No Such Thing As A Fish - 448: No Such Thing As Pastries in Alleyways

Episode Date: October 14, 2022

Live from Cardiff, Dan, James, Anna, and Andrew discuss kings, kissing, coaching and croissants. Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes.   Join Club Fish for ad-free episodes and exclusive bonus content at nosuchthingasafish.com/apple or nosuchthingasafish.com/patreon

Hi everyone, before we start this week's episode of No Such Things as Fish, I just wanted to quickly remind you about our super special members area known by us and everyone who sees the name as Club Fish. It's a wonderful place where you get loads of bonus content, you get all the episodes without any adverts, you'll be the first to hear about any live shows we're going to do and we have a thing called a Discord. Now for the uninitiated, such as myself, a Discord is a place where you can go and chat all things fish with like-minded fish fans. It's a really cool place to be, loads of fellow listeners on there and you might even see the odd member of No Such Things as Fish popping up from time to time and when

I say the odd member, I mean Dan of course, like I always mean when I say the odd member. Meanwhile I'm here, I might as well remind you that Dan has a book out, it's called The Theory of Everything Else, it's absolutely amazing, it's basically all of Dan's brain printed in a book and what could be more enticing than that, let's be honest. So go out and buy that and join Club Fish if you'd like and the place to join Club Fish is NoSuchThingsAsFish.com and all the information about how to subscribe to Club Fish through Apple Podcasts or Patreon is there. Okay, on with the podcast. Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Things as Fish, a weekly podcast this week

coming to you live from Cardiff. My name is Dan Schreiber, I am sitting here with Anna Tyshinski and Drew Hunts of Murray and James Harkin and once again we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in a particular order here we go. Starting with fact number one and that is Anna. My fact this week is that croissant shaped croissants taste worse than non croissant shaped croissants. It feels more like a complaint to Waitrose than a fact. It's more of a complaint to the country of France. When you say croissant shaped croissant you mean a crescent shaped croissant. Well it's not actually a classic but it is the name obviously croissant comes

from the fact that it is you know in the old school sense crescent shaped curved. Why is it not classic? Well just because today so many of them are straight and I couldn't believe. You can't redesign the classic. That's the classic. That's what that word means. They've updated the classic. It's a modern classic. Modern classic. The modern classic is a straight croissant and they taste nicer. Facts. Surely they're just a different shape so how can they taste different? Ah so glad you asked. Almost like I know the answer. You'll probably know this if you are French or if you work in a patisserie but basically you know if like straight croissants so they're fat in the middle and thin on the outsides but they

go in a straight line. They are all butter croissants okay but curved ones in that little C crescent shaped croissant shape they can actually just be made with oil or margarine which as everyone knows tastes inferior. Right but interestingly a lot of French people prefer the margarine one because apparently it dunks better in coffee. Yeah there are claims about this. I feel like that's people trying to be contrary because let's face it all butter croissant they're more expensive they're more luxurious. In France you know that adults would get the straight croissants and they'd give their kids the shitty cheaper curved croissants because they're made with margarine. I read that somewhere and I think

this is mad. There are some claims that it's actually by law that margarine croissants are not allowed to be straight but I can't find that law anywhere but it certainly is practice across France. Somewhere in the French parliament they will have a croissant division who are looking into croissant related legislation. But it's not the butter that turns the croissant into a crescent. The butter doesn't do anything there's nothing that's happening chemically here it's just in practice just the rule is if you work in a boulangerie if it's all butter croissant it's straight and if you want to make an all butter croissant curved you can but if you want to make a margarine croissant straight you're going to prison. But fortunately

in French prison the wine selection is very good and you'll actually have a nice time. So there was a coup in 2016 and this is in the UK a croissant related coup which is Tesco replaced all of its curved croissants with straight croissants and they did it as in they just announced it and they said right from tomorrow they gave people no notice or warning. Because you might have gone in and just bought the entire stock, right? Well you can't stock up can you because you have to buy them fresh every day. So they knew that their customers would be snooker the next day but they just said they claimed okay they made this claim which I think is bizarre they claimed it was due to the spreadability

factor that they were they were actually making life easier for their customers. They said if you cut open a straight croissant it's very easy to put in your jam or whatever. Obviously if you cut open a curved croissant it's a nightmare and it takes hours blah blah blah. Do you know people took the piss at the time and it was the boss of Tesco Harry Jones who said this but I genuinely agree with him he said when the croissants curved people can take up to three attempts to achieve perfect coverage which increases yeah increases the potential for accidents involving sticky fingers and tables but honestly it is harder to spread a curved croissant. So I want to and I can't because he's not here and I don't know him

pick him up on that sentence sticky fingers causes accidents and other problems what the fuck is he talking about what on earth is that centered and he said 75% of people who were surveyed wanted the straighter croissant because of as Andy says the spreadability factor. Am I the only one who doesn't cut open a croissant and spread jam in it? I just find that so weird the other interesting thing about croissants is in that kind of respect is you know the idea that especially when you go to France you see them and they're cut in half and they put like ham and cheese and stuck in the middle but that was only invented in the 1970s you know that so the French they decided to do this because they were worried that American hamburgers were coming over to France

and they thought what can we do to stop holy the march of the hamburger I know what we can do we can put ham and cheese inside our croissants that's the French hamburger I didn't know that there were these places called croissanteries across France and they were created in the 1970s as a big government like the statist intervention in the market to deal with the scourge of what they call the fast food yeah yeah I just can't imagine ever anyone's on oh it's 1 a.m. God is McDonald's open but the croissanteries are fantastic I stayed in a four-star all-inclusive recently yeah and it was really interesting they had this bit of new technology I've seen nowhere before which is during the breakfast buffet they had croissants and you would select your croissant

of which there was almond and just classic plain and chocolate you get a plain one and then they had all these pipes coming out kind of like if you were pouring a pint right there was like seven of these pint pulling things and what they did is they take your croissant over and one dispenses chocolate one does jam and so on and what they do is they shove the croissant into the pipe and then they pump it full of chocolate or jam or whatever oh my god it was like seeing the future I couldn't believe it they came back and I was like in Italy they've got the future in the four-star inclusives it's amazing I was really thinking when he launched on this story I think I know more about breakfast buffet technology than Dan does and I didn't I'm I'm stunned yeah you need to

know where that is now don't you Andy because you are a bit of an expert on breakfast buffets the last all-inclusive I went to on the breakfast buffet they had Haribos and I must admit I did not eat a single croissant that week well the French of course traditionally put Haribos on their croissants one thing about croissants that's really interesting is that they're quite new right so the oldest recipe as far as I could find which is of a traditional classic or even modern classic croissant is from 1906 and so that means that Napoleon didn't eat croissants Bolzac Victor Hugo Georges Son they never ate a croissant in their life wow maybe that's why they were so productive maybe the croissants led to the downfall of France

did you guys hear about Operation Croissant no Operation Croissant was something that was launched in 2016 it was a it was an Anglo-French operation it was the day before the Brexit vote and a campaign group tried to campaign on Brexit with Operation Croissant which was giving out croissants accompanied by pro-eu messages written by people in France on postcards saying please you know don't don't leave okay and the croissants get this they had been baked that morning the 22nd of June and they come to London on the first Euro star of the day and there were 600 croissants which will go which that's a lot of effort for something that ended up being completely fucking useless isn't it it's very romantic though and very French and they they had 600 croissants ready

to give out and then the police the police um interceded the police stopped them and said it's illegal to use food drink or entertainment to influence a vote oh it is yeah and so they were all uh imprisoned actually for there's some of them are still in uh no they issued a statement saying we are happy to fall on our baguettes and stick to the right side of British law have you guys heard this is an America of the cronut yeah yeah am I the only one who hasn't heard of the crown i think it might be oh okay uh have have you guys heard of the cruffin okay no you know i reckon between us even if we haven't i reckon we can put it together go on then it's a cronut full of stuffing isn't it yeah yeah it's a Christmas it's a Christmas

crustal uh full of full of stuff yeah so anyway you guys must have facts no no hey Sam have you heard of the um the cremosa cremosa someone gasped then as if this is the greatest thing they've ever heard basically a crustal with samosa filling and then deep fried oh lovely yeah have you heard of uh if we're doing this which i think we are a craigle a craigle okay yep yep that's a croissant and a bagel anyone like to take the next one oh i'll go for one yeah uh a townie a townie it's not very politically correct James okay there's no croissants involved what is it it's a half tart half brownie oh and finally one more uh a doughnut you know what that is a pug a pug and a doughnut a pug that's been turned into a doughnut yes it's not so far off

it's a doughnut crossed with a chicken nugget oh which is basically just a doughnut shaped chicken nugget wow that's pretty good it still tastes the same yeah um the uh the cronut an interesting thing about the cronut is that this was made in 2013 and it was in america and it was a bakery guy who wanted to do a doughnut meets the croissant and it took off massively straight away so he released it on one day the next day there was a queue of a hundred people trying to get access to the cronut and the market value the black market value of the cronut immediately was massive so you would buy it for something like two or three four five dollars right it was selling for like a hundred dollars there were people in alleyways yeah there were yeah it was such hot property in alleyways

in alleyways in new york you wouldn't buy a pastry in an alleyway you would if it was a cronut because cronuts were they were so popular and so he it was a guy called dominique ansel who was the creator of the cronut and it was so popular that he trademarked it so he owns it no one else can make a cronut they can they just can't call it a cronut well no there's the doissant which you can get um but you can't get the original and so yeah but there was a huge black market value for it god people are stupid aren't they um we we should say just because otherwise people are going to write in that and i never thought i'd say this james turns out to be the most sophisticated of the four of us in this one metric because in france they never put filling into their croissants

which i didn't actually realize but all frenchers seem to concur on this they say that they've literally never in their whole life met someone from france who puts jam or butter even worse on their croissants because it's got all the butter is sort of in it already but it's been half butter but people it doesn't taste the same as when you melt the new layer of butter into it i've got no patience with people who say there's enough butter in croissants already you can never have enough butter um do you know the concord du meilleur croissant de grand paris this is the french croissant championships would you go french sir sorry i didn't i didn't mean to i didn't mean to but it's it's what is the most french thing you can imagine so it's this is the is the

greater paris best croissant competition basically and um there was a brilliant national geographic piece about it the judges comments are just so french so listen to this one it's executed to perfection if mary antoinette had offered these to the french people there probably wouldn't have been a revolution he also says at the beginning it's executed to perfection which is time for fact number two and that is james okay my fact this week is that manchester city women's football team has a menstrual cycle coach now is that a cycling coach who is also menstrual or is it no it's a coach to get the best out of their players when they're on the periods or in fact for all different parts of the month so this was an article

i read in the economist uh and they were talking about this in general and then i found out that mancity have this but basically i mean it really makes sense right so if you're an elite sports person you're really always aiming for that extra like one percent that'll just make you better than anyone else and a load of studies have been done and more and more are being done that show that women's performance fluctuates at different times of the month due to their cycle and so it really makes sense that you have someone on your team who can get the most out of your players by working that out oh so it's not like you'll be hauled off halfway through a match because the cycle coach has looked at their watch and said no she's on get her off i should hope not no okay i really

hope that doesn't happen i don't think it works like that i've seen those adverts roller skated along but this is the other thing that's really important is that um women footballers are way way more likely to get certain injuries than male footballers right so there's a thing called the anterior cruciate ligament and like football fans will know that this is something that plagues like male footballers but it's really really bad for women and apparently women are eight times more likely to get an acl injury than men and a lot of people think that it's related to the menstrual cycle so arsenal midfielder jordan knobs she missed out of the 2019 world cup because of her acl and she reckons it was because of the time of the month she was on

and that made her weaker yeah apparently um basically your menstrual cycle is split not yours but half of our menstrual cycles are split into essentially two phases the follicular and the luteal phase and in the late follicular phase which i believe is week two so you've had your period then it's kind of the week after that uh that's when estrogen concentration is highest and that's when you're just going to get injured your bones are going to snap uh your your ligaments are going to break you should basically stay in a padded room for a week all right well what they can the thing is that um estrogen is anabolic so you'll know anabolic steroids that people take to build muscle so estrogen helps muscle to build so that's one difference that happens but really what you do

is you make sure that your diet is different at different times a month you can change your training so you can work harder at one time a month and less hard at another time the month that's what they're kind of they're kind of doing in city i was also looking at other bits of uh sort of sports science in women's football i didn't realize the england women's team they have personalized bra prescriptions did they yeah they did this year they got in a breast biomechanics expert or two to provide very very personalized bras to ensure that they got the right literally the support they need do you have to go into a chemist and they say we'll just make that up for you every 10 minutes you've got a seamstress in the back the um the guardian covered it and they said if those cups

could talk slightly creepyware but again um they might claim a share of the lioness's victory for themselves right but it genuinely makes a massive difference and supposedly if you run in a poorly supportive bra it can shorten a woman's stride by four centimeters and that and i'm going to need some help with this statistic can add up to an extra mile over the length of a marathon now that's what i read i don't understand how does that mean when you get to everyone else's run 26 miles and you still have to do another mile well that's that's what i don't understand i i think it means that you have to do more strides to do the marathon i see but i i yeah i don't think it means that you get to finish early yeah i like with the with the lioness's there's so many like superstition is a big

thing within footballers where they have to follow certain routines we see it in sports where like serena williams will wear uh the same pair of socks throughout a competition if she plays wimbledon she'll wear the same pair of socks just so it makes it sort of feel like she'll win that's her thing with the lioness's there's one player who always needs to have beans on toast that's her thing she thinks that's going to help me it's just it's just routine and it's and it's what they do and then another thing was there was one match where a few of them had a ponytail that was done by one of the players and they had a great game they started believing that this ponytail was part of the the sort of who the hell needs someone else to do their ponytails i've seen the ponytails

of the england women's team they're pretty basic ponytails um when the when the euros were on um earlier this year the guardian newspaper had biographies of all 368 players okay um so i read all of those nice and i'll be honest there wasn't that much in there um so lina mogul who plays for germany this is her fun fact she was born exactly 225 days to the day after napoleon bonaparte 225 days yes she's she's very fit her age she's very very old wow she will only have got croissants since the 1970s she was 200 years old and she's like what is this uh marie leon let's see if i could get this one right she's spanish uh she has lots of tattoos but they're only on her left arm can you work out why they're only on her left arm uh she right handed but she's a tattoo artist

correct oh wow that's really good um and another one vivian may diemer who's from the nevelins she always got upset because people called her the goat so goat means greatest of all time yeah but she didn't know that's what it meant and she just said a goat is not the best animal to be why are they calling me a goat so we we mentioned ages and ages ago there was a ban uh the the english f a they banned women's football in about 1920 something didn't they 21 they banned women from playing on their pictures which effectively banned it so it sort of shut down the game but this was i this happened all over europe so the french game was they their football federation they banned it 1933 uh west germany 1955 um spain 1930 to 75 it was banned or it was all it was banned all

in the 20s and 30s and then all the bands were lifted in about the very late 60s or early 70s yeah it's just uh it's very peculiar yeah it is very weird although some sort of underground matches did happen socially underground not literally underground um in the interim and um i think there was it was the early 1970s as you say that it started to come back into the mainstream again and there was the unofficial women's world cup in italy in 1970 and i think fifa refused to play a part in that but it did happen and it was quite popular and then there was a follow-up in mexico in 71 and it was really popular so i had no idea the final in 1971 had a crowd of 110 000 which i think is the biggest women's crowd ever and there have been claims made about similar

crowds recently but i think that's bigger than all of them wow um yeah and it was uh it was great it was sponsored by martini so i guess you got three shots of fortified wine given out to you the the classic football drink and um to make it weirdly to make it appeal more to the female audience i guess they painted the gold frames with pink and white and all the stadium stuff were pink outfits no there's an intake of breath but i do think that pink gets a bad reputation because it's not an objectively bad color um but yeah it feels like a bad color for a football goal though right a nice bright white is what you want you know that's probably the most contrast isn't it yeah yeah better than painting it green i read about what i think might be the earliest

example of a woman playing football oh yeah it was this woman who was born just after napal no it wasn't it was in 1773 in yorkshire and it was a match between the married gentleman of the town of walton and the bachelors of the town of walton and it said in the report it said the game had many falls and broken shins on each side and at one stage the wife of one of the married men went to help him after he was injured she then went after the ball and secured victory for her husband's team doesn't count though really it's a legal move isn't it kind of a random play come stumbling from the crowd they've got women's football basically has just until recently had just terrible even internally from the football community um particularly the officials just terrible times

1991 fifa didn't want to name the women's world cup the world cup so instead they got a sponsor so it was the m&m's cup um they could have named it after mars bars and called it the mars cup so you have the world cup and the mars cup oh yeah and then they could have done an intergalactic exactly that's yeah solar cup and those games they made the games 10 minutes shorter yeah in case the women collapsed when playing for the full 90 minutes yeah that was but it seems to be the reasoning that's 1991 right 1991 yeah and when when uh germany uh west germany listed its ban in 1970 the games were only 70 minutes long and they were only allowed to be played in warm weather basically just in case cold weather uh killed the players yeah that seems to be the the panic

that there was set set bladder who is the he's the president of fifa right um he was asked about women's football this was a while ago and he suggested that he was a very progressive man so i'm looking forward to an extremely liberal and thoughtful well you're bang on you're not gonna tarnish the good name of set bladder in this room he said that he suggested to get more people watching women's football that female players should wear tighter shorts to promote a more female aesthetic um he said they could for example have tighter shorts female players are pretty if you excuse me for saying so and they already have some different rules to men such as playing with a lighter ball they don't play with a lighter ball yeah you did used to be there used to be

played with kids balls in japan when they started playing women's football in the 80s they played with the children's ball i think and the halves lasted 25 minutes and um handballs were permissible if it was players protecting their own breasts which i actually think is a fine rule i'm gonna need to move us on in a second i was looking at world records for kipi oppies oh yeah um because in 2003 there was a woman called millen dominguez who's quite a famous age footballer she's the ex-wife of rinaldo um not the rinaldo that you would know andy but the rinaldo that football fans would know it's so nice that you presume i know any of the rinaldo's i'm really like i'm anyway she was 17 at the time and she did 55187 kipi oppies which was a world record

now according to the guinness book of records the current world record is was made in 2009 it was by a british guy called dan magnus and he did 24 hours of kipi oppies in covent garden he did over 200 000 touches what but he was allowed a few breaks to kind of stretch his legs and stretch his muscles and stuff whereas millen dominguez didn't have any breaks and whenever she needed to do anything whenever she needed to eat drink or go to the toilet she did it by balancing the ball on the back of her neck and then backing up and sitting down and doing it so i reckon she should start the record oh my god i think i will just have a main actually i'm gonna skip the starter thank you very much wow and then there was a 12 year old called imogen papworth heidel who last

year did 7.1 million kipi oppies sorry but she had a lot of them donated by other people so the idea was that she was going to do one for every key worker in the uk after you know covid stuff and she in fairness she did like over a million over a long period of time but the rest were donated by marcus rushford lucy bronze and spandau balling star martin kemp yeah go martin it's been a joy patch since he left his standards hasn't it it is time for fact number three and that is my fact my fact this week is that two of the leading archaeologists to dig up king richard the third's bones were called king and richard so a slight correction of my fact one was an archaeologist another was a geneticist and this

was two people called richard buckley who's of the university of leicester archaeological services and professor turi king who's the geneticist who was the person who went and did all of the dna testing to prove that richard the third was who he was so can i just say dan like maybe about two months ago you did another fact which was that the someone from the movie king richard was called richard king yeah the editor of the movie are you just looking up richard kings it's my new hobby i'm just trying to find anyone called richard or king um so this the big story that i'm sure everyone remembers episode one of no such thing as a fish uh in which we mentioned that the reason that king richard the third was found was because there was a screenwriter called filipa langley

who was doing some research for the script that she was going to write she was walking through leicester she passed a car park and she had a sudden feeling that richard was there and so she went away and she told her friends that she was like i just felt like he was there and she kept telling this story and eventually she thought i'm going to go back and check if he's there she goes back a year later she walks into the car park this time she sees something that wasn't there last time which is a giant r which is painted onto the ground which she thinks is like a helicopter sign which just means richard is here and so she puts um forward a plan to richard buckley who i've just mentioned saying i'd like to get a dig going here and she helped to raise the funds

anyway the story is is that they found the king underneath the r but recently while i was trying to do some research on a photo a friend of mine was in touch with tury king professor tury king and she said oh you're not getting in touch about the r underneath um where he was found because he wasn't found underneath the r so that's been a big story so i thought okay because probably it's very annoying as an archaeologist or a geneticist that when you've used actual science to find a remains of a body that someone else is claiming that they use psychic intuition to find it but then she doesn't acknowledge the fact that there's huge synchronicity in the point that richard and king these two people found the fucking body yeah yeah and there's a third there's a third

incredible uh nomenclature link to this dan yeah so after the bones of a richard the third were found they were then reinterred there was a big ceremony for the reburial of richard the third and the man who made the lead lined casket that the king was put in was called john castle man and what is a king if not a man wow who lives in a castle so true and isn't that spooky having the hairs on the back of your neck gone up yeah there's one interesting sort of spooky thing about richard the third and that is that there's i only learned this by doing this research this week and that is that there's a theory that leicester city won the premier league with the help from richard the third's ghost oh yes and on the leicester city website they have a lot of evidence as to why this

is the case really right so they won the league but the season before they were bottom of the league and they you know it's about christmas and they lost lost lost lost lost lost and then they um laid richard the third to rest and nine days later their next game was against west ham and they won that game with a last minute goal by andy king no done done done this is redaker and richard was actually he went from the bottom of the car park to the top didn't he when they dug him up so it's awful i just tell you from the leicester city website that's all that's amazing i'm at a conspiracy theorist meeting and it's freaking me out um i just want to mention something that i like about cheery king yeah that um she discovered so these issues are geneticists so she she was one who

said look this is richard the third and the dna match was made by comparing people who were descended from his mother's side of the family um to his dna but she then thought okay let's just check out the other side of the family and they uh first of all she and her team of geneticists uh they got relations of henry summonset who was descended from the same great great grandfather as richard the third so they'd have to share dna um they got people who were related to henry summonset and it turned out they didn't match richard the third at all which is very weird it means there must have been a break somewhere in in the line of succession and so that's that's incredibly someone was cheating and stuff it means that we suspect there's been some hanky panky and then there's also another guy today who's

descended from jeffrey count of anju who's basically the founder of the plantagenet dynasty and he's who it was named after and that person's dna doesn't match either of the other two's so basically everyone in this dynasty was shagging around different centers for us i can tell that's really cool richard the third himself he uh was born with a full set of teeth and he was in the womb for two years come on wow that can't be true well these might be propaganda claims from the era um yeah in fact there's shexperian propaganda claims i think it's in the play that he um he was born with a full set of teeth are they pro or anti in propaganda terms what does it sound like a compliment what do you think oh that's pretty cool if you bought a full set of teeth

and you're in a mums yeah that's pretty cool and haired his shoulders as well um right he was born with and it wasn't i think shakespeare took it from historians who immediately after richard died were coming up with coming up with this slander or maybe it was true we don't know it's probably untrue though um can i i just want to say one good thing about root to the third because he gets a bad rep of justifiably he was probably a murderer of small boys but on the bright side he did introduce england's first legal aid system which i didn't know yeah so he instigated in his but what was a very short reign um he was only on the throne about two years wasn't he was he yeah at the same time he was in the womb that's insane but yeah he instigated

this thing called the court of requests that meant that you if you couldn't afford legal aid or legal representation then you could get it would be provided by the state but it's very ahead of its time yeah it's pretty cool he founded a council of the north to ensure that the north got representation in government great yep the only northern king really that we've ever had i think like proper northerner i got a really good fact which i didn't look up so it might be wrong but it's cool it's it's so nice to set the expectations at the beginning of a damn thing yeah so the third word of the third scene of the third act of richard the third is fourth i love that fact that's so good if it's true if it's true

have you guys heard of marmaduke constable sounds great though we were just on um like relatives of richard the third and this is one of the really close descendants of richard the third as in almost contemporary in fact he was contemporary he he was yeah his name was marmaduke bosworth he fought at the battle of bosworth where richard was killed yeah um he also and that was the year 1485 just to say he also fought against the scots at the battle of north umberland that was in 1513 he was aged 71 when he took actively part in that battle he only died in 1518 aged about 75 years old when he choked to death drinking a glass of water which had a frog in it so rich the third died let you say in the battle of bosworth um

we've found you know we checked the bones and we reckon that he lost his helmet and came under a hail of 11 wounds at the same time and that's what did him in but traditionally he's supposed to have been killed by a soldier called ralph rudyard and ralph rudyard's family went on to own a lake in staffordshire called rudyard lake and rudyard lake we've said before is where rudyard kippling's name comes from yeah right so his parents went there and they really loved it and they thought we'll name him after the lake so um ralph rudyard's family owned this rudyard lake but they owned two lakes in the area one on each side of a hill um rudyard lake and another one called titty's worth so that means that rudyard kippling could so easily have been called titty's

worth kippling that's really great um can i quickly go back to cherry king a second because i just want to say there's been um an interesting thing that's been in the news recently so there's actually a movie that's just been made steve kogan has made a movie of the story of philippa langley finding richard the third and in it the sort of plot line is that she has a psychic intuition and the scientists and archaeologists and geneticists in it are kind of portrayed in that classic way of being really rational and really unkind and they're really pissed off because they weren't um and if you watch cherry king just in case you see that movie and you think oh scientists are bad she's awesome she's she's really cool she's found incredible stuff as a

geneticist so she goes around doing dna for all these finds when she was trying to find out about vikings she found that many men just came in to give their uh to give their dna because apparently most men think they're viking that's the that's the thing she was like there was no trouble getting volunteers for people saying are you viking because people are coming you're going well i definitely am so let's prove this are we sure that a lot of men didn't do it because they thought maybe they'll give me an ipad and some free porn for half an hour and that's how i'm donating my dna was that how you donate your dna i don't think so i saw there's a cheeks one i'm saying that's what they thought okay well thank god you clarified that otherwise you would have been straight down there

yeah and if i'm giving you a call when i'm in jail because i took my dick out during uh it was meant to be a cheek swab swap this cheek okay it is time for our final fact of the show and that is andy my fact is that to establish dominance the sarcastic fringe head fish will engage in kissing competitions with rival males and here's the fish so there's a picture of it on the screen here the sarcastic fringe fish the sarcastic fringe head they're really bizarre fish oh i should give credit for this this was actually sent into us by app flock of words online so thank you so much um they're called neoclinus blanchardi

they live off north america uh on the pacific side and they're really ugly looking so they're kind of tiny little brown fish and they live in holes and they jump out and they go wow at their prey and they they're just like they're they're sort of these gross awful fish but the one amazing and beautiful thing about them they have this enormous mouth as in their mouth is wider than the entire body because it's got these huge sort of supporting struts and they've got big flappy cheeks and they can just sort of go wow sounds beautiful yeah okay it's a bit like just just to give a visual to the audience it's a bit like even though it's part of their mouth remember in Jurassic Park when the dinosaur comes up and it suddenly looks it's looking cute but then

it spreads got the frills frills yeah it's kind of like that except that's its mouth not frills it's really like that and they have this weird weird ritual where uh if they are near a rival male and it's the the mating season they will both yawn open and kind of push their mouths against each other to see who's got the bigger mouth and this is the more this is the intimidating thing in my experience that's not what kissing is maybe i'm doing it maybe i'm doing it wrong but it's not always like let's see who has the biggest mouth well i've got some apologies to make because i'm like undefeated champion and the smaller male or the male with the smaller mouth rather will surrender and

leave and they do but they basically are sort of yeah but it does because they're both about the same size it does look like they're kind of making out yeah yeah so it's not proper proper kissing although if if one has a smaller head sometimes the one with the bigger mouth will be able to fit the smaller one's head inside its mouth oh my god really which is my memory of year nine discos um but in this i one thing i couldn't get to the bottom of is so they do the mouth display the sort of dominance thing yeah yeah if if they were to have a fight then off the back of that like let's now have a fight what is the advantage of having a bigger mouth other than obviously they're a bit bigger but does that mean that they're going to win in a fight not really

they actually almost never have an actual fight yeah they will slightly they might slightly bump into each other but that's just not the way they do it as in it's not in their repertoire it's just like basically going at a year nine disco or to another guy and then doing your muscles and saying look my muscles are bigger than you but i really don't want to fight you okay you guys have crazy year nine discos you and Anna i can't believe you guys went to the year nine disco i wasn't allowed to go and i good news it sounds like i missed nothing at all but they do i mean these jaws they have quite sharp teeth so they can kind of bite and hurt you but they just tend not to do to each other like if you go near their house they'll do this

kind of sort of scary big open mouth thing but then if you don't go away they'll actually go for you and they are you know they do have a hefty bite on them yeah they'll bite humans won't they when you say you actually you divers and that's where sarcastic comes from by the way because we think you know does it have like some sort of like is it like the Anna Tyshinsky of fish but no it's sarcastic means that it's uh it's a greek word sarcasmus and to bite or tear oh is that right yeah yeah right it does it comes from uh i think sarco is flesh uh so it's to and uh so sarcasmain or whatever to bite flesh and it's where we get sarcophagus which i'd never thought about but sarcophagus sarco is flesh and then faggo faggo so it means eat i eat so it's flesh eating

a sarcophagus is something that's eating your flesh gross they have these kind of bright yellow lips don't they there people in here can see them just about i think but um for the people at home you you kind of have really bright yellow lips and then on the inside it's kind of a little bit colorful but not really but in actual fact those bits on the inside of the mouth reflect ultraviolet light so to anyone under the sea that can see ultraviolet light which is a lot and a lot of fish can see it actually that also looks like there's a massive sort of disco coming out of his mouth right they are so cool it does look i think that is very beautiful with its mouth open it looks like it really reminds me of having your face painted at a fair it looks like a kid's gone mad

with face paint um on them their mouths are so big that it's possible they struggle to eat and that sounds bizarre really they're a particular kind of fish called a blenny there's a huge great family of fish and they are tube blenny's which live in tubes um and most tube blenny's feed on small plankton but the male sarcastic friendship his mouth is so big that it can't suck anymore um so it's it seems to struggle a bit sometimes to eat plankton i sort of filter it in because it's just got this huge grip yes it's like when you're um if you've if your toilet's clogged and you need to use a plunger but sometimes the plunger head is too big to get suction on the actual whole bit and so it's a pointless suction yeah i don't think anyone was actually struggling to

grip the original point but thank you so much but now all you've done is connected our minds opening our mouths with a blocked toilet and we've all gone to the same place uh blenny's are yeah they're a huge family aren't they there are so many cool fish in the blenny family but one of the things they have is they have um the only fish that suckles it's young so the only thing on that suckles like we do yeah the viviparis eel pouts uh so viviparis uh being you know they give birth to live young hence that name but when they're pregnant and they have six month long pregnancies which is a quarter the length of richard the third yes absolutely yeah is that is that long for a fish it's long yeah yeah it's good for a fish usually the bigger the animal the

longer the gestation period okay and these are like 30 centimeters right these yeah um but the way they suckle is inside this they sort of live in the ovaries they don't have a separate uterus and they've got ovarian follicles and each little fish embryo suckles on a follicle one inside the fish and there are up to 400 of them so imagine it's like you've got 400 breasts and a baby on every one in there wow that's amazing a massive mouth yeah there's there was a website called worldwide words i don't know if you guys have seen it it's online it's really really good website uh they've collected a list of animals with names that are suggestive of emotion uh of which the sarcastic fringe head is one of them oh yeah um so there's a few here the festive midget um that's

the species of moth that's found in north america the confused flower beetle that's confused because it looks a bit like another kind of beetle not just walking around not knowing what's going on uh and the depressed muscle oh they're called that because they have a flat shell all muscles seem kind of depressed to me i mostly see them actually on a plate so that doesn't make sense but um have you heard of the tetra fish i've got going on general fish mating and aggression displays now tetra fish is unbelievable uh sailfin tetras so there are dominant males and there are also smaller more feeble males okay both of them are competing for the attention of females the dominant ones you would think they just you know they they're very

active in fact they do nothing they hide in some um sort of kelp kelp thank you they they decide so the low ranking males have the run of the place right and they do all these mating displays and they're trying to persuade the female um that they're a good prospect and they're good to have sex with and they do days and days of work persuading the female to have sex right yeah and when they have finally got the female to agree and they're going off to the mating zone um a more dominant male will just emerge from the kelp and say thank you very much i'll take it from here and the female just goes off with him every time he's like right i'm now in the mood and here's an even better offer that was my urinine disco

and this is a thing called courtship piracy and the dominant males are just good at finding good hiding places right near the mating zone and then just popping out of the last minute why do they keep doing it the little nerd ones they just accept it it's so weird they never fight maybe occasionally they get lucky yeah exactly yeah they must they must hope that hope hope hope that somewhere in the kelp there's no it must just be like kind of looking in all the kelp and stuff just going on there's definitely none here exactly yeah um female brown trouts they fake orgasms oh yeah so it's kind of a similar thing so what will happen is if two if a male and a female trouter are having sex by which i mean like one laying eggs and the other one

spawning over it then another male or other males might come in the area they might kind of turn up and say i want a bit of that would you say come in the area do you mean they might we might get to that okay so what they'll often do is the female brown trout will kind of meet up with a male who she's kind of not sure about she kind of fancies but not sure and then they'll do this sort of shuddering thing you know they're both shudder and usually when they both shudder the females release the eggs and the males release a sperm but actually often the females will kind of hold on to their eggs while they're doing that because they know that other males in the area will turn up and then the other males will fight with the guy she was supposedly shagging and then they will

all fight and then hopefully she'll end up with an even better male who she can then actually have sex with nice genius smart isn't it that's really smart i want to hear what a trout fake orgasm sounds like i want to i want to see the when harry met sally of the trout world i'll have what she's having what some plankton yes there's one in just sticklebacks male sticklebacks also very territorial the males fight a lot and when it's in mating season and in mating season they go red on their undersides so the way they spot other males to fight is they see a flash of red but apparently they're not very good at distinguishing fish from other stuff so if you've got a pet stickleback if like a red post fan goes by they'll fling themselves at the side of their tank

well football team goes past exactly they'll attack them all yeah don't wear red around the sticklebacks speaking of going red this is not in fish this is in mandrill's so the primate yeah but it is about like males attacking each other to try and get a female so they will kind of try and become the alpha male and if there's an alpha male then you will fight against them and if you beat them you become the alpha male and if you become the alpha male immediately just this biologically happens all the sexual skin on your face and genitalia turns red and the guy who you've beaten his sexual skin goes kind of more bluey and less red and your testicles increase in size and the person you defeated their testicles decrease in size really just automatically

happens as soon as you win the fight popping off to the mandrill tale of the next morning congratulations on your winning your fight last night sir i'll be expanding the crop area of these that's so good what's the sexual skin on your face do we have sexual skin on our face well some of us do andy but don't worry about it it means let it change color so that it's secondary sexual characteristics so the females find it attractive blushing blushing yeah pretty much it's our sexual skin i don't know man if you've got nothing else to offer maybe but right because we've got we've got little bits of um clitoris in our nose what are you on about excuse me well speak for speak to yourself do you know how they say that men can't find the clitoris

so i'm pretty sure it's in my own nose where i thought yeah the inside of the you have a rectal tissue in your nose but i don't think that's quite the same that's what i was thinking as in when blood will go to it and it will get engaged your poor wife who's jamming your fingers up her nose every evening was it good for you well it wasn't that good i have to say well i feel like we've all learned a lot um tonight i'm gonna go home and apologize to my wife um i feel we should all go home as well that's 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've said

over the course of this podcast get the other three maybe not me on this one um but you can get me on at shriverland andy at andrew hunter m james at james harkin and anna you can email podcast at qi.com yep or you can go to our group account which is at no such thing or our website no such thing as a fish.com all of our previous episodes are on there as well as a link to club fish this is our new exciting venture where we have awesome hidden places where you can chat to other fish fans as a community there's also ad-free episodes and there's a shut up chance stop talking about hidden places i can't look at you in the face anymore um yeah uh or you can uh what else can you do you can uh you can have extra episodes like drop

us a line it's our correspondence place where we chat about all of the facts that you're sending in and all the letters um otherwise uh we will be back here in carter for another show sometime soon i really hope so thank you so much for having us for everyone at home listening to the show we'll be back again next week with another episode we'll see you then good bye