No Such Thing As A Fish - 307: No Such Thing As EastEnders, The Opera

Episode Date: February 7, 2020

Dan, James, Anna and Andrew discuss the never-ending opera, whether worms are carbon neutral, and how Edgar Allan Poe helped to create Scrabble. Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes.

Hey everyone, before we begin this week's episode of Fish, we just want to let you know something hugely exciting. One of us has our first debut novel out this week. That is correct. Which one could it be? Andrew Hunter Murray. It's Andrew Hunter Murray. Oh, it's that guy. It's that guy. He has written a debut thriller novel. It's called The Last Day. I've read it. It's unbelievably good. It's really great. So it's kind of this sci-fi dystopian future where the world has gradually stopped spinning.

Half of it's plunged into darkness, half of it's bathed in light. It's impossible to live in any of those areas. But what about the middle sliver? That's sort of half light, half dark. That's where the novel takes place. It's wonderful, boldly imagined and beautifully written. The best future shock thriller for years. Those aren't my words. Those are Lee Child's words. Lee Child. And look, I know a lot of people respect Lee Child's view, but my view may be even more important to some. And genuinely, couldn't believe it. Andy can actually write incredibly well. Absolutely. It's a stunning original thriller. It's set in a world of tomorrow that'll make you think about what's happening today. Not my words. Harlan Coban. Harlan Coban said that about Andy.

You may be beginning to think that Dan has no words of his own. And even more exciting news is that you can buy this book. It's available to buy in what we call bookshops, all of them. Or on the internet. And if you want to listen to it, there's an audiobook available and it's narrated by Gemma Whelan of Game of Thrones. If that's not a mark of quality, I don't know what it is. Go get it, buy it, read it, listen to it, do it now. That's right. The Last Day by Andrew Hunter Murray. A fabulous achievement. Not my words. Stephen Fry. Oh, Jesus Christ. Okay. On with the show.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden. My name is Dan Shriver. I am sitting here with James Harkin, Anna Chazinski, and Andrew Hunter Murray. And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days. And in no particular order, here we go. Starting with you, Chazinski. My fact this week is that after being stuck at an opera that went on twice as long as the scheduled running time, Emperor Joseph II of Austria banned encores. So, yeah, this was 1786. It was the marriage of Figaro. Very good. No disrespect to that, I'm sure he emphasized,

but it did go on twice the length it was supposed to because almost every single scene was encored. It's tough. If you've got kids to get home to, it's difficult. So anyway, the Emperor went and he thought that was fine, but he immediately afterwards set, put up kind of bills in theaters, saying that no piece of music should be encored henceforth. And to be clear, he said no piece of music for more than a single voice. So if you are singing, you're solitary, a little solo, you can maybe get away with it, but basically you couldn't do anything else. It's an amazing thing, the idea of an encore mid-show or even at the beginning of the show and just carrying on and on. I've never heard of that before.

They just used to interrupt shows. I mean, this is how encores worked until apparently up to the 1930s in theater. It was common. Like if you were watching a scene and you liked it, you just shout encore and continuity couldn't happen because you'd have to do the scene again. Sometimes there'd be like a song the audience really liked sort of in scene two and then an hour later they decide to encore that song from scene two. And they'd be like, hey, play Hit Me Baby again. That's incredible. And you'd have to go back. What's Hit Me Baby? Is that Britney Spears opera? Yeah, the Britney Spears opera, I think it was 1810.

One more time! But there was a thing where you would sing an encore which wasn't even part of the opera you were seeing. So some singers in the 19th and even 20th century would sing an encore which is just a little musical bonus unrelated to the piece you'd just seen or the opera you'd just seen. And they would do encore after encore that was not in the opera. So there was a Polish tenor whose name was Jan Kiepura and he made sure there was a piano in the wings just in case he needed it for an opera, for an encore. For an encore? Yeah. But playing something else just for pitching his other one.

Be like you suddenly reading a chapter of your novel mid-show right now for us. I don't do that. It was a dark and stormy night. Wow, OK. The last time I heard you do that accent was old John the Pooh smuggler. Oh yeah, he's a main character in the novel. It's a Pooh smuggling ring being bus-wide open. Oh, that's disgusting.

Anyway. Anywho, on to opera, guys. Figaro was extremely popular, wasn't it? Yeah, it was. It was a huge deal. Well, I think it was popular eventually. Apparently the first performance they didn't love, they didn't know what to make of it. So this was in Vienna when it was first performed and apparently it was ruined by Hecklers. So someone who was there wrote that it was destroyed by obstreperous louts in the uppermost story,

exerting their hired lungs with all their might to deafen the singers and audience alike. Oh wow. Is that from a rival composer? I assume so, yeah. And when it was played in Prague a bit later, it was really popular. So Mozart said, here they talk about nothing but Figaro. Nothing is played, sung or whistled but Figaro. No opera is drawing like Figaro. Nothing but Figaro.

All right, mate. Get over yourself. I didn't even know it was a play before it was an opera. And it was written by a man called Beaumarchais, who is seriously interesting. He's the best. He's incredible because it was quite an incendiary play. It had lots of stuff about the aristocracy being rubbish and layabouts and useless. And this was soon before the French Revolution.

So Louis XVI banned performances of the play, which the opera was based on. Yeah, he said actually, he said, for this play not to be a danger, the Bastille would have to be torn down first. And then everyone went, oh, that's an idea. He actually referenced himself in a later play. So I think it was in Don Giovanni in act two, which Mozart also wrote, which also was an adaptation of the Beaumarchais Don Giovanni. Really? He played some taffel music, which is like table music,

and it's like background music in a scene where people are chatting away. And as part of the table music he used a marriage of Figaro melody that he got the wind players to play. So in his later opera was a callback to his previous opera. It was so far up his own arse by that point. Another character who's a part of this story is Lorenzo de Ponte, who was, he wrote the words to the opera. So all the trilogy of those plays were done as a collaboration.

He was the Bernie Torping to Mozart's Elton John. He was a big deal in his time, Lorenzo. He was the court poet to Joseph II. So that was great. But then Joseph II died and Mozart died and he got banned from Austria. And he had to flee where he moved to America and opened a grocery store. He lived in New York. He lived in Pennsylvania, New Jersey in those times.

He had a grocery store, a bookstore, a traveling general store, a gin distillery. So did he, he didn't bring the stores with him. He did. He opened up a new store in every new place. Every new place. Yeah. And then the general traveling store. I don't know about that because that was on wheels, I assume.

So he might have brought that everywhere. Traveling store. Yeah. And he opened the first opera house in New York, but it closed after two seasons. And it was the first opera house to play Italian opera. But unfortunately, yeah, it failed. But amazing character. Yeah.

And he was actually really important with the marriage of Figaro, wasn't he? Because Mozart wanted it to be close to the original story, which like Andy says, was really anti aristocracy. And it was about, was it about like someone who wants to shag some guy's girlfriend and he's the lord. And he's like, well, I'm the lord. So I'm allowed to shag your girlfriend. And the guy who's the girlfriend's boyfriend is like, oh, you're only there because you're

rich, you idiot. And then all the people. Are you describing a plot of EastEnders? Yeah. Because then the other guy goes, you slag. You slag. He's not worth it, Figaro. He's not worth it.

But there was loads of quotes about why the aristocracy were bad in this original story. And it was De Ponte who said, let's get rid of all those passages. Let's just stick with the comedy bit with Barry and Janine. Let's just stick with those ones and get rid of the Mitchells. Yeah. I read the plot of it today because I've never heard the music except obviously I have when you press play on a Spotify list. It's like, oh, that most famous song ever.

Is that what your Spotify lists are? They are now. It's that and Ariana Grande at the moment. Don't ask me why. It's Arias and Ariana. Lovely. So I'd never heard it before and I read the plot today and it does read like a carry-on film.

Like it's total farce. The stuff of having to hide in the bedrooms. Very funny just even by plot. Can't wait to see it. It becomes less funny on stage. I doubt it. Apparently I read that the play was so popular, the original play that in France women would have lines from the play inscribed on their fans.

Cool. Yeah. So that became like sort of merchandise, but bootleg. It's awful. Not official, not official merch. It's awful that when you said fans, I thought you were going to say something else. God, I thought you was going to say fanies as well. I was going to say how on earth you would scribe words from a play on your funny.

You need a mirror. The only person who can read it is Leonardo da Vinci. Do you guys know what the French for encore is? Encore. Encore. So it's not encore. It's not encore in the French accent. It's not encore in any accent.

No, it's B. So encore is the French for... Can I have some more? But actually the English language nicked it from Italy's encore and changed it to encore thinking that sounds nice in French. But the French would say B as in a second time. Do it a second time. Oh, okay.

Yeah. Not like a buzzy, buzzy bumblebee. No, like we've heard it once. A, let's hear it. B, twice. Very good. I think because so modern day on course, you don't repeat the material. It's bits you haven't played.

I don't know. I once went to watch the band Junior Senior and they only had one song. It was called Move Your Feet that anyone had heard of and they played it four times. Did they? Wow. There are occasional times where that happens. In 1926, there was a musical called Betsy, which is a Rogers and Hart musical. But there was a song that was added to it at last minute, which was Irving Berlin song

and it was Blue Skies. And it was so popular that at the end of the night, they requested the song again. And it was sung by Bell Baker, but they requested it in total 24 times. She did an encore 24 times. And on the final time that she was singing it, she was so dazed from singing it, she forgot the words. And while she forgot the words, suddenly a voice could be heard from the front row, which was Irving Berlin, who was filling in for the missing lyrics and singing the rest of the song for her. No way.

Yeah, quite a cool opening night. There were some people in the crowd who were saying after maybe the 20th time, Well, we've all had a really good time. That is hell. You've got to turn it down. You've got to learn to say no to an encore, I think, in that instance. There's just no way of voting. If a few people really want an encore, then you might get one.

It's hard. There used to be a thing, in fact, where in the 19th century at these choral festivals that happened, it was so irritating that, you know, you kept getting loads of on-course, that the encore decision was reserved for a single person, like the bishop or the male or whoever. And they could decide what they wanted to hear again. Just because you talked about the bishop. Yeah.

Do you know that just after the marriage of Figaro started, Beaumache got arrested and got sent to prison. And that was because there was a protest outside of the play, which involved the Archbishop of Paris, and he apparently assaulted the Archbishop of Paris and got sent to prison for bashing the bishop. That's where we get the phrase from. And was he assaulting him?

Had he banned an encore or something? Well, the Archbishop was trying to stop people from going into the theatre because he was like, stop this filth kind of thing. So he was like stopping anyone from going in and he was like, how can you stop these ladies from coming in? And you shouldn't. And he kind of bashed him out of the way. And then he got arrested.

Cruising for a bruising. Dashing for a bashing. He was dashing for a bashing. Anyway, Andy's novel is available on all good books. It was a dark and starry night. It's a combination of Dr. Seuss and the Pirates of Penzance. OK, it is time for fact number two, and that is James. OK, my fact this week is that humans have transported European earthworms

to every continent on the planet except Antarctica. In a process, some worm experts are calling global worming. It's really good. Deliver that like as a Fox News headline. Well, this was an amazing article that I read in The Atlantic by Julia Rosen. And it's all about earthworms and the fact that mainly if you go to North America, they had a big glacial ice sheet over there about 10,000 years ago and it killed off all of the worms.

And so you would think there'd be no worms there, but actually there are worms there. And that's because humans have brought them over. And this is actually bad news for the environment because worms are pretty good for the environment in some ways. But if you put them in a place where they're not supposed to be, then like all animals, that's not a good thing. I like the tone in which you put them. Here's Tom with the weather. No, but it's surprising because I would have thought that, I thought before researching this fact that worms were good pretty much wherever you had them

because they, what do they do in the UK? They make your soil better. Yeah. They make channels in it. Some people say it's a bit of a myth actually. And a worm is a symptom rather than a cause of good soil. So they go to good soil is the idea? That's an idea.

That's interesting. Look, there is a controversial issue. I don't want to get into it right now, but that's what some people say. But basically where they shouldn't be, they are the soil in the boreal forest in the northern, you know, half of the planet. It's the largest carbon sink in the world. It has 200 billion metric tons of carbon in this boreal forest. And that's not just in the trees. I didn't realize that either.

Loads of it is actually in the soil. Under a tree, you might get twice as much carbon in the soil as there is in the tree itself, which I had no idea about. And so the worms, sometimes they eat the top layer of the soil basically and they just make it thinner and thinner and thinner. And then all the carbon is actually being released into the air because the worms are eating it up and creating channels. Although there is another argument that when they're making their casts, which is when you're eating soil, you kind of give out some soil poo stuff that that actually keeps in loads more carbon. So really, actually, these days, no one has really looked into earthworms enough to know exactly what they're doing to the environment. I didn't realize there was such a hot bed of debate. We don't see enough of this on TV.

It's a new Brexit. Yeah. Just wait till next week. Piers Morgan will be wanging on about earthworms. But they eat seeds. They eat seeds which you'd think would be fine because it's just their diet. But in the bits of America, north of the Mason Dexton line and east of the Great Plains, where they used to not exist, there used to be millipedes and mites everywhere.

And that's just worms. Yeah. So they're hugely invasive. And so for sure, it's quite bad for them to be up there. Because like, for instance, you've got all this bits of leaves and stuff on the floor and all the millipedes live under there nice and happy. And then suddenly the worms come along and they just eat all of the leaves and stuff like that. And there's nowhere for the millipedes to live and they all die. And someone said in this article I was reading, I think it was in this Atlantic article that it's like going to the African Savannah,

taking out all the animals and just replacing them all with elephants and just tons of elephants everywhere. Yeah. And one of the problems seems to be that we know very little about them to some extent. So it was only in 2008 that we discovered the common earthworm, which was thought to be one species is actually five. Wow. So that, you know, one common earthworm is different from another as a human from an ape. And in the US, I like this quote. In the US, I was reading in one article, a quote which said,

shockingly little is known about any of our native earthworms. There is only one working earthworm taxonomist in all of America. So I looked into this because I wanted to find out who it was. That's an easy job, isn't it? Of all taxonomy. Oh, taxonomy. I thought it was taxidermy. Worm taxidermy is very easy.

You're right. You just cut off the end. Just blow out the middle. So I tried to find out about who the taxonomist is. And anyway, I came across this 1995 book and I was just so impressed at the level of research. So it was about worms and it says there's one trained professional worm taxonomist in America. And then it says there is sort of a second, but she's only recently trained. So not good enough.

And then says, okay, there's a third expert. He was trained by his mother and he actually works in a post office most of the time. And then it was like, he said the fourth and last person in North America who has any knowledge of earthworm taxonomy works as a police lawyer in New Brunswick, Canada. Wow. This guy has actually been around every single person in America to find out if they know about earthworms. That's really impressive. So impressive.

Yeah. You can get three meter long worms. That's long. Yeah. This is the Australian giant gypseland earthworm, up three meters long. And apparently they used to be very abundant in the 1800s. And if you plowed your fields, they'd be red with blood from all these worms that you'd plowed up. That's messed up.

It's pretty messed up. Yeah. They would hang from the plows like spaghetti, someone described it as. Wow. But they're quite cool. So you can hear them. They're so big and they're so vocal that when you're walking in the territory, in the gypseland area, they're like, oh, you're walking on the, oh.

Is that what you say vocal? Is that what you mean? That's sort of what I mean. But if you walk along the ground, you can hear them squelching and squirming underfoot because they're very fast. And so they squirm away. And so if you walk, you'll hear a gurgling, squelching sound. They're moving through their burrows, I think, because it's like the water draining in a bath.

They've moved through. Yeah, their bodies are slimy against the walls of their burrow. They're a foot long when they're born. Yeah, they're really big. Are they born in eggs? Are they in like a cocoon type thing? I don't know if they're eggs or born live. Right.

But they do, they sort of have no teeth, but they do have a gizzard. Like a chicken. Like a chicken, yeah. They swallow little rocks and they use those to grind up their food inside them. Do you know how you collect worms? Because there's a worm conservation effort going on now in the worms are good for the environment lobby. So I think you tap the ground and they think there's a bird there. No, they think there's rain there and they come up thinking there's rain and then you just plop them out.

You do do a bit of that and we have mentioned the worm tapping before, haven't we? I was actually talking about the more brutal way, which is you just shove a spade in the earth, which is what people used to do and they're doing it much less now. But it turns out you're just cutting them in half all the time and that does cause a bit of an issue. Because if you're trying to get rid of them, you're just doubling the population. Exactly. It gets out of control. So what they do to avoid using the shovel now is they take DNA swabs

because it's all about counting the population of a certain species. And so you swab the mucus from their passages so they make these tiny channels and scientists who are looking into earthworm populations will just swab a worm tunnel and they scrape their saliva off it and then they measure it in a test tube. When you said swapping the passages, I thought it was like inside the body passages. That's a small swab, isn't it? That's what I was thinking. The worm goes, I've got my GP check up again.

Worm spear test. There's only one stare up. And the doctor uses a cocktail stick. OK, it is time for fact number three and that is my fact. My fact this week is that the most popular street in America is Second Street. The second most popular street is Third Street and the third most popular street is First Street. And who's on first? Yeah, so fourth is fourth, fifth is park and sixth is fifth.

Just to bring you further down the list. Is there not Main Street? I see you're in any way here. So there is. This is from 1993. This was the Census Bureau in America release this report. In recent years, I think it was in the like 2013 sort of period. And they released all new information about the just general information about geography, topography and so on. But they didn't do the same list that they've done before and few people have gone through it completely and they've compiled lists.

But none of them seemed to tally with the others. So Washington Post did one where they said that park was the number one street. But then someone on Reddit called Darren Hawley, he did one that said Main Street was the top one. And so they think the reason first is not up there is because first and main were two versions of saying first basically. So it knocked it down, it halved its chances. Also, the idea is that if you have a first street, which is your Main Street in your town, you might name it after George Washington or Abraham Lincoln or Donald Trump or something like that. Yeah. Did you know that Ludford in Lincolnshire has a street named after Donald Trump? Well, I say it's named after Donald Trump. It's called Fanny Hands Glane.

Oh, come on, sorry. Cheap, cheap and unfair. But actually, there's nothing rude about it. Nothing rude about Fanny Hands Glane. Yes, there is. The word Fanny. It is, it has been claimed that it's affecting property prices that having a street called Fanny Hands Glane. But the thing is, it was just named in the 19th century by a man named John Hands after his wife Fanny. No. There's nothing rude about it.

Do you know in London, just down the road from here, there's a place called Knight Rider Street. Oh, nice. Very cool. And do you know who it's named after? Hasselhoff, I would say. Well, the car? No, obviously not. No, it was because it was the route that knights used to take from the Tower of London to Smithfield where jails were held.

So knights would ride across that street. And they're talking carriages, wouldn't they? I was reading about Nicaragua's capital city of Managua. So I was trying to find out, based on this fact about street names, I was trying to find out if there was any way where the streets have no name, like in the South. Yeah. Because Bonner wrote that one on a visit to Ethiopia and it's thought that it was about the poverty there and, you know, that didn't have a proper street naming system. So in Managua, in Nicaragua, it did have a modern grid system until 1972. And then there was an earthquake which destroyed lots of buildings and infrastructure.

And basically they've replaced the system with the really ramshackle ones. So you might be directed to somewhere which is a block south of the convent and half a block east of the college. And you just have to get there. And so taxi drivers there are amazingly good because they know all these places. And sometimes your life of directions and you'll be told, oh yeah, go to the blue house which is actually brown. That's because locals know that there is a house which is brown but it used to be blue. Wow. I know.

So cabbie's there at like next level. Or you might be told to go down and that means go west because the sun goes down in the west. Oh, that's good. I don't know how any stuff gets delivered properly. Also very difficult if you've got one of those travelling shops we were talking about earlier. But it does talking about this kind of thing makes you really respect America for having just gone down the line grid system. You know, this is the number of the street. This is the number of the avenue.

It's very boring. It's very effective. And so that was that was come up with by Penn after in Pennsylvania named. Not from Penn and Teller. Just magic streets into existence. So William Penn, he came up with the grid system in 1682 when he founded Philadelphia, which was only founded because basically the King of England, King Charles II, was massively in debt to him and had no money to pay him.

So instead said, have this random tract of land in Philadelphia. And so he gave him this land and so Penn famous Quaker set up this utopian, what he wanted to be a utopian society, but he really didn't want it to be called Pennsylvania. And also Pennsylvania is not named after him. It's named after his dad. Yeah, who happens to have the same names. He was very clear.

I don't want everyone to think I'm a cocky twat. He wanted to call it New Wales because it reminded him so much of Wales, which was very fond. Anyway, so yeah, he really didn't want it to be called named after him. And now Pennsylvania forever bears his name, which is very sad. It's cool. And they're quite good at coming up with funny names in America. They have the streets.

I know they do have lots of first and seconds, but there's a few funny ones. I'm sure we've mentioned them before. Like we did say once that the number 69 road markers always get stolen. Don't we? Didn't we? And there's a stoner drive in Colesville and a blunt road. And they have had people stealing their road signs all the time, but they've come up with a way of stopping that.

And that is they're making them without any vowels. So what used to say stoner drive now says ST, blank N, blank R drive. And what used to be blunt road is now BLNT road. Do they leave the space? They leave the space. Wow. Wow. Because that just looks like it was made by a stoner.

Yes. It just couldn't be bothered finishing it. Unfortunately, they've all been stolen by fans of Only Connect. Okay, it's time for our final fact of the show. And that is Andy. My fact is that the game of Scrabble is partly thanks to Edgar Allan Poe. Oh, spooky. And that's why spooky with 20 O's is actually accepted in Scrabble, isn't it?

So this is about the man who invented Scrabble. His name was Alfred Mosher Butts. And he... He sounds like a good time, doesn't he? Yeah. He's a good time guy. Yeah. That's Mosher Butts.

He was an unemployed architect. He was a sacked architect in Depression era America, so early 30s. And he was trying to work out how to come up with a board game, because he thought this could be worthwhile. He thought there aren't many wordy board games at the time, which there weren't. I think he was playing... Was he playing Trivial Pursuit or something? He was playing some game that he absolutely hated and like,

there must be something better than this. Yeah. And he was inspired by Monopoly as well, I think. And so he... But he was trying to work out how to come up with a word game, because he thought this might be something. And he had read, as a child, the Edgar Allan Poe story, The Gold Bug. And there's a code in that, which has to be broken.

And the way to break the code is that it's based on how frequently particular letters appear in the English language. So the one that appears most is E, and so on. And so... And you know the rest. And so he decided to make that the system by which letters would score more or less in Scrabble. And he studied newspaper front pages for ages,

and you can see there are photos online of his tally charts, where he's methodically counting each letter, how often it appears on the front page of The New York Times say, very dedicated. Yeah, and that's where he came up with the scoring system. That's cool. He didn't really like playing his game too much by the end, because his wife always beat him.

Mrs. Butts. She once scored 234 for Quixotic. No. Yeah. Apparently. He sounds like a sore loser, because I just assumed it was only because he was losing at trivial pursuit that he invented Scrabble. I've got to invent some game.

Okay, here's a game. Whoever has a stupid name wins. They've still long comes funny hands. Oh, for fuck's sake! They've still got the scorecard. There was a journalist who fell madly in love with the history of Scrabble, and he tracked down the nephew who has no interest in playing it, but has an obsession with collecting all the things that led to it.

Well, they tracked down Mosha Butts' nephew. Yeah, and in his house. So he has everything framed, but most of it is not up on the walls. It's still in the sort of brown packaging that the framer's handed it over in. And one of those is the scorecard that... So Mrs. Butts kept the scorecard from her Quixotic score. Sounds like there were more problems in the marriage. If you're framing your victories over your husband.

Well, actually, James is right. If you'd scored Quixotic, and I suppose it was across two triple word scores, I mean, it sounds like an absolute smash. Story checks out. Yeah. Set up. Do you know who is the best Scrabble players in the world? Which country?

America. USA. No, no, no, no. France? No. Well, I'm going to say from an old episode, I think it's a guy from New Zealand. Ah, yes, because he managed to win the French one, didn't he, despite not being able to speak French.

Yes. But no, it is Nigeria. Oh. Okay. And the Nigerian Scrabble Federation, as this year said, that they really need to be given more money from the government, because according to them, it's the only sport that they're the world's best at in the world is Scrabble.

Cool. Can I just quickly, because we spoke about Nigel Richards in episode 79, a long time ago, this is the guy who won the French Scrabble thing. I just wanted to check on an update on him, see how he's doing in his championships. He is still the winner of the French Scrabble championships. He won 2017, 2018, and 2019 in their elite competition, so he's still just owning it.

Yeah, but how really how many people are competing? It's a biggie, I think. Is it, though? It's Scrabble, isn't it? Let's face it. Do you know who our Scrabble champion is? No. He's a great guy.

He's called Alan Simmons, and he is banned from playing Scrabble as of 2017, because he cheated by peeking at the letters he was picking out of the bag and then putting them back in and swapping them for other letters. That is Scrabble champion of the UK. Wow. But that's the thing. There's a rule where I think maybe,

who knows if it's thanks to Simmons or not, but there's a rule where you have to take the letters out of the bag at eye height or higher. Really? It was done for holding the bag too low. That's great. And there's a thing called brailing. Have you heard this?

Oh, yeah. Brailing is feeling the letters as you're holding them in the bag and trying to work out what they are. Yeah, that makes sense, right? Because a blank would just be a flat surface, so... Yeah, that's true. But I mean, I'm not very...

I can imagine taking a long time to work out, oh, it's an E or whatever. Like, it's quite impressive that you get an F. Yeah, it's not just blanks and non-blanks, okay? They're more sophisticated than you are. I mean, you could do that. Yeah, yeah. It's no blank.

I think if you're taking out three or four scrabble tiles each time and you pick four, quickly feel them, and if there's no blank you pick another four, that's going to... Over a long run, that's going to make a difference. Yeah. Yeah.

Are your minds averages? Yeah. But I do think that if you are fondling around for what shape the indentation is in the scrabble tiles, you just need to reflect on your life. Just with your hand in the bag, you need to think, what the fuck am I doing?

Winning. Winning. One thing that was a new exciting moment in scrabble is that last year, okay, was added. Apparently, this was very controversial. Yeah. Okay. You agree?

I do, actually. Do you? Why? Because isn't one of the things about scrabble that you're not allowed acronyms. Okay. Oh, my God, Andy, I can't believe you're on this side of the argument.

Okay has not been an elicitism for, like, a hundred years. What does it stand for? Oh, well, there we go. But that's the theory that it stands for all correct. But all with O-R-L. Correct with a K. Correct. Yeah, okay.

It does stand for that. That is genuinely the first instance of okay, is the all-correct thing. But it was... There is another theory that it stands for happy birthday, but happy is spelt with an O, and birthday is spelt with a K. Yeah.

Okay to you. Yeah. But when I say okay, I am putting a full stop after the O, another one after the K, and therefore, which would be a letter play in spell. Do you know what you should start doing then?

You should start saying ow, which was another thing that this magazine tried to get going at the time, when okay took off. So ow was for all right. And so it thought that ow was going to become a thing as well. How do you spell that? What letters are you putting in the start of O?

It's O-W. Oh, oh, God. It's all misspelled. It's part of the satire, guys. The comedy was different. I'm going to start, but I'm going to start saying ow, and I mean okay.

People will constantly be asking me if I'm all right. Are you okay? Ow. All right. Yes, that's what it stands for. Crazy. Have you heard of coffee housing? No.

That's another practice in Scrabble. It's not frowned upon practice in Scrabble. Can you guess what it is? Coffee housing. Is it when you shove the tiles up your arse? Like we all do in a coffee house. Where's your connection to that? It's frowned upon.

I was just thinking of something you might do in Scrabble that's frowned upon. Yeah, that's true. Is it? Yeah. Because you can feel that on the tiles in the bag, can't you? You can. These have been in an arse.

If I go to a coffee house, I give them my name, and they spell it incorrectly every time. So is it putting down a word which is correctly spelled, incorrectly spelled, and saying it's correct? That's a r- That's so good. That's actually much better than what it is. That's a lovely explanation.

Coffee housing is just distracting your opponents with chat about their day or anything else that- Put anything up your arse recently. That's quite good. That's a good idea. That's amazing. This podcast is all coffee housing. No Scrabble, isn't it?

It's like a game of Scrabble where the coffee housing got out of hand. There's one- There's a blog which I really like called TaiWikiWidbee, and the person who runs it is called MinnesotaStan. And they play a game of Scrabble, which I think is really good. They do a few different things.

First of all, double bagging. Frowned upon. Well, you keep all your consonants in one bag and all your vowels in another bag, and so you can pick the ones that you want, depending on what you've got on your rack. Oh, like countdown. Yeah.

That's a good idea, right? And they have another one which is open booking, which means you're allowed to have the dictionary open and check things as you're going along. And they also spin their racks around to ask the other person for help if you get stuck. And they played a game where the two people playing got a combined amount of 2,000 points.

I just think it's a more friendly game. It is. It's more coffee housey. Yeah, that is good. I think I would play Scrabble more if I was allowed to do those things. Oh, no one let you play Scrabble with them anyway at school, did they?

I don't know what that means. It's not a cool sport. Yeah, I can't say. It's not like it's a football team. You were so cool at it at school. That's really embarrassing. Everyone wanted to play Scrabble with me. That was my dream.

Got to let into the Scrabble team. I have a few things on poem. Oh, let's go. Should we go, Po? Ow. All right. Wow. This is going to get incredibly annoying very fast, isn't it?

So the Gold Bug, which was the initial short story that was written that inspired. So Po had basically what it was was that was a code that he'd worked out and he, the same method, kind of looked through bunches of books and papers to see what a recurring letter was, to give them this form. And he was quite a big code setter

back in the day for the newspapers he worked for. He used to do a thing of setting out a challenge of saying to the readers, send me a code, anything cryptic, and I will solve it. And he would publish his findings. He'd published the solutions in the next week's paper. Yeah, it's a nice idea.

It's a lovely idea. And he used to set them as well and give them out to the readers. And he was shocked when even one person was able to crack them because he thought he was so good at setting these codes. The side of him I had no idea about. Yeah, he had the bit of the Mozarts about him, didn't he?

Yeah. When he published the Raven, it was basically an overnight success. Everyone thought it was amazing. Turned him into a celebrity. And everyone said how brilliant it was. And he told a friend it was the greatest poem that was ever written.

Yeah. Wow. There were loads of weird parodies of the Raven, though, which came up straight away. So as soon as he published the Raven, he became super famous. It became super famous, but also published were the gazelle,

the whip-or-will, the turkey, the pole cat. And Lincoln actually, President Lincoln, read and enjoyed the pole cat, the poem, the pole cat, before he read the Raven, which was the piss take of the Raven. There's a few people that believe that the Raven was not originally going to be a Raven,

that it was going to be a parrot. Well, because it can talk. Yeah, exactly. And it was... Nevermore? It was a dark and stormy night. Yeah, Poe wrote a philosophy of composition piece. And in it, he said,

arose the idea of a non-reasoning creature capable of speech and, very naturally, a parrot, in the first instance, suggested itself. And then he later on says, but then it superseded with a Raven along the lines. But we might have had a parrot. It just definitely does another same kind of haunting, spooky vibe, does it?

No, no, no. There's one theory. I think this might be true, actually, that the Raven that he writes about was Charles Dickens' Raven. Is that right? Oh, yeah. So Charles Dickens had a Raven called Grip,

the knowing, and he was a character in Barnaby Rouge. And when Edgar Allan Poe reviewed Barnaby Rouge, he thought that this Raven was an amazing part of it. And the theory is that the Raven in his poem was from that, and that's why he changed it from a parrot. Wow, so he cast the Raven from someone else's book. That's incredible. That's awesome.

Isn't it cool? It's like going, I love Winston Smith in 1984. I'm going to bring him into my book and use him. But it's not like that. It's the Raven from... What a weird review that must have been. Poe, did you read any of the rest of it?

It's like reviewing Harry Potter and just talking about Hedwig the entire time. That's incredible. Yeah. I mean, his reviews were a bit weird, though, weren't they? He liked to slag people off quite a lot in his reviews. He reviewed a collection of poems by William W. Lord in 1845 saying,

The only remarkable things about Mr. Lord's compositions are their remarkable conceit, ignorance, impudence, platitudes, stupidity, and bombast. Wow. But he only read the bit about the sparrow at that time. He had his struggles in life. He died aged 40 of drink, really, drink and poverty. He was incredibly broke.

Well, his death was quite spooky in itself, wasn't it? Yeah. He was found in the street, wasn't he? And clothes that didn't quite fit him and he was taken to hospital and he was braving. Tough times for Poe. A lot of people thought when he was found, he was drunk and maybe had been on a drinking binge.

But then his family and friends said, well, it's pretty unlikely because he couldn't really drink. If he gave him one glass of wine, he'd go tonto. So it didn't seem likely that he'd been on some binge. Yeah. I think it's really even more controversial than that, really. So he was found in someone else's clothes. It didn't even fit him.

Some people think he was cooped, which is there was an election on the day that he was found dead. And so some people think that he was cooped as in, this was a weird thing that was practiced where people who were campaigning for a certain politician would literally coop people up, would drug them, would force-feed them loads and loads of alcohol and would drag them from one polling booth to the next,

force them to vote and then leave them abandoned and they'd change their clothes as they went. So they looked like they were a different person. But his reputation as being an alcoholic and a bit of a disaster, walking disaster, is mostly undeserved. It's this weird myth that came about as soon as he died and it was spread by this guy called the Reverend Rufus Wilmot Gris.

And it only happened because so he reviewed, so Poe reviewed one of Grisold's poems very badly few years earlier and then Poe started having an affair with this lady that Grisold fancied and then Poe died. And for some reason that no one knows, Poe's aunt made Grisold the executor of his will and made him the executive of all his papers. And so he was in charge of his papers

and he forged a bunch of shit. And he wrote this biography of Poe which slandered him and basically said he was this opium addicted, crazy, drunken, poverty-stricken, he deserted the army, expelled from university, none of this stuff was true. He wrote his obituary as well. He had the line,

we'll startle many but few will be grieved by it, talking of his death. It's just a full-on guy. The Baltimore Ravens are an American football team and their name comes after the Raven novel because Poe lived in Baltimore. The poem? God, it's a short poem.

It's a long novel. I don't know what it is. A novel to James. Well, this is more than two pages. So they get their name from the poem, the Raven, the Baltimore Ravens, because Poe lived in Baltimore. And in 2001, they won the Super Bowl.

We just had the Super Bowl last night as we record this. And in 2001, the Baltimore Ravens won the Super Bowl and they won it because they had a great defense. And ESPN said, Quoth the Ravens, never score. Nice. Very strong. Yeah.

Well, it will be by the time I've edited 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 we have said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter accounts. I'm on at Shriverland, James.

At James Harkin. Andy. At Andrew Hunter M. You can email podcast.qi.com. Yep. Or you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing or go to our website. No such thing as a fish.com.

We've got everything up there from all of our previous episodes to behind the scenes documentaries. And why not also go to your local bookshop or an online bookshop retailer and get Andy's new novel. It's fantastic. Maybe try the audiobook as well. If you like Irish pirate noise coming at you.

Okay, that's it. We'll see you again. Goodbye. Bye.