No Such Thing As A Fish - 408: No Such Thing As A 'Waiting For Godot' Action Figure

Episode Date: January 7, 2022

Live from Chesterfield, Dan, James, Anna and Andrew discuss monkey bashing grannies, monkey bashing Beatles, and how the number the beast can get you on the road to Armageddon.  Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes.

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast this week coming to you live from Chesterfield! My name is Dan Shriver, I am sitting here with Anna Tyshinski, Andrew Huntson Murray and James Harkin and once again we have gathered round the microphones with our four favourite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order here we go. Starting with fact number one and that is Andy. My fact is that one Japanese slang term for a retired husband is Sodaigomi which literally translates as Bulkie Waste, that's two on the nose, it's a lot, it's a lot.

Do we know if it's meant affectionately or less affectionately? I think tone of voice counts for a lot in these scenarios, I don't think it's a completely affectionate term, it's a phrase that I think maybe older people will know more than younger people in Japan today, I think it first came to prominence in the 90s and it was basically certainly at the time in Japan a very strong culture of working very hard, a lot of quite traditional gender roles at the time so you'd have, you know, a husband might be working sort of 16 hours a day for 40 years and then suddenly he's retired and he's here all the time and this was the phrase that arose as a result of that.

Another one that they use is Nureo Chiba which means wet fallen leaves and the idea is that if you have wet fallen leaves they just stick to your shoes all the time and the husband is just sticking to his wife annoyingly and she can't get rid of him. That's so funny. That is horrible. It's good. So Japan has a very high population that is sitting above the sort of 90s even, like they have the second largest number of centenarians in their country.

That came out so weird out of my mouth because I was saying centenarians and then I thought centaurs and I thought which one is it and I got stuck halfway through. It's both actually in Japan. A lot of old centaurs in Japan. Yeah, which is amazing. What's the highest? America. America is the most.

So America has, from the article that I read, it was 97,000, this is a few years old this article, Japan with 79,000. So Japan, it's six people for every 10,000 people in Japan will make it to 100 and above, which is crazy. Okay, is that high? Yeah. So you're saying proportionally I think it's Japan surely. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, Japan's got the highest number. I think so, centaurs do live long so it's not really as impressive as you think. But it does lead to, I mean there's a lot of retirement about it in Japan, basically there are a lot of free hours to fill after you hit 65 or 70. Well you can always go to the leisure center. Ah. That did not deserve even that sarcastic rather. But they have lots of activities.

So for example, Japan loves rugby, there's a hugely popular sport there, but they have 120,000 rugby players, give or take, 10,000 of them are over the age of 40, which is impressive enough as a contact sport. There is one rugby club in Japan which has three over 90-year-old players. Come on. Genuinely, genuinely. No way. There was an interview with a few of them, one of them was called Ryuichi Nagayama and

he said he found it an enormous amount of fun. He said, since I joined, I have broken ribs many times and broke my collarbone too. I can't stand not playing. He said it would kill him if he stopped playing because he loves it so much. It sounds like it will kill him if he keeps playing. Yeah. I'm picturing a crumbled heap of bones right now. It's very impressive.

Yeah. They do. There was a story which I imagine, it sounds like one of those stories that must slightly be fake, but from what I can read is true, which is that the sales of adult nappies are overtaking the sales of children's nappies. They are. So that's definitely true. Which is amazing.

That's just, there's your indication about the difference in population in Japan, more adults and nappies than babies. Yeah. And it's not just the old ones. Sometimes it's just convenient. Yeah. How do you think we lasted an hour up here? Yeah.

They do have a Japan problem with dementia, as lots of countries do, but Japan particularly obviously with its massively ageing population and there's been some kind of cool initiatives to deal with that. So one of them is that there is a restaurant in Tokyo called the Restaurant of Mistaken Orders and it's where the waiting staff is comprised entirely of people suffering from dementia. Oh my God. It's a great, the restaurant openly says that you as a customer may or may not get what

you order. We guarantee it's delicious. The chefs do not have dementia. Right. Yeah. And it's so good and it just allows people, it's sort of based on this idea that there's a lot of misunderstanding of dementia and people think you're incapable of doing anything, whereas actually people are capable of doing lots of stuff.

They just can't remember a lot. And so it encourages a lot of open discussion about it and gives them something to occupy them. Yeah. That's great. It's a great idea, but probably not for the whoever owns the business, right? It doesn't feel like. Well, people love it.

Yeah. I'm having to choose what I want in a restaurant. If I could know that I could just say a random thing on the menu and it didn't make a blind bit of difference. I'd go there. I read about these three women in Japan that called the monkey busters. Did you come across those guys? So there are a lot of areas of Japan, especially in the rural areas where you get like the

monkeys and they will come down and try and steal stuff from people and all that kind of thing. So this group of three women, 174, 168 and 167 have formed the monkey buster group. And if you see the monkeys coming along, if they're trying to like damage your fields and stuff or whatever, then you call the monkey busters and they come down. How quickly do they come down? nearby then quickly down the road. It might take a few minutes.

So funny. What did and when they get there, do they do they shoot the monkeys? Do they trap the monkeys? They don't shoot the monkeys. They shoot over the monkeys heads like they do warning shots to the monkeys. Firecrackers is the other thing they use sometimes. Oh, that's great. That's a great thing to do once you retire, just go around scary monkeys.

I'd like it as a career monkey busting. I'm sure someone would pay me for that. You guys heard of Yuichiro Mura. No, he's not. So he is a sportsman. He's Japanese and he is interesting partly because of what he's done since your classic retirement age. He was the oldest person in the world to climb Mount Everest.

He climbed at age 70. Then five years after that, he did it again at the age of 75. He started again at the age of 80. So he's become the oldest person to climb Everest three times in a row. The high point of his career, I reckon in his 40s, he skied down Mount Everest with a parachute on his back so he could slow himself down. Okay. Wow.

It's unbelievable. There was a film made about it in 1975. I don't think we've mentioned this before. No. I've never heard of it before. Did he go from the top? That's... He went from very, very high up.

Okay. I don't know if he went from the exact... I don't know if he went... I think he did. I thought it worked. It can't be the top. No, it's too... It's certainly rich.

There's too much going on up there. There are lots of crevasses. He nearly died many times on the way down. He went 160 kilometres an hour on the way down. Wow. The parachute didn't work at first. He was sliding towards this huge crevass and eventually the parachute kind of kicked him.

Oh, my God. He was a hero. But I love, because you go past all the crevasses, going, fucking come on, parachute. When it finally does deploy, parachutes, of course, rip you back, coming to do all the crevasses all over again. I don't think it sails you back up to the top. He's still there. He's still there.

He's still there. It's just on a loop. Yeah. Because they have such an aging population, they have a problem with elderly drivers. And they're trying to do a thing where they're trying to get older people to hand back the driving licence. There's a few ways they've tried to do this. There was a 97-year-old Buddhist priest who handed over his driving licence.

The idea was, if he did it, maybe he would encourage other people to do it. There's some areas where they'll give you cheap ramen, 15% off your ramen if you hand in your driving licence. Ironically, it'll stop you ramen anyone else with your car. Very uncertain about that, just to feel it. And there was also a funeral home in Tokyo that's offering a 15% discount on the cost of a funeral if you hand in your driving licence. That's very good.

We're going to have to move on in a sec. I'll give you a couple of sayings or phrases in Japanese so you can guess what they mean. Bakudo hage, which means barcode baldy. Is that someone with a comb-over? He's got it. Really obvious comb-over. You're a barcode baldy. By the window tribe, do you know what they are?

That is Madogi wa zoku. People who are underemployed, nosy parkers, sit by their windows, spying on their neighbours. Underemployed was close. So it's people who have been promoted to quite a senior level, but they don't really do anything decent, so they just sit there by the window looking out of the window. And here's one more. Kairu no sura ni shomben, which means piss on a frog's face. That's just good advice.

Is it like a frog's face isn't bad enough? The piss on it is even worse. If you're pissing on a frog's face, do the lowest of the low. That's a good guess. If someone who is a little bit slow isn't affected by anything, so whatever you say to them, they'll just sit there going, yeah, fine, whatever. And this is due to a theory, which I don't think is true,

that if you piss on a frog, it just sits there. My neighbour has tadpoles in their garden that are just turning into frogs, and I am going to try that. I'm going to be squashing over the fence next week. Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that in 1969, Samuel Beckett wrote a play that lasts 35 seconds long and features no actors or any dialogue. The play is still performed today and has even been adapted into a movie.

It's an amazing thing. Samuel Beckett, waiting for Godot, one of the great playwrights and novelists, he was called upon by Kenneth Tynan, who was an amazing journalist and writer, critic in London, famously first person to say fuck on television. Dan, sorry. That's alright. First person to say fuck in Chesterfield. Dan.

So in 1969, he was putting on a play called O Calcutta, and the idea was he wanted to invite a lot of very famous people to contribute to this play, but he was going to keep them anonymous. So he wrote to Samuel Beckett. Samuel Beckett agreed to do it. And the story goes is that he wrote this entire play, which lasts 35 seconds long, onto a postcard and mailed it to him. So he received the entire play on this postcard, and then it was put on.

But Beckett was very upset because when the play was eventually put on by Tynan, he added extra stuff into the 35 second long play. And he was like, don't touch my play, you dick. So what happened was O Calcutta was an erotic review. So there were going to be loads of these little mini plays that were kind of erotic plays. And when Beckett sent this stuff to Tynan on the postcard, it was basically just a load of clutter on the stage. The lights go on, off, on, off, and there's breathing that goes with the on and off.

And then at the end, there's a little bit of baby crying. That's it. And the whole point of it is it's a joke because everyone's expecting something really sexy and you get something really lame. That's the whole point. But what they decided to do was to add some naked people into it. Well, it's an erotic review. Let's just have all of that stuff, but with some naked people on stage.

And yeah, he was absolutely furious. Yeah, that's so annoying to face the objects. Exactly. Beckett's very difficult, I have to say. Yeah, I agree. Really difficult to understand. You need an interval. Was there an interval in this one?

It was part of the sketch within a bigger thing. So there was lots of different places going on. When it's now performed on stage, it's a two-hander. So it's like when we tour live, we do a first half to our show, we do close to 50 minutes, Beckett says 35 seconds, and then there's an intermission for beers, and then you get a full play on the second half.

Oh, you get a Beckett in the second half? Yeah. Beckett was maybe the most Beckett. The most famous Beckett. Andy! Sorry. It was a first person to say Beckett on TV. Yeah, yeah.

It was my father's third audition tape. I didn't get it. Maybe the most famous play of his, Waiting for Godot, famously described as a play in which nothing happens twice, which is kind of true. And it was written in French, which I didn't know. He was a very international writer.

He travelled around a lot, lived in France for decades. But it was first produced in Blackpool in 1956. And it's a pretty aggressively modernist play now. And Blackpool in 1956 was not ready for it. And there was an incredible... This was still an era where all British plays had to go through the Lord Chamberlain's office, the official censor of all theatre.

And an agent called C.W. Herriot saw it on behalf of the Lord Chamberlain to say which bits shouldn't, shouldn't be allowed. And said he had been through two hours of angry boredom. The man next to him had fled the theatre saying, let me out of this. Several women were apologising to their escorts for having suggested a visit to such a piece.

And he also requested that they cut the bit where Estragon's trousers fall down. He actually... It's quite interesting reading his notes, because I kind of warmed to him, to Herriot, because he's... He basically is saying it's really boring and pointless, not that it's too crude.

And actually with Estragon's trousers to be fair to him, he says, on the business of letting down Estragon's trousers, I suppose that may be a right, better keep. You know, he thinks that's a bit fucking weird, but whatever. I thought this was quite learned of him. He censored the words gonococcus and spirocaete,

which, yeah... What's gonococcus? It sounds like a magic trick, doesn't it? Gonococcus does not sound like a magic trick, does it? It sounds like a spell from Herriot, doesn't it? Gonococcus! You're demanding a Darren Brown refund if he's done gonococcus on you.

It's presumably a bacterium of some kind. They're both microbes, so the bacteria of gonorrhea is one of them and the bacterium of syphilis is the other. But he went to the trouble of looking in a dictionary to check up on those words. Right. Good on him. Do you know you can get a Godot action figure?

Oh, cool. Except it's on Etsy, and it's just an empty package. Cos Godot... You're wandering, it never arrives. That's it! It's all got five-star reviews on Etsy, apart from one person who says, I paid for expedited shipping and I still have not received the item. Brilliant. I love that.

Those, he was once asked by the director, Alan Schneider. Beckett was once asked, who is Godot? And Beckett answered, if I knew, I would have said so in the play. Wow! That's very annoying. That's a mystery, wasn't he? Yeah.

Just genuinely a very mysterious man. He won the Nobel Prize for literature. Oh, yeah? You'd think. He'd be happy about that. It was a catastrophe. His wife said it was a catastrophe. He refused to go to the prize giving, because he was on holiday. And his publisher wrote, Dear Sam and Suzanne,

in spite of everything, they have given you the Nobel Prize. I advise you to go into hiding. It's the most eminent prize in the world. Anyway, he seemed absolutely furious about it, although someone did write to him a message from Mr. George Godot. Got in touch with him and said, sorry to keep you waiting. Which he must have hated. I bet he cracked a secret smile at that

and then just hated himself for it. He's famously the only Nobel Prize winner to have played first-class cricket. That's a quiz question that comes up quite a lot. He played for Dublin University, against Northamptonshire, and he played two games. And for some reason, there was just this arbitrary thing

where they said, OK, this is a proper professional game now, and all these other games aren't proper professional games, and that's why it counts that he played first-class cricket. But actually, when you read the articles about the matches, it turns out that his team were absolutely shit. And there's no reason at all they should have been a first-class team. Like, the first game they played,

the article begins with the university men are by no means a first-class side. They are keen and enthusiastic, but their batting was poor, their bowling presented no terrors, and their fielding would have been improved by alertness. In the second game they played, a year later, it said in the newspaper,

they are weak in all departments of the game, and the university were outclassed from start to finish. Maybe he liked that. He hated the good reviews. Maybe he loved the absolute strategy. We're going to have to move on in a sec to our next question. We haven't mentioned that he was friends with James Joyce and used to wear shoes that were too small for him because he wanted to be like James Joyce.

We haven't mentioned that he was in the resistance during the Second World War when he almost got killed by the Nazis. We haven't mentioned the fact that he was stabbed by a pimp in Paris. All this stuff. We've got to move on. Was he wearing shoes that were the same size as James Joyce's shoes? Or did James Joyce also wear shoes that were too small for him? Exactly.

That's my question as well. He wanted to wear the same shoes as James Joyce. James Joyce had very narrow feet, and so he wore these shoes that were really, really narrow, even though they didn't fit him. He also, like, would only drink white wine because James Joyce drunk white wine. He just wanted to be like James Joyce.

Because they're so needy. Imagine how oppressed you'd feel if your mate was like that. You know, you dumped them. I think they had it falling out. They claimed it was because James Joyce's daughter fancied him and he didn't return her affections. But I think it was the weird wine-drinking shoe-wearing shit. I think you might be right.

Can I tell you quickly, just back to Eau Calcutta, the play that Beckett submitted, this brie that was called The Play To, and then Timon wrote to a lot of famous people to try and get them to submit a thing. And one of the people he wrote to was John Lennon. And again, it was meant to be all anonymous, but apparently this is known that John Lennon did submit a sketch.

So he wrote a sketch about masturbation, and it was based on his time when he used to masturbate amongst his friends at a party. This is the sketch right now. Paul McCartney verifies this story because in a biography on Paul McCartney called Many Years From Now, this is what he says. Apologies for what I'm about to say.

We used to have wanking sessions when we were young at Nigel Wally's house in Wolton. We'd stay over night and we'd sit in armchairs and we'd put out all the lights and being teenage pubescent boys, we'd all wank. What we used to do, someone would say, Bridget Bardot, ooh, that would keep everyone on par. Then somebody, probably John, would say, Winston Churchill.

Oh, no! And it would completely ruin everyone's concentration. So John, yes, submitted a wanking play to old Calcutta. She does sound like a really fun game. Yeah. So does the wanking bit. I only wish I knew any Beatles songs, because there must be some puns in there somewhere.

Yeah, come together. Yes. OK, we need to move on to our next fact. It is time for fact number three, and that is James. OK, my fact this week is that the European road called E-404 doesn't exist. Have you searched for it? Yes, I have. It definitely doesn't exist.

It was in 1995, the European Parliament decided they were going to build the E-404. It was near Zebrugge in Belgium, and they decided they were going to build it, and they just never did. And so now, if you try to go onto the E-404 plug-in to your sat-nav, it will just give you an error message. That's brilliant.

So good. Do you know if it predates the E-404 message? 1995, it would not, just about. Is there an error about? There is an error for a fault message, which is where you go on the computer and you search for a website and it's not there. That was invented by Tim Berners-Lee

around the start of the internet, so that will be around the late 80s, early 90s, something like that, so it probably doesn't, yeah. There's a rumor that it was because there was a room at CERN where they were working on the World Wide Web called Room 404, but it's not true. No. And one of the founders, Robert Caillio,

Tim Berners-Lee's colleague, was asked about it in that thing, the room, and he said, I don't even have a hunch about the 404 fascination and frankly, I don't give a damn. The sort of creativity that goes into 404, the response pages, is fairly useless. The mythology is probably due to the irrationality, denial of evidence, and preference for the fairytale

over reality that is quite common in the human species. Oh, my God. Wow. But actually, like, barrel of glass. Oh, what fun. The 404 pages are really important at the start of the internet because it meant that you could search for something and if you've got the wrong thing, it would just give you something basic.

You knew what you were going to get. Otherwise, it could go in some kind of weird loop and you never, you know, it was a really, really important part when they were kind of putting the networks together. Right. It's not puppy interesting, James, that's his point. And the fact that you were bothering to discuss it is a waste of his time and yours.

Well, look, the number 404 was always used at the start of errors when they were user-created errors and they would have 401, 402. Are you trying to make this interesting? I find that very interesting. And there's a better theory about where 404 comes from, which is that in 1989, they were working on this, there was a flight, Flight 404, that went missing

and it was never found. And so they may have heard on the radio that 404's not been found. And in 1990, there was another Flight 404 which crashed. So there were two Flight 404s which went wrong. Really? And so... Coincidence? Yes.

Yes. Let's see, I grew up in Hong Kong and four is a very unlucky number in Asia. Oh, yeah. It means death or something? Yeah, four. Sounds like it. Which means death.

Yeah, so it's the same sound. So room 404 in any hotel does not exist. Let's say for a hotel room 404. And it's really interesting because 404 doesn't exist. So obviously the whole of four doesn't exist. So you lose floor four. You would lose floor 13 as well. But you also...

Because 13, for any foreign people who are coming in, they keep to the superstition for foreign builders. Yeah. You got one, two, three, five through to 12. Yeah, but then you would also lose any floors that would have four in the number itself. So 24, 34. In a 100-floor building,

it's actually only about 80 floors once you minus all the floors. Does it go from 12 to 15? Because 14 has a floor in it? Yes, it does. Are they cheating? You know how they claim to have... In that part of the world,

a lot of the tallest buildings in the world, do you think that they're actually quite squat? They just skipped out loads of floors. Yeah, the Sturgeon Khalifa is actually only three floors high. It's a bungalow, isn't it? Yeah. Also 87 is bad luck in Australia, I think. Is it right?

It's 100 minus 13. Yeah. So you lose that. So I don't know about that, but in... Who's annoyed about 87 because it's 100 minus 13? Australian cricketers hate 87. And if they ever got that high against England,

they would be really upset about it. Yeah, there's some sledding. Um, the year 404? Oh, yeah. Oh, what a year. AD, was it? 404 AD. Did it not exist?

It did exist. Ah, okay. Last gladiator fight in Rome. Really? Apparently. And it was alleged that St. Telemachus tried to stop the fight, the gladiator fight from happening,

and was stoned to death by the crowd. Oh. And that... But supposedly that was the last fight that ever happened there. I don't understand why it would be the last fight that happened there, because they've just stoned someone to death. They're clearly very passionate about having the fight still. Yes.

Maybe too passionate, you know? Yeah. You don't like football hooligans, maybe they didn't like gladiator hooligans back then. Yeah. It's like, all right, we're going to stop letting you watch this. That's how you react. There's a car called the Bristol 404.

Oh, yeah? Yeah. Does it exist? Yes. But there are only nine. Oh! Okay. How come?

It's very old. But there are still nine registered on British roads. So if you try and search for that, you may find it. But they're really expensive and they're mostly in private hands, so I don't think you will find it. I appreciate it. I've gone through the ball and the thresholds here. Any more follow-ups?

And before we went on stage tonight, I said, I have a fact so boring that I need to build up the bravery to say, have we got to it yet? No, we haven't. We haven't. We haven't. We haven't.

We haven't. We haven't. We haven't. We haven't. We haven't. We haven't. We haven't. We haven't.

We haven't. When we think about number E404, the road, you know e-lumbers in food. Additives. Additives. There is an E404 – Does it exist? Yes, it exists.

Right. I'm about to tell you in punishing detail what it is. It's calcium alginate and it's a gelatinous creamy substance derived from seaweed and used to dress wounds. And that's not the borval front. Just wait. It's actually what it says on the screen. It sounds like something you might get at a Beatles party.

You should be dressing wounds with that. How many? You haven't got 404 of these, have you? I haven't. I think I may be out of 404. Maybe I'll talk about something else for a bit. Crying shame. Should we do what?

Roads? Yeah. Cool. So, weird roads. Hawaii has lots of roads that sort of only half exist because they keep getting covered in lava. I didn't actually realise that Mount Kilauea has been erupting basically solidly since 1983 in Hawaii.

So, it's just been spewing out lava. It had like a little break in 2018, but then in 2018 it took a little break and then suddenly had this huge spew and ejected enough lava to fill 320,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools. It buried an area half the size of Manhattan. And that includes quite a lot of roads. And the road that suffers the most seems to be this road

called the chain of craters road, which should have known what it was doing when it called itself that. But hang on, surely... I mean, sorry, layperson on roads here, but don't you just leave the road for a bit and then paint over it and then you can drive along the top of lava? I think if you're driving over, like, craters and boulders and stuff... But a dried lava?

It's quite bumpy. Have you ever been to a lava field where the lava's dried? Absolutely not. Oh, well... You wouldn't cycle over it and put it that way. Also, they don't just paint roads. It's like... Let's get the paintbrush out and paint us a new road.

There's a lot that goes into it. It just feels like lava would dry like asphalt. It doesn't. I'm clearly wrong. I'm clearly wrong. It's very lumpy. You'd need extremely good suspension, maybe in a monster truck or something. You can get gallivanting over it.

Right. Just put up a sign, monster truck's only on this road. I was actually driving in Hawaii, I remembered, and there's a sign that says, Beware Invisible Cows. Cool. Isn't that cool?

But not ghost cows? Not ghost cows, no. Cows that are hiding in the... Is it the landscape underlates? I fear this might be a lot more boring than your guesses. It's basically, it gets very misty there and there's lots of cows that walk over the road so you can hit them without seeing them.

That's great. They could maybe change the terminology just to make you understand what you're looking out for. Yeah. I agree with that. Buckle up, kids. There's some spooky ghost cows. I've got such a good email,

actually, a few months ago from someone called Tom Rex. So thanks for this, but he said, and I think he's just spotted this, the road to Armageddon is, to drive to Armageddon, you have to go on roads 6, 6 and 6. So Armageddon comes from Ha Megido, which means Mount Megido,

and that's a place in Israel, Mount Megido. And if you drive there from Jerusalem or Tel Aviv or most places in Israel, then you take, just by complete coincidence, take route 6 and then you change onto route 66. Isn't that cool? That is con. Does that mean anything?

Does that mean the world is going to end there? I'll refer you to Robert Kylo, who says the sort of creativity that goes into this is useless. The mythology is due to the irrationality, denial of evidence, and preference of the fairy tale over reality that is common in a human species. Thanks Bob.

I found a few random road names, like error 404, I was thinking, so there's a road in Alabama called this Ain't It Road, there's a place called Error Place, which is in Cincinnati as well, and then I got distracted because there were places like Wiener Cut-Off Road,

and then this is my favorite, Far From Poopin Road, and this is a real road, and it's in a township called Fanny in America, and Fanny obviously meaning you're bum in America, so Far From Poopin Road, and the reason it's called that is because it's the closest road that gets you to a place called Constipation Ridge.

And I went on Google Maps, and it's all there, it's all real. These are real places. Any ideas why it's called that? The road is always blocked at Constipation Ridge. Alright, so we need to move on to our final fact of the show. It is time for our final fact, and that is Anna. My fact this week is that in 2001 in Newfoundland,

a golden retriever chased after a coyote and was never seen again. Now, Newfoundland has its own population of white coyotes. What are you saying about this? What am I implying? This was some research that was done by someone called Carl Zimmer, who was looking into these amazing white coyotes in Newfoundland. They don't exist anywhere else, they've sort of just appeared,

and they're not albino. They've still got pigment in their skin and in their eyes. They've just got white fur, and they've looked at their genes, and they found that they've got this specific mutation on a gene, and the other place, the other significant place that this mutation on this specific gene exists, is in golden retrievers. And it's what makes them yellow,

and in the same way it's what's making these coyotes white. And Zimmer realized that in Newfoundland in March 2001, there were news reports of a guy whose golden retriever went galloping off down a hill after a coyote. It's beautiful. It's quite sweet. It could be a Disney film, couldn't it? They're called coy dogs, aren't they,

when a coyote has sex with a dog, and that's what they create, a coy dog. And a coy carp, of course, is when a coyote has sex with a carp. I'm highly prized. And in Mexico, they used to breed coy dogs on purpose in Teotihuacan, which is one of the main cities that they had in the Mayan area. They would have the coyote and the dogs,

they would make them together, and it meant that they had them as guardian animals, so they were really fierce, but they were also loyal. So it's a way of domestication, but crossing it, crossing a domestic breed was something. So you still have something that's really fierce, like a coyote, but then you have the domestic side of the dog. That's very clever.

Yeah, it's clever. Nice. You want to make sure you don't breed something that's like really pathetic, but also really fickle. How do you know you're not going to get the opposite of both? That's the risk you take. There's the coy wolf as well. So that's a coyote wolf, obviously,

and wolf populations are dwindling, and it seems like wolves basically got a bit less choosy in who they were mating with, and coyotes were spreading, and it's also known as the eastern coyote, but it's definitely a cross. It's 10% dog, 25% wolf, and the remainder is coyote, and they're big.

They're twice the size of a coyote, which is a fox size-ish. Yeah, they basically, coyotes kind of fill the plate. In the UK, we get foxes kind of going in cities and kind of going in bins and stuff, and coyotes in America, especially North America, they kind of do that same thing there, don't they? Yeah, and they're so good at navigating cities and generally adapting to human expansion.

I think they're the only carnivore that's growing. His populations are really growing exponentially everywhere, even though Americans are trying to exterminate them because they're thought of as pests, but they do really well in cities, maybe even better than birds, and they do this thing where they navigate the traffic brilliantly. So they look both ways before crossing the street.

Very impressive. They'll run across half a road, and then stop in the middle, because the traffic's coming the other direction, sprint across the other way, and they even know if they come to a one-way street, they only look in the direction that the traffic's coming from. Also, just in terms of, let's say, their populations are going up,

they do this crazy thing, coyotes, which is that they have the ability to change the number of the litter that they're going to give birth to based on the howls of a coyote. So this is a thing where, let's say, there are coyotes where they're being culled or they're being reduced by natural predators or because of humans. They can do a call-out, so a male will be like,

coyote call, I can't remember how they speak, but... It's like that howl? Howl? Yeah, I think they howl. Coyote call! Like that. So yeah, so they do the howl. And once they do that, they can understand,

based on responses, what the population size is within the community. Oh, how interesting. And so, if you, let's say, you were culling the coyote communities by 70% by the next time that they had given birth as in the time frame that they would need, they would be back up to the population size

because they can jump from five to six litter that they would usually have up to 12 to 16. This call causes an autogenic response, basically, and they can just up the numbers. It's unbelievable. Wow. It's unbelievable how clever they are. It's like a hydra.

You just chop off its head and 17 more heads appear. Pretty much is, yeah. And they're very crafty, too. They're extremely wily. So wily coyote, obviously, cartoon character, but genuinely, they're wily. So there was a biologist called John Way who was trying to trap some for research purposes,

and he found they would take the meat off the trap and they wouldn't spring it. Incredibly annoying. Another scientist called Robert Crabtree was trying to find one in the late 90s, and he had his own personal Moby Dick coyote, which he could never get. So annoying.

It would dig up the trap and flip it over and then leave it alone. Or it would scrape off the dirt that he'd laid carefully on the trap. It would poo on the trap and then leave it alone. There's one time where I don't understand this fully. Crabtree was in a helicopter trying to drop a net

on this one specific coyote, and it jumped up, tried to bite the helicopter, and then just ran away, and he never caught it. Is it that this coyote is really smart or that this guy is pretty dumb? I mean, if Robert Crabtree ever came up against a roadrunner, for instance, he's fucked.

Wiley Coyote. A lot of misconceptions in that cartoon, for example, coyotes can outrun roadrunners by twice the speed. Makes no sense. It should be the other way round. Who would have thought that was not a David Attenborough documentary I was watching.

What do you think the E in Wiley Coyote's name stands for? Is it the European additives? Yeah, E-404, calcium alginate is what? No, it's actually Ethelred. Oh, so close. Ethelbert. Oh, yeah, just, you know, it's not interesting, but worth knowing. Yeah, Ethelbert. So the thing about them being Wiley or Crabtree

is just a conception of coyotes that's been around forever. And so if you look back at Native American law almost across America before Europeans arrived there, they're known as kind of tricksters, and they're probably the most important animal to a lot of Native American tribes, one of the most important. And yeah, they're like this cheeky trickster,

exactly the same as kind of Loki or Mercury. I find it really interesting that in all mythology, we always have this naughty boy who's doing bad stuff. He is a very naughty boy, though, the coyote in some Native American stories. There's a book called Tales of Coyote, The Trickster, American Indian Folklore, and I read the reviews of it. Someone said, we bought this book for our fourth graders

who are learning about folklore. We read reviews saying, great for all ages, but one quick peek into the book and you will quickly agree that is not great for all ages. There is literally a whole section about coyotes' amorous adventures. The amount of times the word penis, vagina and horny and other inappropriate euphemisms show up in this book

is alarming, four stars. I killed the time very nicely while waiting for my Godot to arrive. This doesn't sound like the traditional Native American historic coyote shout. He had a detachable penis that he would send around to have sex with people, the coyote. Oh, the coyote, really?

Candy. Gosh. There's one very cool story in Chinookun, which people from Oregon tell, which is about how coyote learned to catch salmon, and coyote, so coyote was actually a kind of half-person, half-coyote, sort of godlike figure. And coyote defecates while trying to catch salmon,

and his own feces start mocking him and laughing at him for how shit he is at fishing. He's like, you're shit. No, you're shit. I'm supposed to be. And then this blumber poo takes pity, offers him advice for how to catch and how to cook salmon,

which I don't know if you take culinary tips from a poo, but he does. And then he succeeds for a while, then he fails again. And so, as before, he thinks, what am I going to do? It does another big poo. And his poo tell gives him some more in-depth instructions this time for exactly how to fish and where to fish. And, you know, that's how the coyote learned to fish.

Wow, that sounds great. That's incredible. There was another thing called coyote way, which was like coyote illness. And the idea was that if you killed a coyote or even if you touched a coyote, you could get this kind of weird illness. Is it where cooties come from?

No, I don't think. I mean, I'm guessing that it's not, because that would be amazing. But it's basically, if you touched this coyote, you would get this real illness. The various things that could happen to you, you get a twisted mouth, cross-eyed vision, loss of memory,

fainting, mania and prostitution. A bit of a clock twist at the end, though. Oh, no. It's not my fault, Officer. I touched a coyote earlier today. I'm sure you can understand. Mr. Hugh Grant, you're not... Coyotes have a lot of encounters with celebrities.

There are rashes of stories. Yeah, rashes of stories about celebrity coyote encounters. So, for example, in 2010, Rick Perry, who stood for president in 2016, he shot a coyote while on a jog, because it was threatening his puppy, and apparently he carries a pistol sometimes when going for a jog.

Is that like a coyote and Rick Perry having an... You know, it's an altercation, rather than the meeting each other, isn't it? It's true. Yeah, it's not much of an encounter. Well, in 2009, Ozzy Osbourne's pet Pomeranian dog was eaten by a coyote, and he didn't hear it, because he was watching a Michael Jackson memorial show on TV.

Right. Oh, and that was live. So, which means, if you're watching it, we all know where we were when Ozzy Osbourne's dog was eaten by a coyote. Exactly. Wow. Does anyone in this audience know where they were

the day that Michael Jackson documentary was broadcast live? No, exactly. OK. One more, one more. In 2015, Steven Spielberg's sister Nancy was briefly spooked by a coyote. And that is the boring fact. All right.

All right. On that absolute solid piece of gold we are going to wrap up. That is it. That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you would like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast,

we can be found on our Twitter accounts. I'm on at Shriverland, Andy. At Andrew Hunter M. James. At James Harkin. And Anna. You can email podcast at qi.com. Or on our website. No such thing as a fish.com. All of our previous episodes are up there

as well as links to all the rest of the tour dates that we are currently mowing through. It's the Nerd Immunity Tour. Do come and see us. But otherwise, we will be back again next week with another episode. Chesterfield, thank you so much. That was so much fun. Thank you for being here. Everyone at home, we'll be back

with another episode. We'll see you then. Goodbye. Thank you.