, 13 million? Let's see, 12 million. This was up to 1967. He did it. Yeah, a lot more people used to watch. Yeah, but they didn't have break-off.

They didn't have break-off back then. What was the fact that you told me in the office the other day about like a tire and stuff when they were recording? In radio, early radio, about what they had to wear? I actually know the fact. Oh, yes, okay, yes. No, I do remember, Dan, yes. In the 30s, the British newsreaders had to wear dinner suits

even though you couldn't see them when they were reading the news on the radio. I really like that. You can tell, though. You can tell with the voice when they're setting up properly. They wouldn't be slouching like I am now, would they? Is that why? Was that their justification?

Yeah, I think it gives you a better posture, a better accent. You know, just being annoying about it, sure. For anyone listening, we're all wearing dinner jackets. Some animals have accents, don't they? But not all. What? I'm trying to distinguish which animals do and which don't. No, they do.

So people tend to think that hardly any animals have accents. Like animals is in their dreams, the way they speak. But then farmers in the north of England reported that, I think this might have been where I just read Somerset. It was a Somerset farmer who said that his cows had a different accent to the farmers in surrounding counties. Oh, they do. It's a social thing they do.

They moo in accents, yeah. That won an ignoble prize, didn't it? Cows moo in regional accents. A period review scientific paper that... Babies as well. Babies have regional accents in a way. They moo in different accents. No, babies go...

French and German babies have different ways of saying, Neither of them sound like that. German ones go... And I'm paraphrasing. And French babies go... Okay, there is a difference. And machines can hear it. My dad, if he was...

We should wrap up on our first fact. Have we got anything else? Anyone want to add anything? Apparently the announcers on the BBC, if they would cough during a broadcast, they would be inundated with cough lozenges and woollen underwear because everyone was scared that they had a cough. So guys, whenever you want to start throwing...

Oh, that's really good. Okay, I have one more. Yeah, go for it. Just in case we don't come back onto the subject of radio for loads of podcasts. When Woman's Up again in 1946, it was hosted by a man. Early items on the show included cooking with whale meat, I married a lion tamer, and how to hang your husband's suit. True.

Great, in fact. Okay, time for fact number two. And that is my fact. And my fact this week is that in China, if you want to empty a building of people, a building full of people, if you want to empty it, you play this song. Don't get up and leave if you hear this.

And it doesn't work, apparently. So this is a song... Does anyone know what that is? No one, okay. Anyone can even guess the artist. Yes, Kenny G. Oh, five points. Yeah, now this is a weird thing.

No one in this country in the UK seems to know who Kenny G is. Kenny G is one of the biggest artists in the world and in my heart. He's sold 75 million albums worldwide. He played at the inauguration of Bill Clinton. He worked on the Bodyguard soundtrack. If you watch the Grammys in the 90s, and variably at some point, Michael Bolton would rock on stage next to Kenny G and they would own it.

And the interesting thing is that since the year 2000, in 1989, this song came out and it got really big. It's called Going Home by Kenny G. And for some reason it got adopted and no one really knows why in China as the Going Home song. So at the end of the day... I think because it's called Going Home. Why?

Why did they choose it? You wouldn't do it in a home song. Why didn't they choose Melody in B? Wake me up before you go. So they basically... It's a tune that just gets played everywhere at schools. At the end of school, they play it to kids to go home. If you're on a train that's entering the final stop

of its destination, the terminal, they play that song. Everywhere in China, in a marketplace, they'll play it on loop for an hour and a half to tell you to get out. And Kenny G... People aren't really getting the hints if you have to play it for an hour and a half. At the end of a party, presumably, you play that when you want everyone to leave.

Because as a result, this song, he doesn't get any royalties from it, but he plays a lot of gigs in China now. He had to make sure that he put that song at the end. Otherwise, people are suddenly leaving during the gig. But this is an insane thing. If he did get royalties, though, he would be richer than Bill Gates. If they play it for an hour and a half every day at the closing of a market...

Not only that. When TV used to end at, say, like 12 a.m. or 11 p.m. whenever it is in China, up until 6 a.m. when it came back on, it would be on loop. That was the song that played. Kenny G is massive in China. I have read a few accounts from Chinese people saying, I'm pretty sick of this song now.

I liked it the first time I heard it, and now I really don't. So I hadn't heard of Kenny G. Oh, no, I had heard of him. I didn't know what he was. But I think that's us being musically illiterate. I think everyone else in Britain, I think you're touring British people with our brush by saying no one's heard of Kenny G.

No, no, no. No one in this room except one person, right? Oh, loads, loads. Okay, well done. So the only thing, so I was like, I haven't heard of this guy. I don't really listen to music that was made in the last 40 years. So I just decided I'll look up something about music. I know he's kind of jazz. Let's look up a circular breathing.

The longest musical note ever held lasted 45 minutes and 47 seconds. And the record was set by Kenny G. Yeah. He was so great. This guy has been phenomenal. I know about him. Yeah. Well, I like playing golf and I looked up

who's the best musician who plays golf and it's Kenny G. It really is. He's everywhere. He's off plus 0.8. And many years ago, Kenny G woke up one morning when his uncle said, I have a business. My friend is running and I think you might be interested. You should buy some stocks into it.

They make coffee and he went, I'll buy some stocks. And he now has made almost as much money off the back of the fact that he put stocks into Starbucks before it launched as much as he's made from his 75 million albums. So should we boycott him now? I have been doing an unconscious boycott of him all my life. I don't know who was. Now, I didn't know who Kenny G was either.

And I googled Kenny G is and the first two are Kenny G is my imaginary friend. And Kenny G is Katy Perry's uncle. And I looked it up and he isn't. So I have no idea what that's about at all. And then I spent the rest of the afternoon googling Katy Perry's uncle who is even less interesting than Kenny G. What's he do? Who is he? He's a director of movies.

He's dead now. Bit of a downer. You didn't even know him. And in fairness, guys, he was a robot. Circular breathing. There was a thing in Greece called the disfigurement of Athens. And it's written about by some Greek writers. And apparently that was a weird facial disfigurement you would get

if you did too much circular breathing. I really? What's that like? I don't know. I don't really know how you do it. No, how you do circular breathing. No, I read about how to do it the other day and I can't do it. You save a little bit of air in your mouth and then you breathe through your nose. Does it help people beat box?

Is that? Is beat box? And it's to help you sustain notes. Yeah, yeah. So jazz, he's jazz, right? That's what he does. Otherwise, I've been reading about everyone's. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Let's say he's jazz anyway. I see he's jazz. He plays his saxophone. Dizzy Gillespie ran for president. Did you know that? What? Of America. In 19... Of America. In 1964, he ran a joke campaign for president.

He promised to rename the White House the Blues House and appoint... And he was going to appoint Duke Ellington as his secretary of state and Miles Davis as head of the CIA. Which would have been bloody brilliant. He also... Dizzy Gillespie couldn't hit in... Since 19... From 1949, he was unable to hit the B-flat above high C on his trumpet because he had a very, very minor bicycling accident.

But he got $1,000, which I think was quite a lot in 1949. Sure. In compensation for it because it damaged his art but could never hit that high B-flat. Yeah. Wait, a minor cycling accident. Just a twisted ankle. Yeah.

Stopped him from being able to hit a high... Weird. Yeah. Maybe it was winded or something. Is that? You can sue for damaging your art. You want your art? Dan, I don't think you've got a case.

Just checking. Another influential jazz person. Most influential guitarist of all time. Jimi Hendrix. I was going to go with Django Reinhardt. Or maybe we're talking like jazz guitar. Oh, okay. Was missing the two main guitar playing fingers, didn't he?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So only Abora did solos on two fingers. Didn't he die because he refused to go to a doctor? Yes, I think he did. Yeah, he had a minor medical condition. And he didn't go to a doctor. And then he got bad and then he died. Does anyone know what he had?

Don't remember, no. Just speaking of Django, this is a very weird link. But it's something I was... When I was looking into all the stuff about Michael Bolt... Sorry, Kenny G being massive in China. It is curious when you find out about people who are big in other countries, who aren't sort of like Norman Wisdom being massive in Albania.

Yeah. Like Norman Wisdom is huge still to this day in Albania. When he died, it was almost a national holiday. And they just... A national holiday. A national day of mourning, I think you were good to say. Finally, finally, the hated Wisdom is removed. When Kenny G dies, a lot of Chinese society

will celebrate not having to listen to this song anymore. That's true. That's true. Oh, come on. There's a lot of Kenny G laughing in the room. People are more famous in other countries. Yeah, yeah. So I was reading about people who are more famous.

The list of Americans or just foreign people to China being big there. It's quite interesting. The most famous person in China is Kobe Bryant, who's a basketball player, which I did not expect. The most famous person in all of China. Well, my theory is that it's actually Mr. Bean, which... And then in at number three, Mao Zedong.

Yeah, it's a phrase it then. No, it's the most famous foreigner. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not lit. So these people are getting bigger and bigger. And as a result, there's a really interesting thing going on with the movie world at the moment,

which is that the Chinese movie world has now overtaken Bollywood. It's taken over everything except America. They're the second largest movie makers in the world. And so as a result of these people's names getting quite big, they're getting put into movies now and being sold to China. And as a result, so the top film in China last year was Transformers above anything in the world, right?

They absolutely loved it. The latest Transformers movie that came out. But they do this really interesting thing where they have to edit out certain bits of the movie as it exists because it turns out there's a lot of anti-Chinese government stuff in movies that we don't realize. So when movies go out,

suddenly there's a missing five minutes where a character has been taken out and it suddenly just doesn't make sense. Cloud Atlas, they took out 43 minutes of the movie when they took to China. That you can argue that it could miss 43 minutes. Couldn't either of you? I haven't seen it.

I haven't seen it. And when the sound of music came out in South Korea, it was really, really popular. And like cinemas were playing it four or five times a day. And one cinema owner wanted to work out a way that he could play it more times a day to get more paying customers in. So he edited out all the songs.

Amazing. That's like, if anyone heard an episode that we did, I think it was last week or the week before, Chuck Norris, when he plays his movies to his kids, doesn't like the idea of his kids seeing the fight scenes in the Chuck Norris movies. So he personally edits out all the fight scenes from his movies and his kids just watch it.

And I cannot think of a worse experience than watching a fightless sound of music without any songs. It's just called of. I can. People must have left cinema so confused. What was with the title? Just to qualify, when I said Django, the reason I said that is Django Unchained,

the Quentin Tarantino movie, went into China and was pulled minutes from all of the cinemas when it started because it had a nude scene. And they don't allow nudity in movies now. That's not anti-China propaganda to be fair to Django. No, it's just, they have strict laws still with cinema. The other thing is that China is the biggest, as in the amount of money they take,

not the number of movies they make, I think. Yeah, because it's the second is Hollywood. Which is Nigeria. They do this thing as well now. So you know, like when we watch a James Bond movie, how they take out, you just see Richard Branson suddenly in it, and it's obviously a virgin ad, or it's just product placement the whole way through.

They reshoot scenes with Chinese product placement. So which movie was it here? It was during World War Z. Great movie. Great film. Great movie. It is a great film. What's it, World War Z?

You like Pacific Rim as your greatest ever movie. I love Pacific Rim. Come on. Thank you. Oh my goodness. Yegas forever. All right. I saw an edited version of World War Z,

because I was on a plane watching it, because that's when you should watch World War Z. And they edited out the bit with the enormous plane zombie scene, which ends with the plane crashing. Really? Really? Yeah, weird, right?

We eat sensors. Let us watch the scene. That's fair. We should move on. We've done quite a lot of this. I just want to say one more thing. So this, Kenny G's real name is... Kenneth Gorlik.

Kenneth Gorlik. And I thought I'd check and see if I had anything on him in my files on my computer. And I didn't have anything on him, but I did have something on another Kenneth Gorlik. And this is... That is a weird coincidence. Yeah.

Kenneth J. Gorlik, this is. Oh yeah. He's a medic, and he wrote a paper called a four-letter word in the medical literature. And he went through all medical literature looking for instances of the word fuck. Okay. He found 17 instances since the 1960s.

Four were about a fungus called fuck. Two were sexual. And six were the author. Okay. What do you mean? As in the name of the author. Oh, right, sorry. So he wrote,

The most prolific single contributor was Dr. E. Fuck, whose four German language publications on the malic acid metabolism of saccharolytises constitute a major contribution to the field. This may be about to change with the emergence of Dr. L. Fuck as a co-author of a publication in 1999. So look out for those new fucks. Okay.

Let's move on to fact number three, and that is Chaszinski. My fact is that the two leading paleontologists of the 19th century used to destroy their fossil sites after excavating them so that their rival wasn't able to find anything on them. That's insane. And so, and these really were the two,

by far and away, the leading paleontologists. So they were Edward Drinker, Cope, and Othniel Charles Marsh. Othniel. Othniel. Yeah, that's right. That's his name. Got a problem with that? No.

No, ma'am. It's just a brilliant name. It's good. So before they came along, there were nine species of dinosaur had been discovered and named, and between the two of them, by the time they both died,

they'd named 136 species between them, including all the ones you've heard of, all the big ones, Stegosaurus, Diplodocus, Triceratops, all those guys. And they kind of liked each other at first. So they met in 1867, and they named species after one another. So a giant serpent from New Jersey

was called Mosasaurus copianus after Cope and vice versa. Yeah, but I'm not sure that was because they liked him because it actually is Cope anus, copianus. Is it? So that's what it is. Yeah. So I think that might have been an insult. If only you'd been there to tell him.

He thought they were best friends. I think this is why he was so upset. Dick Hedosaurus? So, relationship went sour when Cope showed off this fossil of an elasmosaurus at a big showing of new fossils he discovered. Classic, classic faux pas. Yeah.

Not at the end yet. Did that, put the head on the wrong end of it, and Marsh said, I think you put the head on the tail, and Cope was like, no, I haven't, you're wrong. And they called in the museum curator, the academy curator, who said, yeah, you put the head on the wrong end,

and he was so humiliated by that, that Marsh wrote that after that, he's been my bitter enemy. And it was so extreme. They spent 25 years stealing each other's fossils. They both employed teams of sort of spies to go and jeopardize each other's sight, so they'd steal and break each other's fossils.

One of them, Marsh, got into government so that he could withdraw funding from the other guy. There was this constant exchange of letters where one would say, some of my fossils are damaged and have disappeared. I know you're responsible, and the other one would write back going, it's outrageous that you'd accuse me of that,

but since you mentioned it, some of my fossils are gone, and it's just 25 years of this. Wow. It was called the Bone Wars. The Bone Wars. How would they destroy each other's sort of... Well, Dynamite was how Marsh did it.

Dynamite? Yeah, yeah. So they would just, they would find their bit and then go, there may be lots more here, but I'm just gonna... Yeah, just in case there is. Or I think if they couldn't carry stuff back, or if they'd found the thing they needed to find...

They couldn't carry stuff back! Well, that's all I can get about the... Well, maybe they thought they would propel it back with the Dynamite. I read that on one occasion, their two teams of researchers even had a stone-throwing battle against each other. They hated each other.

Yeah. They hated each other. They were throwing fossils at each other. Yeah? No, I think they're stones. Oh, just stones. Yeah. And it was quite,

even though they were obviously really successful, A, what were we missing that we could have, and B, it was quite damaging to their, like how good they were at their work, because they constantly rushed to have stuff published before the other person, and this is whence the Brontosaurus cock-up came about. So Marsh, Othniel Marsh, named the Apatosaurus,

and then he thought he'd found a different dinosaur and he named it the Brontosaurus, and that was a really catchy name, because it means like thunder horse or something. And it turned out that it wasn't a Brontosaurus, it was just another Apatosaurus. And that was just because he'd sped it through, because he was going mass-publish more papers then.

And he won the Bone Wars in the end, because he named 80 new species, and Copponi named 56. I don't think there were that many winners on this, really. Oh, the voice of moral authority. Oh, you might teach it. When bones fight each other, nobody wins. I've read that they died.

Yes, they did. Dinosaur's. Yeah, they've gone. Great fact about that. That was your fact next week. So yeah, after Copp, Marsh, when he got into government, he devoted his, yeah, as you say, he made himself hugely powerful

just so he could fight the other guy, but then he tried to take Copp's fossils away from him, and that was his crucial misstep, because he said these were found with government money and dug up with government money, therefore the government owns them and we're going to take your collection away from you. But Copp proved that he paid for all of his own.

He kept the receipts, right? He kept the receipts, yeah, and he destroyed Marsh's reputation by showing that Marsh had behaved so unethically. So then Marsh lost his job in government, lost all his income, lost everything. Copp died 56 years old, penniless. Marsh died two years after that,

and he had $186 left. You see, Anna, no winners. I've learned my lesson. The dinosaurs are all, they named 142 dinosaurs, but only 32. That is true. Actuals, they're still dinosaurs. They got over excited.

A lot of them were mistakes. They made, what, 110 fake dinosaurs and they rushed to beat the other guy. They're not fake. We just weren't as good at classifying species then. Cool dinosaur thing. The most complete or one of the most complete fossils we have of a T-Rex was wrapped around

and with its teeth embedded in the most complete fossil we have of a Triceratops. Wow. It's really cool. So annoyingly, it went straight to Bonham's and they're trying to sell it for something like $10 million or something. So they haven't got scientists into verifying.

Was that quite recently? Yeah, it was last year, but it didn't go. And they were saying about how T-Rexes would have eaten them and they would have taken the head off like a tin opener kind of thing. Is that wrong? Because these teeth were embedded in its neck. The teeth had come out of the T-Rex

and were in this fossil sort of neck. So that was a theory that they would just cut around the neck and take the head off and eat the inside. So then it was doing this and there was an earthquake, I think, and which caused sand to fall on top of them and they sort of sunk into the sinking sand and they were forever embraced for 60 million years.

They've been embraced. As if it wasn't exciting enough with dinosaurs fighting, then there was an earthquake. Oh, that's amazing. That's incredible. You don't get that kind of entertainment anymore. I read the very first dinosaur bone that was ever found at the time not thought to be a dinosaur bone.

It was in retrospective kind of looking at the drawings of the thing that was described. And it was a guy called Robert Plott. Oh, yeah. And Robert Plott, he thought what he'd found was not a dinosaur, but a giant, which is incredible. He thought he was looking at this bone. He was like, this must be a giant man.

And so he told everyone that that's what he thought it was. Yeah, it was actually, it was a top of the thigh bone because of the shape of the top of the thigh bone of a dinosaur. It's quite hard to imagine that. But because of its shape, they called it scrotum humanum because it looked like a giant scrotum. And the thing is that they giant balls. Is that what he thought it was?

That wasn't him. That was Richard Brooks who thought that, but he came a little bit later. He thought it was a giant like an elephant or something like that. But then they came along called it scrotum humanum. And then they realized it was a megasaurus bone. But according to the rules of nomenclature, they should keep the first thing that it was called.

So the megasaurus should really be called scrotum humanum. That's so good. So the thing I really liked about this guy though, Robert Plott, he was quite an influential character back in the day when it came to science and classifying things and pushing forward ideas. He also wrote about, and I'd not heard about this until today when I was looking into him,

he wrote about the first ever noted double sunset. What? Yeah, double. Have you heard about this? Okay. So he noticed it in the leak, which I've not heard of either. I don't know what that is. It's famous for it.

I think if you're from anywhere near the leak, like they're known for their double sunsets. They're known for their double sunsets. Yeah, it's amazing. What is it then? No, no, I don't... No, no, it's a real thing. It's a real thing.

It's just where the contours of the earth are aligned such that when the sun sets on a certain day of the year, I think it's on the solstice, it looks like it's set over one hill and then because of the distance a certain hill behind it is, it rises up again and sets again. What? Just look at it on YouTube.

It's a real phenomenon. It's a double... It's not magic. It's just the angle of the sun compared to the mountains. Yeah, and it's in England. It's a double sunset. It's really... It's pretty great.

Yeah, it's amazing. Another thing just on rivalries that I really like is that there's so much academic warfare that goes on. It's not just with the dinosaur hunters. You look through any bit of history up until now. I tweeted once saying, where does outer space begin? And that sparked a huge debate on Twitter for ages

where no one knew where outer space technically began. So I love collecting these little things and I found this thing that the first mobile phone call ever placed was on April the 3rd, 1973. I was a guy called Martin Cooper. He invented it and he basically worked for Motorola and his very first phone call when he was like, we've made the mobile phone.

Let's do this. His very first phone call was to the rivals at AT&T to say that they've got their first. How cool is that? He called and we got their suckers. Bye! Hang on. That was the very first mobile phone call ever made, 1973.

We need to move on, by the way. Oh, should we just quickly talk about what a bastard Edison was? Go for it, yeah. It's about bloody time. I think it is. So obviously Edison is credited with a great deal. He was a propaganda maestro and he came up with DC Current. Well, Tesla was coming up with AC Current,

which is what is used mostly around the world now because it's much more useful. It travels longer distances, et cetera. But Edison waged such a strong campaign against Tesla and against AC Current. To the extent that, he wrote to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in the US and asked them to send him a bunch of dogs, cats,

sheeps, horses, and elephants to electrocute using AC Current to prove that it was dangerous. And the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals said, yes, of course, he has some animals. Feel free to electrocute them at your convenience. They're not really doing the job, are they? We did that in public, something was going on there. Yeah, and he electrocuted Topsie the elephant.

He electrocuted Topsie, which is just the most traumatic thing. So Topsie was a circus elephant who basically she killed one guy who poked her in the face or something. And so she was supposed to be hanged, as elephants tended to be, when they were... It's hanged.

They used to hang elephants. What? Best way to do it. It's not the best way to do it. I mean... This is a source of a lot of content in the GUI office. Keep the Kenji song. Yeah, on the normal circumstances,

we would have cut that bit out. It's live. I've just admitted to hanging elephants. Okay, time to move on to our final fact. Andy Murray. My fact is that Mozilla Firefox translates its computer systems into hundreds of different languages,

but lots of the metaphors don't translate. So things like cookies or files or mouse, things like that. So in Senegal, in the Fula language, a computer crash is known as a hooky, which means a cow falling over but not dying. Isn't that good? And they have all kinds...

All of these things, they're translating them using local idioms and local languages. So a timeout is a honama, which means your fish has gone away. And I don't really get this one, but aspect ratio is translated as Jean Donderel, which is a rebuke from elders when a fishing net is wrongly woven.

You don't get that? I don't know. Do you know what aspect ratio is? Not really. I'm thinking about it now, I do get it. I think that's quite good. It's kind of like a fishing net, isn't it? When it's wrongly woven.

I'm bluffing, I still don't know what it is. Never mind. I do like it when... Yeah, so when interesting linguistic metaphors, I guess, and I think we might have been more fun with them in the olden days. So in the 1800s,

they referred to ducks or any birds with feet quite close to their bums as ass feet. And if you read natural science journals and stuff, they'll say the ass foot duck present here, or the ass foot present here was... Wasn't the grebe formally known as an ass foot? It would have been. Yeah, yeah, grebe.

Which one is known as a windfucker? That's a kestrel or a kite, because they stay hovering against the wind. So computer words, in Hawaiian, the word for computer literally means electric brain. That's lolo uila. Yeah, and in Iceland, the computer is known as a tula,

which means number prophetess. That's good, isn't it? That's really nice. I like it. It's a female as well. Yeah, yeah. And they, they're all... Standard.

Their old word for a pager was, oh, I can't pronounce that, frith flur fur, which means thief of the peace. Wow. That's good, isn't it? That's incredible. Yeah, so speaking of women and computers,

first person to write computer code was a woman, right? Who I think we've talked... Yeah. She's here tonight. Welcome to the stage, the 150-year-old, please come up. Ada Lovelace, or Lovelace, I never know how to say Lovelace.

Byron's daughter. Byron's daughter, Byron's only little daughter. Although she was never allowed to see him, because understandably, her mum hated him so much. Yeah. Yeah, she was...

Oh, so she wrote the world's first computer code in 1842, and it was because she worked with Charles Pappish, didn't she, who made the analytical engine? Is that what it was called? Yeah. And it wasn't called a computer, because originally computers were people who did sums. Yes.

You would say, I'll just go and turn on the computer. No, you wouldn't say that. That's too wrong in too many ways. My mum always, you know, in parents' life, like, really lame jokes, they do your whole life, and whenever you say to her,

could you turn on the lights, please? She starts flirting with the light switch. Well, I think everyone here has shown... That's not a lame joke, actually. That's pretty good. She'll be thrilled. The first search engine was called Archie. Oh, was it?

Oh, yeah. And so it was set up by this guy called Alan M. Taj. It was in the 80s, in 1983, and he was Barbadian, or Bayesian, whichever we're going to call it. And yeah, so he set up this search engine, he did computer science, and it was called Archie.

And because I think, like, comic book fans overlap quite a lot with computer geek people, sometimes. And so everyone assumed it was named after Archie, the comic book guy. And so eventually he did an interview where he came out, and he said it's not named after Archie,

it's named after Archive, and I took the V out. Archie, the comics are the most insipid thing I've ever read. He was not invited back to Comic-Con the next year, was he? Anyway, he hasn't owned a computer since 1983. They probably haven't let him have one, since he was so rude about their 90s car, too.

The word bug, supposedly, was coined in 1946, when a lady called Grace Hopper found a moth trapped in a relay at Harvard University, and she freed the moth, and then she taped it into a book. But still, the computer then worked again, and that's where people thought we got the word bug from.

But it's not true. It's been in use since at least the 1870s. However, she is amazing. She is not only a great computer scientist, she was also a US Navy Rear Admiral. Wow. She's badass. There are photos of this little old lady

in an enormous rack of medals on her chest, and she's got the proper naval admiral hat. Amazing. Yeah, very cool. In the, what is? Uh, she died in about 1980 or 1990. So in the mid, sort of, 40s, 50s, 60s, was when she was in her admiral and computer heyday.

Yeah, look her up, Grace Hopper. Very cool. Brilliant. I was looking at language because of the language part of the fact. I was looking at a language of Vanuatu, which is called Bislama. And this was brought to the islands by sailors,

so they're a bit, you know, a bit racy, the words. And a lot of their words have the word shit in them, their word for shit is sit. So sit belong fire is ash. So it's the ship which is left over after a fire is burned, which is quite good. That's sensible. Sit water, obviously, is diarrhea.

And sit belong spider is? Spider shit. A spider web. Oh, I fell into that one. And then I spent all afternoon looking at Vanuatu, basically. Go on, what have you found? I found that they have pseudo hermaphroditic pigs on the island. And these are the pigs that they've bred and bred and bred

to have less and less testosterone. So their penises have got smaller and smaller and smaller. And now you can't even tell they have penises. And they're pseudo hermaphrodites. And they're so precious on the island that they're used as currency. So they use pseudo hermaphroditic pigs as currency, which is the best sentence I've ever heard.

Do they carry around in wallets? No, it's just like owning it. And then if you wanted to buy a house and you had 10 of these, you would buy 10 of these. I think they use tusks as currency as well. So it takes seven years for a tusk to grow in a full circle, at which point it is valuable after the pig. It's removed from the pig, obviously, or taken.

But if you get a double tusker, that's 14 years worth of accumulated money. So that's how they calculate what's worth more. I was looking at language as well. And so fun words that exist in other languages that we don't have words for in English. I think we should. So I think my favorites are, which one?

Jeyus, or yayus in Indonesian, is a joke so unfunny that you have to laugh at it. Which is weird that that, yeah? That's my next Edinburgh show title if anyone wants to come along. Mangata in Sweden literally means moon street. So it's guessable, actually, but it's the... Do you know what it is?

No. It's the... So when the moon's reflecting over a lake, it's the reflection of the moon that looks like a road. And then sobremesa in Spanish is the time spent in conversation after a meal. And it literally means over the table. But I really like that,

because that turns it into an activity that's then kind of justified in spending six hours doing, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sobremesa. Post burning and washing up, basically. The word... This is a great...

It's a Swiss word. And it's altos und hinterlassene versicherung. And it's the Swiss word for a pension. And they just say A-H-V. But what it means is old age and survivors insurance. How cool is that? Okay, just one more thing about Senegal, because that was...

Yeah, the original fact. The original fact. All the way back was about Senegal. The main language in Senegal is Wolof. And the Wolof language doesn't really have words for colors. It does have them, but they don't use them. So they don't have the word for blue and orange and red. They use the French.

But they do have lots of words for shades of gray. Loads and loads and loads. No, no, really. How many? We don't know? I don't know. The reason they have so many shades of gray is because of their caste system.

Because the shade of your skin matters so much to them that the different shades between black and white are really, really important to them. And that's why they have so many shades of gray. And the good thing about it is if you're a person who does a lot of art with pencils, especially in Africa, they use all these different shades of gray when you're deciding how much you shade things in.

So they are actually useful as well as a bit racist. I'm so excited that you've mentioned Wolof. Because when I was reading about jazz, it's in the Wolof language that they think the word hip comes from. And it's a word in the Wolof language called happy cat. And obviously, so it's like a black culture thing, jazz. And so they think hip comes from happy cat. And then a bunch of other etymologists

think that that's rubbish. And that's just sort of post-hoc rationalization. And they say there's no actual evidence that it comes from happy cat. And so apparently among etymologists, instead of saying to cry wolf, you say to cry Wolof. And this is etymologist banter. To cry Wolof.

Start using it, guys. OK, that's it. That's all our facts. Thanks so much, everyone, for listening to this show. We'll be back again next week with another episode. But if you want to get in contact with us, if you're listening to this right now, you can get us on our Twitter accounts.

We have a main account, which is at QI podcast on Twitter. But you can get us individually. I'm on at Shriverland. Andy. At Andrew Hunter M. James. At Egg Shaped. Chasinski.

Can email podcast at qi.com. And yeah, we're going to be back again next week. This was our first live show. We may do it again. I don't know. Thanks, everyone, in the room for putting up with it. Thanks so much for coming. We hope you enjoyed it.

And we'll be back again next week with another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish. Thank you so much. Good night.