No Such Thing As A Fish - 456: No Such Thing As Glass in the Future

Episode Date: December 9, 2022

Dan, James, Andy and special guest Jamie Morton discuss Oscar records, Disney secrets, and what Rocky Flintstone was doing in the 60s. 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 everybody, just a quick announcement before we start this week's show and that is that we have a special guest on. He's been on once before and he was so good that we decided we absolutely had to have him back. It's Jamie Morton from My Dad Wrote a Porno. He is the star. He is the one whose dad actually wrote a porno and we're having him on partly because he's a brilliant guest and also because it's a very sad time in podcast land because the final episodes of My Dad Wrote a Porno have just gone out all apart from the very very last one which is coming out on the 12th of December and it features an exclusive interview with for the first time ever Rocky Flintstone himself the Banksy of Erotica as they call him missed

opportunity to call him the wanksy of erotica but never mind. Jamie was absolutely brilliant. This was such a fun episode to record. He is so funny. We think you're gonna love it and so do check out the final My Dad Wrote a Porno episodes and all the other ones too. All right on with the show. Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden. My name is Dan Schreiber. I am sitting here with Andrew Hunter Murray, James Harkin and special guest. It's Jamie Morton and once again we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order here we go. Starting with fact number one that is Jamie. Okay so my fact this week is this

week. I'm not on the show often but this week my fact is Barry Fitzgerald is the only actor in Oscar history to be nominated twice for the same role in the same film. Amazing. Was the film an early version of Mrs. Doubtfire? Best actor and best actress. Yeah exactly. No no he had one role. It was Father Fitzgibbon in 1944's Going My Way which did win Best Picture actually. Yeah he was nominated for both Best Leading Actor and Best Supporting Actor. Yeah which is insane. It doesn't say much for the rest of the cast does it? Exactly. But he won for Best Supporting Actor so he could have conceived of the one for both. Yes but it went to Bing Crosby who was the lead in the film. Or Co-lead. Hang on to it one best film. It won Best Actor for Bing Crosby. Yes

but then Fitzgerald lost Best Actor but he won Best Supporting Actor. Yes correct. That is amazing. I know what a sweep. Yeah. Do you have to pay entry fees for the Oscars? That is a great question James. Andy. Yeah um yeah you do. I imagine you do. You have to nominate yourself. Yeah yeah. You have probably an administration fee like 20 quid or something. 20 quid probably. This movie sort of set a lot of records. For example it was the first film to ever have two actors win the Academy Award for Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor. It was the first movie to get the Academy Award for Directing and Writing which was by a guy called Leo McCary who wrote and directed it. Oh so he won two. He won two at that one. It was the first film to win Best

Picture at the Academy Awards and the Golden Globes. It was the first picture to win Best Picture and Best Song. It has all these records as the first movie. And no one's seen it. I never heard of it. Exactly. It seems such a waste. I suppose 1944 we had other things to worry about. Didn't they hit Europe? Well it's interesting you should say that because during the war all Oscar statues were made of plaster instead of gold or gold-plated bronze which is what they actually made of. So he got a a plaster Oscar and he was a massive golf fan with old Barry Fitzgerald. And he was practicing his golf swing one day and he decapitated his Oscar. That's a great picture of him with like the head and the body. I was reading a bit more about this guy Barry Fitzgerald.

Interesting man. He was childhood playmates with the siblings of, okay fine, James Joyce. Okay but not James. No they thought he was weird didn't they? I think he was a bit older. He was a bit older and they said that he had a beard and glasses and was always reading books and so didn't play with them. Tracks. His name Barry Fitzgerald. It's not his real name is it? And usually you do that because you arrive into the the world of the arts and someone has your name and so you have to register your name right and you change it. But for him it was because he was trying to hide from the fact that he was sort of doubling on his work when he was meant to be working in the civil service. So they wouldn't, his name would be on the bill and they wouldn't you know

it was him. The worst thing was he worked in the unemployment department so they had all of the yeah they had all of the lists of who was supposed to be working and who wasn't supposed to be working so all of his mates would have known that he was doing it. He's a movie star. It's hard to hide being a star star. It's when he started. I was in the bullfield days. He was doing plays. He worked in the Abbey Theatre with Sharon Yates as well so more. What a what a milieu. I know. He was once almost kidnapped before the opening night of a play he was in by his boss who said you should be working. It's all the clown the stars right. It was quite a controversial play and Ireland was very recently out of a civil war you know it was a febrile time and the play had a lot of

controversial stuff in it and the Irish Times reported this. It was in 1926 several gun boys turned up at Fitzgerald's mum's house. I don't know what a gun boy is. A young gunman. I mean we've got a gun man that's the thing yeah and it's just a young one of those I guess. I think people who carry guns around between places maybe like gun runners or young people maybe. I might be. Well anyway the gun boys were there at the door and they met his mum and they said right we're here to take him just keep him safe until the opening night has gone so he won't be able to appear on stage in this play. Right. And she said well he doesn't live here. This is his mum and I'm not telling you where he is and so they had to go away and then he did the play. Wow yeah. What polite

gun boys. That's just because the gun boys still live at home doesn't mean that everybody's They're almost like knocking it's very okay to come out of play please. Have any of you ever held an Oscar? No. In real life. Oh my god. I reckon there's an addict out coming. You haven't lived boys. And I'll tell you something. I've held two. Same time? Same time. Oh my god. I went I was name drop hideous name drop but I was at Emma Thompson's house for dinner. She's not that hideous. No the name drop she's lovely. She fed me and everything. No but in her downstairs loo her two Oscars right there. An interesting fact about Emma Thompson you might know this that she's the only person in history to have won Oscars for

writing and acting. Still to this day. Wow. What? Yeah. Were they both for I mean was the writing one sense and sensibility? Yes. Correct. And the acting one. I thought Jane Austen wrote that. Well they agreed. It was a controversial year. It's like when Kenneth Branagh won the Oscar for Macbeth or whatever he's got. Best adapted screenplay literally just used the words. He didn't actually win. I was going to come on to that. You mentioned Kenneth Branagh. You know they used to be married. Emma Thompson. What? I did not know that. They used to be married and he just won an Oscar for writing Belfast at the last Oscars. And if he were to win an acting Oscar him and Emma Thompson would be the only people in history to have acting and writing Oscars.

And he's been nominated for two acting Oscars. So it's not beyond the realms of possibility. And then that's how we sort of parent trap them back together, right? Well maybe not. I think it's very happily married to Greg Wise but you know. Jamie did you take a selfie of yourself in Emma Thompson's toilet? And what he was holding to Oscars. I mean what would you have taken a selfie with? Well I didn't but my friend did and then weirdly later on in the evening somehow I think we were taking pictures and like we were like say oh they had dropped me them or whatever. And Gaia Am's daughter took his photo and found honestly about 50 selfies

in his camera holding to the Oscars. She was like oh my god that's so embarrassing. But I didn't because you know. Too classy. Too classy. You'll wait till you get your own. Well I'll be waiting a while but there we go. I'm not sure that Barry Fitzgerald should have got the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. Well for example there's a there's a little a little goof in this which is that so he plays a Catholic priest in this film but Barry himself is Protestant so he wasn't kind of fully aware of how priests act and in the film I haven't seen the film myself but I read. You didn't deserve the award though aren't you? Well apparently when he does the crossing of

himself you know he does it the wrong way which feels like as an actor you would look into the basics. Maybe they flex it and post. Oh my god that's possible. He doesn't do it the wrong way upside down though. He just does it right to left away. He should be doing it left to right. I think he meant to do the left to right. You do the top to bottom. I go top to bottom left to right. That's correct. So okay yeah. So yeah take it back. Take it back. Curiousy isn't everything in the arts Dan. It's an interpretation. Do you think maybe he was making a comment on Catholicism? Oh my god. You know like the devil probably would do it that way. Yes yes really good call. Oh my god it's even deeper than I realized. But you know that it's um this is a bit of a reach

guys but uh I found this and I thought I'd share it. Uh male actors who have won or been nominated for an Oscar are statistically more likely to get divorced than their osculous acting peers. Interesting because because they've just got women throwing themselves at them. Well because there's a thing called the negative consequences of positive status shifts. So basically when you get a bit arrogant because you've just been nominated or won an Oscar men tend to leave their wives. Interesting. I could do so much better. And then there was I remember years ago reading a book where Dustin Hoffman struggling actor for years and getting bit rolls and stuff suddenly gets cast in the graduates. Yeah and this line being that when he got the call he tells his wife

and they just stare at each other and there's an unspoken thing that's happening there which is this is the end of our marriage. Bloody hell. Yeah because he's now gonna be he's gonna be globally famous and obviously he's gonna go off and obviously no that's obviously in the room to them too. It was obvious to them too in that moment that that was the end of their marriage. Gosh. To be fair this does remind me a little bit of the time I don't know if you Dan and James remember the time we won our first uh Chortle award. Yeah I did remember that. Yeah we all split up when our partners didn't leave immediately. Speaking of Oscars. I keep my Chortle award in the bathroom actually um which has led to a lot of weird stains on it but. I keep one of my awards in

the bathroom as well. We won a webby award. One of my awards? One of medic. They don't all fit in the cabinet that's the problem so mine is next to a um a review that I got in the Sunday Times which called my dad wrote porno the quote worst cultural event of the decade so it's ying and yang in my bathroom you know. Which decade was it? It was in the Christmas edition of the Sunday Times 2019. It was like a a roundup of the decade and some absolutely poisonous little little little little toad of a journalist. I won't name him he knows who he is. Um he finds a way to worm us into any bad review he ever gives. This was terrible but not as bad as my dad wrote a porno so he'll be thrilled that we're ending. Um yes I thought it's important to kind of have them both to realize

that neither really matter do they? Oh that's very good that's like um Ruddy Kipling isn't it if the triumph of the disaster and you know you treat them both the same. It's exactly like that and yeah I'm often called. Um if you go on IMDB they have lots of sort of tagging that you can do and people just go and do it it's not like an official thing but um there's loads of different tags and each movie might have 20 different tags. Uh someone went through them to see if there's any correlation between these tags and whether you can win an Oscar or not uh and the apparently there are some keywords that have never been even nominated for an Oscar so zombie food fight and breast implant. There has never been a movie with any of those three things that has ever been nominated for an

Oscar. Interesting. I don't think that's true. It's the tagging so it could be that someone has a tag because I'm pretty sure that Hook has a fantastic food fight. Oh was that nominated for best picture? Absolutely not but it must have been something like production design or song or something. You're saying that my screenplay my double D undead custard brawl is not probably not Oscar worthy. Damn it. Oh you might be the first. I'll just quickly ask in my double D undead custard brawl sorry um is it the simply the breasts that are undead? It is it's about a woman who goes in for a routine operation a breast enlargement and um she gets given the breasts of a dead person. Ah yes yeah and it's and they come to life and they come to but still attached to her and she's

alive. Wow that's weird you rarely have a zombie attached to a human who's alive. We don't have a woman on this podcast where we normally do but um is that how breast implants work they just take the breast off another person and stick them onto you is that right? I believe I believe so I did need to do the screenplay it's still in the research phase. Russell Crowe has an Oscar doesn't he? Russell Crowe Russell Crowe has one for gladiator. Yeah he's got a few he's got a best actor no he's the only one but you know where he keeps his um Oscar he doesn't keep them in his bathroom like oh okay I haven't been to his house and take himself where he keeps his Oscar okay um what's the most Russell Crowe place to keep an Oscar like his barn or something yeah yeah yeah you are so

close no it is in his chariot I bet he has the chariot from gladiator and he's got um in a haystack he's like it's a needle in a haystack and he keeps it in his haystack it's like it's a sort of metaphor it's like you're thinking yes has he got colosseum did he take that home as a prop he has a chicken coop and he keeps it in his chicken coop uh at his ranch and he claims that it helps his hens to lay bigger eggs wow I mean he wants all the cockerels sadly leave the chickens that's the problem yeah he introduced it yeah Rosamund Pike buries her rewards in the garden what yeah she's so weird she's so bloody goth rosamund pike yeah she's all classy and la la la actually there's a heart of darkness why does she like leaves a little bit of the top of them to

kind of glint in the sun that's nice yeah I know it's it's kind of interesting isn't it and what awards her she won she's won like a golden globe okay but she hasn't got a chortle because she has got a chortle I mean right when you can't sacrilege to bury a chortle on the car they'll cover dig it up and take it off okay it is time for fact number two and that is my fact my fact this week is that one of the attractions at Disneyland in 1956 was the bathroom of tomorrow which included amongst other exciting exhibits an array of interactive faucets and a dramatic story of valves not valves yeah what a narrative what a narrative whipping any Oscars in this bathroom oh god this should be right except the well there's not but the whole thing is kind of one big

osco because it's gold the entire thing yeah it's by this so the idea was in the 50s they thought in the future everyone will have a gold bathroom I think so basically exactly only Donald Trump has managed to make that dream a reality yeah so this was part of an area of Disneyland that was opened along with the original Disneyland in America called Tomorrowland and Tomorrowland was going to have lots of exhibits where they could showcase how the world was going to look in the futuristic future of 1986 and it included things like this bathroom of tomorrow whereby air conditioning was going to be in there there were dumbbells so that you could do exercise while you're having a bath that were on the side of the bath you know all these sorts of like little innovations but the

whole premise of it it was done by a company called the crane company they were selling it now so the bathroom of tomorrow was actually today and yeah and so this was one of many of these little exhibitions that were put on that were slightly sponsored by corporations who wanted to showcase their related stuff within this area of Disney yeah very cool it was designed by Henry Dreyfus um who was a designer uh Dreyfus also designed the classic black telephone you know this one that you basically see everywhere he also invented most of the Hoover models of vacuum cleaners the upright ones uh and he was also the chair of the meeting of the international organization of standards committee uh in Berlin when they kind of came up with all the different

signs that there would be around the world you know like if you go to an airport the sign for a taxi rank is the same everywhere yeah i love that kind of stuff i love those shadowy organizations you know secretly secretly or dealing with signs and i did i went on a mad research bender last year for qi about um uh plug plug sockets and uh the standardization of plug sockets yeah yeah and are we gonna hear hear about it now i think for everyone's benefit that would be the worst cultural events of the 2020s if we did that i had such an amazing time doing the research and i looked back and i've written about 20 paragraphs of just dross so yeah um this bathroom does have some good things in it uh had a sink which you can adjust the height of you just sort of pull

it up or down that's clever yeah accessible accessible and uh and if you know for kids they can pull it right down and you know it's there and it was hydraulic powered i think that's uh oh that's cool it's a good idea yeah i mean it clearly a huge pain in the bum to install but you know but once it's in it's in exactly you know yeah never think about it again yeah and is it still there no it's shut down after a couple of years yeah it surprisingly was not as exciting for kids uh as they as they probably thought it wasn't just for kids stand it's also for adults absolutely true yeah because you know i i i have worked for disney parks and resorts for have you like more than 15 years i i direct a lot of stuff are you in the mouse suit no

there is no mouse suit james oh sorry mickey um yes i have been to the parks a lot wait wait wait but there is a suit right no you're saying it's just mickey it's just new it's just a new rodent man running around genetically modified mouse man mickey mouse and that's cool uh yeah it's cool so i have been there a lot actually and have you then got access we've spoken in the past on the podcast about all these like crazy corridors that you can go yeah the tunnels underneath what disney's done all that i've been in those tunnels they are cool what they call they call the utilities all of these tunnels and you know they're actually not a basement people think they're the basement but because it's built in florida

and it's essentially on a swamp you can't have basements in florida okay so it's all so everything else is on the first exactly magic kingdoms on the first floor what that's so funny and if you walk up to magic kingdom it's on a very very subtle slope so you're actually climbing up a full flight of stairs as you approach magic kingdom that's incredible that's incredible yeah wow but those tunnels are mad and there's everything in there there's like coffee shops there's like what dry cleaners that yeah it's amazing for the staff exclusively for the staff yeah wow and it's good to kind of get people through the park so that like no character or cast member from one part of the park will ever be seen in a different part of the park they'll just go through the through the tunnels

i imagine like a race of troglodytes who live under there and have never come to the first floor yeah yeah yeah that's that ironically would be a great movie yeah that's something that disney will never make no from the maker of double d under cast bro comes uh this uh just quickly on tomorrow land before we go to broad disney it does sound absolutely bananas because all of it was sponsored by one company or another and there were so the house of the future itself was actually sponsored by uh monsanto who later became extremely controversial as one of the makers of agent orange which was used to be about really yeah so disney kind of dropped that sponsorship once yeah sort of you know came out but all of these different firms so american

dairy association american motors national lead paint who sound great wow it's very much of an era right there it's very mid 20th century um the dutch boy color gallery was cut sponsored by dutch boy paint wow i can't find much more information about friends with the gun buys yeah amazing um and when they opened it they didn't cut a ribbon did they they just turned some taps on instead of yeah like a really yeah because it was the the house of the future just to show that it's the future yeah a lot more of the past than cutting a ribbon yeah um i was told by someone that i worked with over there that this is this is insane this fact okay and i'm not sure if i believe it but he told me and i and he's very any work say yeah quite senior where though is he one of the

troubler diets has he got nuts he's not seen sun in ten years let's just call him mr mickey m no uh m mouse the boss um no four percent of all the photographs taken in the united states are taken at either disneyland or what disneyworld stop four percent that's not insane quite a big country isn't it yeah it states for america four percent is that's amazing mad right yeah it doesn't it you're right to be skeptical yeah i was like is that true but wow amazing um and you know they also isn't just theme parks they have cruise ships right have you been with disney i have oh my god okay i've got so many questions to ask you right okay this is amazing wow i've never seen you so animated not since we started talking about plugs that time okay i was reading an article called disney

cruise secrets right okay and um i have to say it was the most disappointing article i've ever read okay let me just i'm just going to tell you a few of the secrets right the disney cruise secrets okay secret number one disney cruise state rooms are not ready until 130 p.m secret secret how's that secret i know it's only a secret if someone rocks up at 12 30 and they say yes it's ready secret number five you can bring bottled water on board secret number 14 disney will provide you with soap oh the soap's so good on the cruises it's some of the best soap you've ever had in your entire life i may have taken it with me it's really good really okay so that does that is a secret that is a secret yeah um so can you confirm about the rooms are not being

ready until one point i actually can't confirm that because here's the thing with here's the thing right with those ships is that you have to get off them really early because they have a they're they're changed over the same day yeah so everyone's going to be off the ship by like nine or something how long are you on it for is it a few days or you can you can do two nights you can do four nights down you can do a week i'm now a travel agent uh but uh so yeah i guess the turnaround is that they yeah so until right one third yeah that gives them time to clean all the all the state rooms that must be a chaotic four and a half hours on board just finding out yeah i don't left in all the rooms i mean that's happens in every hotel in the world it must be absolutely

but what's fascinating about the disney cruise line is that they're the only cruise line on the planet that has fireworks at sea okay so yeah so they have a big deck party normally on the penultimate night and they have fireworks that set off from the ship and what's fascinating about these fireworks is that um they are made from a biodegradable material so that when they hit the water they become fish food oh that's cool isn't that cool that is really cool i because is it is it do you need special dispensation for fireworks at sea i think i think they would be able to yeah because it might be seen as a signal might look like flares right an sos yeah wow they're going very whimsical with them they're very extravagant flares wow they're sinking but they also want to

let them know goofy is having a great time yeah and then well i was once on one of these ships and they have these rides on board the ships like a slide that goes off the edge actually you know this one that is like kind of you stand on like a trap door and it and it opens and it goes and you go down a chute and stuff i got all the way up to the top stood on the trap door yeah and i was too heavy but instead of saying i'm sorry sir you're too heavy they said i'm so sorry buddy you're just too full of magic today too full of magic i mean i could see what they were going for but it was even more annoying i was like just call me a fat bastard to be honest

that's so funny so i had to walk all the way down in front of all the children and their parents and what you said to each one too full of magic yeah it was all right but i was like i forgot something in my room sorry couldn't get into 130 it's no it was it was a low point on what was otherwise a beautiful trip okay it is time for fact number three and that is andy my fact is that five percent of the world's electricity is spent turning big rocks into small rocks mad that is mad it's a lot five percent five percent that is crazy for something that sounds unbelievably dull i know but this is this is big this is a big business yeah so what exactly is it because i'm i mean i tried to research this

topic i failed i'm not gonna lie i will be a passenger for this podcast andy educate me i found this in an interview i was reading an interview with a guy called john stanton who specializes in crushing big rocks into small rocks that's his line of work and he loves it he's a big rock crusher and basically when you're mining you might get some big rocks out of the ground but the ore is is inside those and you can't just you can't just deal with the big rock you've got you need to turn it into a small rock yeah you need a rock crushing machine yeah and there are lots of great there are lots of great models available on the market yeah can i ask when you say he's a big rock crusher is he a big as in like big in the industry rock crusher or is it specifically

he's a big rock i know he's both of those yeah he works on the two levels that he does yeah i don't know how big he is as a man as well it could work on three levels i don't know i don't know how much magic it does he got i saw that piece in the times these pieces he's got as much magic as me wow it's called comminution isn't it turning big rocks into little rocks oh man and then you screen them and then you might grind them smaller again and yeah crushing grinding do you know what's better wet grinding or dry grinding oh my god because they're both done i do know i do you know i would feel like what would you say better yeah grinding mills can be operated both dry and wet according to the encyclopedia britannica let's go wet yeah and wet grinding is predominant

yeah wow so what is wet grinding you just add give me a break literally read it directly from the encyclopedia britannica you add water to the yeah and i just wonder why it why it helps i guess it's um lubricates yeah lubrication and it helps with like the dust probably absolutely when you cut into flagstones and things yeah it helps have a bit of water to kind of look at where do you come from i'm sorry guys have arrived what can i say um yeah but most of them are like massive nutcrackers basically you just they're they're all top loaded because then the pressure from the rocks above acts on the rocks that you're trying to crush down and so they've got they're being forced into you know two different directions right um and you just feed the rock in and the rock cracks and

because the metal surfaces are harder than the rock that's you know that's the process and then eventually when it's small enough it's a dust and you can get the lithium out or the whatever right yeah yeah gold so hang on so you're using big rocks as your tool to crush the former big rock into smaller rock it's helping that's so cool it's a partner there is actually a thing called autogenus milling uh well it's literally just the rocks that you're crushing they're all crushing each other that's so cool that's incredible i love that i was reading about the history of crushing rocks i think too small and one of us had to uh i i just want to give a shout out to the website machinerypartner.com okay uh because and i'm quoting directly here it's an event in

1881 when philatus w gates got a us patent for his device which was that was the sort of a rock crusher you know that was the basic model philatus not a name you hear often these days is it no that's the first name yeah phil gates in 1883 mr blake challenged mr gates to crush nine cubic yards of stone in a contest to see which crusher would finish the job faster the gates crusher completed the task 40 minutes sooner i was looking into humans who can crush rocks oh that's good thing because i thought before we had the machines we must have needed humans yeah yeah um and then i thought i you know can anyone do it with their bare hands and i actually found uh the first non roman emperor maximinus thrax who was uh who was supposedly a rock crusher

the first non roman emperor yeah i said he wasn't born in he wasn't yeah but he was sorry but he was emperor of ron yeah exactly yeah um and he he's a person who was very tall but because he was quite a lot taller than most people the exaggerations have been written down and it's hard to know where he was so supposedly and this was a roman emperor he was eight feet six inches tall right no yeah all right yeah apparently his um his thumb was so large that he wore his wife's bracelet as a ring on it that's how well he's good at hitchhiking that guy and so during public events he used to impress people by picking up rocks and crushing them with his bare hands and pulling wagons on his own which yeah um feels a bit demeaning for the emperor of ron to be happy to

do like hey he had a very short tenure it was three years as emperor um because he was overthrown because of his disastrous um how you're on war uh just by some people some other people yeah just that's very impressive that they managed to overthrow i mean it's not just him fighting against everyone he's not like let's do a thumb war anyone can beat me in a thumb war i will hand over oh god yeah when he's telling the gladiators whether or not they've survived or not there's no mistake in that it's like a foam hand at the basketball match so this was a really interesting topic for me yeah um so uh i have decided to go a little off-piste and discuss the rock did you know that the rock's nickname as a kid was jewey i bet you didn't no dewey

jewey was it covered in dew yes exactly and that's the reason why um do you know that he has a degree in criminology did none of you knew that he's an ordinary minister guys he's not okay that's more understandable that makes sense um on dewey is it like hui jewey and louis kind of do we know why or is it the dewey decibel system he's about all his time in the library as a kid i'm gonna be honest these are bullet points i i haven't really dialed deep into it okay all right do you guys know what the smallest rock is here we go back to business back to proper rocks boys well okay well what is a rock you know it is a speck of dust a rock no oh it's not it's a pebble a rock yes i think it is okay is it grit is it oh it's smaller than grit you guys are never you

you're never gonna get it talc seems pretty small yeah yeah it's clay clay clay clay oh my god okay no this is really interesting genuinely this sounds so boring i appreciate that you don't need to keep saying that everything in this segment follows that trend so which is smaller sand or clay we now know it's clay it's clay but you might not have thought that right no no clay like sand feels so fine like you know that very fine caribbean sand it feels so fine okay so clay particles are unbelievably tiny the smallest one is clay small rocks it's a sort of little silica i think it's a silicate okay but yeah you only you never feel it as like sand it doesn't fall through your fingers yeah exactly right but i think you've got clay soils and stuff

like that and there it is in granular form so particles of clay can be less than 0.002 millimeters across i think that's two microns possibly it's unbelievably small so the largest particle of clay you can get is not even a thousandth as big as the smallest particle of sand right the world oh that's incredible that's the scale of difference we're talking about i told you i take it all back and this is the really weird thing clay particles can be so small i'm quoting directly from a site i read here clay particles can be so small that it could take hundreds of years for them to settle from the top to the bottom of a bottle of water what because it just take everything gets in their way everything you know the tiny molecule of anything just disrupts the clay from

its path and um and this is why clay soil is so sticky is because there are so many spaces in between these tiny tiny particles the water fits in between the particles so it just holds huge amounts of water that's why clay soil is so heavy has someone actually done that experiment no we've found a plastic a hundred years ago yeah well that's if they started then they would have they would have watched it hit the bottom i'm afraid i don't think anyone's done that experiment properly but it just thinks it's sort of yeah yeah and also we're actually banning plastic yeah we don't encourage that do we sorry um i found a mystery rock oh it's a mystery rock that grows baby rocks and it it's very bizarre um so and it's only found so far as we know in one place in the world

or at least so far as the article claims uh and this is in romania and it's in a town called costesti and these are called trovant rocks t-r-o-v-a-n-t if you saw the rock one day and it's raining overnight or whatever and you come back the next day suddenly the rock has grown it's got like a bulbous new bit of rock that's on top of it and they basically secret cement and harden so um what happens is during rain during a heavy shower they absorb the rain minerals and then they come into contact with chemicals that are inside the rock which then create a pressure reaction which pushes out this kind of concrete and sometimes they become so bulbous that they loosen and they fall off and that's the baby rock that's created next to the rock other times they

just stick like giant pimples coming out of them feels like we could utilize it to build things like build a bridge you put one of these rocks and then you fire a hose at it and then shake it yes exactly yeah i think it's true and and some are some are tiny they can be really really tiny or 15 feet high these rocks so when the bulbous bits are secreted they're like giant rocks yeah two roman emperors ridiculous yeah like and you just get it in this one spot in the world so far as we know wow that is so interesting yeah but did you know that the rock has a tattoo that took 60 hours to do so you know what is it of yes okay it is time for our final fact of the show and that is james okay my fact this week is that one

of the biggest tv events of 1966 involved someone reading extracts from a book written by a relative known as rocky flintstone what this is an outrage this is insane james this is an accusation of plagiarism isn't it against my father this is astonishing i have never heard this so i was just reading the old newspaper archives and i searched for rocky flintstone because i thought maybe there was someone with that actual name who lived in the past and i couldn't find anyone like that but there was a big spike of mentions in 1966 and that was then the final episode of the flintstone's head and you can still watch this today online it's an episode where fred finds an old diary of his grandfather rocky flintstone his name was rock bottom flintstone but he was

nicknamed rocky that's an even better name for that and it was about a running with some stone age nazis and a romantic escape with a character called mataharok like who's based on matahari this way so there's a little bit of romance in there as well do you know what that makes some sort of sense because my dad my dad recently tried to trademark rocky flintstone because he's an idiot and he thinks that that's going to be able to be done and he got a letter back from water brothers basically saying absolutely not really under no circumstances and actually you're lucky that we're not suing you for using it up until this point but you know what there's the parallels here go a bit further than just the name being the same so my dad wrote a porno is ending now after six

seasons because we're being sued by the flintstone and the final episode of my dad wrote a porno is going to feature for the first time rocky flintstone himself so it's the first ever appearance of rocky flintstone someone's read the press release so flintstones this episode where rocky flintstone appears for the first time is the final episode of season six that of the flintstone yeah so it's the exact same scenario as you that's so this is so did you have any idea that your dad i mean has your dad seen this episode of the flintstones no did you sort of see it and then forget all about it and years later no because it would have been i think it's just an awesome name and the coincidence yeah well he was he named himself the rocky after a dog in brazil which we

don't need to go into but the flintstone bit was because he really relates to you know in the title sequence yeah when he gets locked out the house he's like back to the top yes yeah yeah apparently that's yeah that's very well that is very much like my parents so i think that that's where he was inspired from but that is mad that rocky flintstone is actually a character and the the grandfather of fred you said yes right yeah so one generation difference but closer and i watched a bit of the episode in it it's going from fred reading out loud to his wife and barnie his friends so it's a similar thing extracts of the diary out loud while they then cut to the scenes itself i think there's something of alice in wilma as well isn't there what did that say yeah redhead yeah i mean

i'm not sure how i feel about this that makes me think my whole career's been a lie but obviously the flintstones was massive in the 60s yeah it was absolutely enormous and so the end of the flintstones was watched by i don't know how many people i couldn't they didn't have the actual figures but it was like 30 percent of the of the tv watching wow yeah and it was it was the end of the original series because obviously it's gone on and on and so on but we're going to talk about the flintstones movies later on don't you worry i bloody hope so iconic bits of cinema but the flintstones the cartoon i didn't realize was also originally aimed at adults just as much as children yeah of course late in prime time show 8 30 p.m yeah i'm really like in fact it was originally

called the flagstones and then the gladstones yeah and then the flintstones they finally hit on that as a because those two both sound so weird yeah comedy called the flagstones have you seen the pilot of the flagstone no no i actually watched it really all 90 seconds of it and it was it was good it's amazing that it got picked up are you are you saying it is good or is it good it is good but it doesn't have the magic of the was it the same characters as well yeah okay right um yeah but it was it was made in 1959 but never aired until 1994 when it was discovered okay right we should watch it it's interesting to see is the year that the flintstones movie came out no yeah so anyway there's in the original series one of the things that to appeal to adults as well that they did

i'm pushing on is um they would have celebrity guests that would come on or they would parody celebrities of the day uh in order to give some comic as you would say uh for the adult sort of recognition so um quick quiz because they loved a pun they absolutely love okay karry grant is a character what has he been renamed clay grunt oh that's good it's good um karry granite yes one no uh tony curtis who voiced himself is on what is he called um bony curtis because they were in the that's good yeah no close you're in the right area of the name stony curtis yeah um there's uh rock hudson plays himself amazingly yeah it's rock hudstone oh my god and and hallie berry in the movie the flintstones i don't know if you're keen to talk about that

she was actually directly named after a famous female celebrity hallie beryl uh no so no so you've got to step away from hallie's name altogether shaley berry no no what halite very no her name is nothing to do with it right it's another famous actress the character's name yeah the character's name yeah named after another famous charlie's the rock no so there's no pun it's just outright her name oh charon stone yep there we go and she's called charon stone in the in the movie yeah hallie berry's called charon stone in the movie yeah but that's enough on the movie let's get back to the tv series well just lots of i really find it interesting that the sort of adult elements of it because i did not i never watched the flintstones

really i really uh yeah just not refer to you with it i guess so but it's they they they were sponsored by cigarettes so in the original days which winston andy how do i tell you anyway they were sponsored by this firm winston cigarettes was that when it was going out to children it feels like that was when it was yeah yeah yeah even then it was yeah because advertising was just different back then they were advertising to adults they weren't they weren't kids smoking have you seen that as well i i actually watched that yeah it isn't the smoking that got me it's the outrageous misogyny of those two men oh really it is insane like barnie and fred are just like watching their wives do loads of chores and housework and then they're like

let's go around the back and they sneak off and they're just like oh like reclining and just smoking and just chatting and watching their wives work right they are cavemen but it is literally there's a theory that the flintstones are from the future which i quite like well they do meet the jetsons at one stage don't they so that's that's part of the theory one theory is because they have four fingers obviously we have five fingers in this time so perhaps the little finger has sort of vestigially disappeared because you don't need it anymore because you know what do you use your little finger for you're right and we never had four fingers so that has to be an evolution and they the animals in the flintstones can speak

obviously these days animals can't speak and never in the past as far as we know have animals been able to speak yes so perhaps in the future they will be able to speak humans coexisting with dinosaurs never happened in the past is it a sequel to Jurassic Park the theory is that it's a post-apocalyptic future where all current technology has collapsed they're trying to replicate it using the mutant dinosaurs my theory is that they listened to this podcast and rocks became so popular because of the last section that we just did away with all of the technology and people lived in a rock-based society yep i'd live there i'd move wow did you guys see the flintstones kids just say no holiday special no i missed that one this was something that went out in 1988 and it was a

public service say no to drugs flintstones episode brilliant oh man can i tell you the the plot yes please so the flintstones kids it's like young young flintstones this is bam bam and pebbles so no it's not it's actually the main generation we know but like the muppet babies exactly like the muppet babies yeah nice um they're trying to win tickets to a michael jackson concert who in this is called michael jackstone thank you exactly uh wilma is tempted to join up with a gang of older kids whose leader stony smokes crack marijuana unfortunately you're right they should have gone with crack um and then Wilma talks to her parents and they tell her that a real friend wouldn't offer you drugs and stony is arrested for drug usage and ends with a version of

michael jackstone's song beat it and the episode also features nancy reagan as herself does she have a funny name i think she might have been doing a kind of extra like hi everybody you know rather than oh nancy reagan yeah that is a really hot that's probably why she never made it onto them can we talk a little bit about the movie yes oh go on oh my god yes okay well this is kind of tangential it's not really about the movies even though it is um the b 52s but the uh the band yes love very of love jack fein um what a tune they recorded versions of meet the flintstones and the bedrock twitch which i'm sure you've got that record did you yeah the b the b 52s or they they changed their name that's the thing they changed their name to the bc 52 very cool really

it's very cool and they even appeared on the top 40 chart as the bc 52 that's committed to the bit that's great isn't it everyone got on board i like that that's the gig yeah i really want to see both the flintstones film and the flintstones film sequel viva rock vegas yeah um which so you've seen both of course yeah i just mentioned to my wife that we were recording this she's i've seen that hallie berry tries to have sex with john goodman in the film and it's oh it's quite it's there's quite a sort of um saucy plot where john goodman is fred flintstone because he's incredibly eminent as an actor now and seeing him in 1994 playing fred flintstone it's very funny but he looks so like fred flintstone yeah it's amazing to have to say yes yeah is it not a good film uh it's it's

quite like a cult film it was commercially successful uh but afterwards the entire cast refused to return for the sequel which is why the prequel viva rock vegas uh was recast entirely nobody the same yeah because the first of its own movie is elizabeth taylor's last ever film which is really terrible the casting is amazing what a way to go out it's got rick maranis rick maranis it's got yeah elizabeth taylor they clearly thought they had something one thing i read was that rick maranis basically quit acting after this movie because they realized that they were using him it peaked how do you talk about i personally i think i'd read that he had he had family issues which meant he had to step back from acting but the thing claims that he was just like

i can't be put in any more movies like this rick maranis like a maranis like a it's like scree that you get on top of a mountain that's very nice absolutely because rock maranis was right there he needs the puns you need explaining for that's his pun oh glass was bound from the entire set of the flintstones what was it he guesses why no glass in the future in the future there's no glass that's correct was it that though because i know that in um is it in downtown abbey you're not allowed to wear calving client underwear because even though it's not on show they think maybe your sackcloth or whatever it is they wear it might ride up and they might see it so your sackcloth i haven't seen it's it's it's do you think it's like in the 14th century it hasn't been it's not

it's not okay but you can see you can see there are lots of it's abbey i thought it was about monks there are lots of probably quite sheer and slinky gowns and out there so maybe if you're wearing modern you can't wear modern underwear basically even though it's not going to be on show is it similar it's not that no glass bands from set i think james jenny you're the only one who hasn't slang it again james has got quite a good one darren's no glass in the future so there's a wide range of plausibility i forgot again then we talk about the flintstones the flintstones movies but they worried that that because there was so much rock on set no shoes no one's wearing shoes oh no one's wearing shoes the entire cast are filming barefoot that's clever so

really kind of any glass on set yeah well done that that is pretty good there was uh the actor in the original series miss gene vanda ply uh or pill pyl is her surname and she was the voice of wilma and um uh she gave an interview in 1995 where she explained that they were basically for the amazing amount of money that this this made because it was syndicated around the world i mean there was just so much money being made she only received two hundred and fifty dollars an episode and then she did a contract that said the residual payments from syndication she did a one-off payment of fifteen thousand dollars and that was it that she got and she was a great voice she did a lot of voices in the jetsons as well and she did i think as well as

doing wilma she did pebbles in that she was she was she was rosy in the jetsons rosy she was she was the um the maid yeah robot yeah it's so incredible um oh that's awful yeah and so yeah she said if i got residuals i wouldn't be living in sam clement i'd own san clement um oh yeah so well she's she's a better agent frankly exactly don't you blame yourself okay that's it that's all of our facts thank you so much for listening if you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said on this podcast you can find us all on our twitter accounts i'm on at shribeland andy at andrew hunter m james at james harkin and jamie at uncle legal don't ask okay it's a whole thing

yeah or you can get us on our group account which is at no such thing or our website no such thing as a fish dot com check out all of our previous episodes they are up there now you can also buy the new merch that we've released it's a bunch of t-shirts and pin badges and so on and also you can get access to clubfish the private member club jamie uh you can listen to the final episodes of my dad wrote a porno which are going out in december these are the final episodes one including jamie's dad rocky flinstone for the first time ever no one's ever heard his voice before will you have to i know your dad but yeah uh but and it's a good voice so i'm very excited to hear it um but uh on behalf of the podcasting world we're very sad to see you guys go so we're now

lighted well i mean financially does all right fine fish live on forever don't anyway we're gonna miss you guys uh but uh we hope to see you coming back for reunions anyway that's it that's all of our facts we'll be back again next week with another episode we'll see you then goodbye oh my god i just broke it you know when like people win awards like i wish i could break it in a half and give it to the other nominees i'm really sorry i just practiced my golf swing earlier you

you