No Such Thing As A Fish - 98: No Such Thing As Planet George

Episode Date: January 29, 2016

Live from the Up The Creek Comedy Club in Greenwich, Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss Snowmageddon, the most planety planet, and the world's unluckiest lottery winner. ...

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the Up the Creek Comedy Club in Greenwich. My name is Dan Shriver. I'm sitting here next to Anna Chazinski, Andy Murray, and James Harkin. Once again, we have sat around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days, and in no particular order, here we go. Okay, time for fact number one, and that's my fact. My fact this week is that even though we're not sure it exists, the new planet, planet
Starting point is 00:00:44 number nine, is the most planet-y planet of all the planets. So this is a major discovery that we've found. Yeah. A new planet. Or didn't find. Or didn't find. Either way, it's big news. I think it exists because of computer modeling.
Starting point is 00:01:01 They've modeled the solar system. They think this thing exists. It's absolutely massive, and one thing that is very important with planets is that it clears out the area of its orbit. So there aren't other things going around with it, and they think according to their calculations, this planet has done that more than any other planet, and that's what makes it the most planet-y planet of all the planets. According to the guy who discovered it, or one of the two guys who discovered it, Dr.
Starting point is 00:01:26 Brown. Right. A new planet-y planet is a planet that no other things want to be close to, really. Right? Well, if that's the case, then I am a planet-y planet. I read a description of it that it was almost certain to be a fifth member of the Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Quartet. So it's like the fifth beetle.
Starting point is 00:01:46 But it's like the fifth beetle was cast into deep space. Yeah. The really cool thing about the new planet is, you may have seen this in the news, the man who discovered it, one of the two guys who wrote the paper on it, is the same man who killed Pluto. Yeah. It's like a grudge match. It's so exciting.
Starting point is 00:02:06 His Twitter account is at PlutoKiller, isn't it? No. It's actually. Yeah. And he says he still gets... He gets letters and obscene phone calls from people who miss Pluto. He said... These are his exact words.
Starting point is 00:02:25 He said, I got hate mail from young children for many years, and he doesn't get any more now because young children these days know that Pluto is no longer a planet. Pluto was named by a child, wasn't it? Was it? Yeah. It's named by an 11-year-old girl, Venetian. I read such a nice interview with her, which was about five years ago, I think, about how exciting it was that she'd named Pluto.
Starting point is 00:02:45 And the interviewer kept on asking her why she'd named it Pluto. It was a NASA interviewer. NASA interviewer said, and you thought about it because of the Greek and Roman mythology about Pluto being the god of the underworld, yes? And she was like, no, no, I don't think it was as subtle as that, no, it was just the name I knew hadn't been used. OK, but it was also because the first two letters, PL, have a connection with Percival Lowell?
Starting point is 00:03:05 No, no, I certainly didn't realise that. I appreciate it. It's a boy interviewer, just give me something. She got five pounds for that. But they took that five pounds off her when they demoted it from a planet, didn't they? No. She said she was in her late 80s when it was demoted, and they asked her about it at the time.
Starting point is 00:03:30 She said, at my age, I've been largely indifferent to the debate. She's just saying that to hide all the hate mail she's been sending to Mike Brown, hasn't they? So they're going to come up with a new name for this planet, and they don't know what they're going to call it yet. The working name is George, isn't it? Oh, is it? No, but that's quite nice, because we almost did have a planet called George.
Starting point is 00:03:51 Yeah, Uranus was called George. Well, it was called George, and they said that's a ridiculous name. And then they said, let's go with Uranus. It was going to be named George after King George III, and then they said, no. Why did they say no to King George III? Was it after a living? I think they thought all the other planets were named after Roman gods, and suddenly some dickhead king's gone, oh, name it after me.
Starting point is 00:04:16 So Mike Brown and his friend, Constantine Batigin, who's the other person who's kind of found this one, their working name for it is Planet Fatty. OK, they said that they're going to call it Planet Fatty because it's 1990 slang for something that's cool. But I went on to Urban Dictionary, and Fatty does not mean cool. It means something that I really cannot say on this stage. Really? Yeah, something very rude indeed.
Starting point is 00:04:45 Wow. Yeah. Fatty for the pH? Oh, yeah. So James, you think another news story that's going to come up is that Pluto is going to be renamed to Planet? I think it will do in the next couple of years, yeah. What?
Starting point is 00:04:56 I think what will happen in the next couple of years is... What? I'm going to get a lot of hate mail for this. Yeah, give me a stamp. I thought the thing was, it's so tiny, and there are so many hundreds of other objects which are the same size. So I think all the other hundreds will get cold planets as well. No way.
Starting point is 00:05:14 That's my guess. So much more memorizing to do in year nine at school, isn't it going to be? It's 2,000. Oh. Name all the planets well. How long have you got? I was reading about the current status of Pluto's current official name is asteroid number 134340, which is a long way from fallen, yeah.
Starting point is 00:05:32 Why did they call it that? Was it because it's like an asteroid? It's named after the ancient Greek god 134340. Some of the names that they... Maybe some people have suggested names on Twitter and whatever for this new planet. Minerva, Persephone, Nix, who's the goddess of the night, is quite a good one. Some people have said Bowie because of the timing of that. And the first person to suggest this one, which is my favorite, was at Ted Vogel underscore
Starting point is 00:06:01 Wilson, and he thinks it should be called Pluto. Very nice. That's a good name, isn't it? Very good. I think we should have more puns in the skies though. So there's been other news this week, which has been really exciting, in sort of NASA news, space news, which is I saw an article about Scott Kelly, who's been up there now 300 days, and he was celebrating for 300 days of being in...
Starting point is 00:06:25 Wait, he got up there and immediately started celebrating. I'm in space, guys! Actually, it's weird you guys bring that up. They now factor in allness when astronauts go up. So Tim Peake, when he went out on his first ever EVA, when he went outside the ship, they used to have a really tight schedule, go straight here. They now factor in time because any astronaut who would go outside would find themselves just going, oh my god, I'm hanging in space, I'm looking at the planet Earth,
Starting point is 00:06:52 and they never factored in time for that. So they've now given all time where you can just go, oh, and then get on with your work. So all time is now a thing. But yeah, so he's up there. He's with this guy, Scott Kelly, who's been up there 300 days, and Scott Kelly made this clip to celebrate it by showing how you play ping-pong in space. And what they do is they have these little bats that are built to move water. And so this is just as a practical thing in space.
Starting point is 00:07:18 And so what they do is they play ping-pong using a droplet of water, and you just hit a droplet of water over, and it heads that way, and then you hit it back. He was playing on his own. I don't think it's caught on as a game yet. Up in the ISS. But I was watching this video, it was really interesting, because he's playing and he's talking about it, and I noticed as I was watching it that he's wearing a belt. I'm like, why are you wearing a belt in space? Like, that's not going anywhere.
Starting point is 00:07:42 So I googled it, and I was looking, why wear a belt in space? And it turns out you wear a belt in space to stop your trousers from falling up. We need to move on to our next fact in a second. Anyone got anything else before we do? Just one last thing on Mike Brown, the astronomer at the centre of all of this. I just love the title of his 2010 book on the whole matter. It is How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming. OK, it's time for our second fact of the show, and that is James Harkin.
Starting point is 00:08:19 OK, my fact this week is that the first use of the word snowmageddon came in the same press release as the first apology for the use of the word snowmageddon. Because of all the snow in America, I thought I'd see, like, the history of snowmageddon. And I found a use in 2008. It was a press release from the Canadian government, and they said about how it's snowmageddon. And then right at the end, in a very Canadian way, they say, we're sorry we're not trying to, like, take the mickey and say that it's not very important. It is important. Sorry about snowmageddon.
Starting point is 00:08:51 No, we're really sorry. And then snowmageddon was kind of not used that much for a couple of years. And then in 2008 and in 2010, they had a massive storm in Washington, D.C., and that's when snowmageddon really took off. Right. And according to Wikipedia, there was a few other things. Snowzilla, within a few hours of snowmageddon. And apparently that storm also popularized the term Kaiser Snowzee.
Starting point is 00:09:18 Oh, man. This later storm, it's produced a thing. Because you guys, I'm sure, have all seen all the enormous snowfall on the East Coast of America. It's been thundersnow is what's been produced. Oh, yeah, because Scott Kelly tweeted it. Scott Kelly, who is on the International Space Station, I think that was how we found out, very early on when it was happening. He tweeted thundersnow.
Starting point is 00:09:42 And because he's obviously such a knowledgeable guy, he said, this is unbelievably rare, by the way, guys. And it's even more rare that I'm seeing it from the other side of it. But yeah, it's super rare, isn't it, thundersnow? Yeah. So it's where a storm, instead of producing rain, produces snow, because of the different way the air rubs together or something. So...
Starting point is 00:10:01 Some dirty bullshit that we're not going to give the time to. I think when a cloud produces snow instead of rain, it's usually just because it's cold. You can blind me with all the meteorology you like, James. I read today. I had no idea about this. It snows on Mars. So it's not your classic snow. It's not your, like...
Starting point is 00:10:23 It's not like snow, but they... But they call it... Like, it's kind of like a snow. Something cold that falls from the sky. Yeah, exactly. And so the Mars rover was looking up, I don't know why. It was just looking up, and it could see the snow coming down. And it was having all time. LAUGHTER
Starting point is 00:10:44 Wow, wow, wow, wow. But so Mars has the craziest of atmospheres. There's spots in Mars. In the same... This was the article I was reading, and told me this. If you stood in a certain spot of Mars, your feet could be 21 degrees, but your chest would be 0 degrees. That's how the difference between down there to up here is.
Starting point is 00:11:04 There's so little atmosphere. Here, to get out of the atmosphere, you'd have to go really, really high, but there, by your chest, you wouldn't be in the atmosphere anymore. So it'd be really, really cold. Actually, speaking of hot and cold, I was reading... So something that's happening to go back to Space News
Starting point is 00:11:20 is the Kepler Space Telescope that was sent out a few years ago. Was it back this year, I think? And so that's found tons of new planets. And one of the planets it's found is this planet called Gliese 581c. And what NASA says about that is, so it's tidally locked.
Starting point is 00:11:37 So that basically means that it doesn't really rotate. So half of it is... One half of it is scorching hot, while the other half is constantly frozen. It is believed to be the best candidate for human expansion. So the current storms in America, there is a guy who's capitalising on them at the moment. He started it last year.
Starting point is 00:11:59 It's a business called shipsnowyo.com. He's called Kyle Wehring. And you can buy snow in a box from him. And he sends it over, and he keeps it cool. And how does he make sure it doesn't melt? He packs it in... It's like an Ineski. He packs it in an Eski. So he sends it over.
Starting point is 00:12:18 So an Eski is an Australian word for, like, a fridge. Yeah, it's like, really? It's like if you're going to the beach and you're bringing some bottles and you're just going to sit there and down some tinies. It's that kind of thing. It's weird, because when the Australian comes out in you, it really comes out. It's crazy, by the way. I just can't sound it.
Starting point is 00:12:34 So just quickly, following up on this, he offers... By the time your Eskies arrived and your snow's melted, he offers you a refund and he'll send you a whole new batch of snow. There's also someone... So quite a few people have made it, even though a lot of people are in serious trouble.
Starting point is 00:12:51 A lot of people actually are quite comfortable and having a lot of fun with it. People are making bars out of the snow and serving drinks there. Yeah, they sold tons of extra booze, didn't they? As soon as they knew the storm was coming, they bought as much booze as they could possibly get. Yeah, yeah. And someone on Airbnb put up an igloo that they've built.
Starting point is 00:13:07 For $10 a night, you can rent the igloo. You've got to bring your own sleeping bag. But suddenly, since reading the article, it's been updated, the article, and it's now no longer on Airbnb. They're not sure if it was banned or if it melted. So on naming storms,
Starting point is 00:13:24 this storm doesn't need a name and the Weather Channel, I think, is against the US Weather Channel. It doesn't need a name. Snowstorm is not a finite thing. I think one meteorologist, I was reading, said it's just an extension of normal weather.
Starting point is 00:13:40 So something like that. Everything's just an extension of normal. There's no supernatural weather. Something like a cyclone has a very finite start and finish. You can pick one exactly when it started and exactly when it finished. So they need names,
Starting point is 00:13:56 but storms don't. The Weather Channel has announced the storm names for 2016 and they are things like Ajax, so there's going to be a storm called Ajax, Kyla, Quo, as in status, and Zandor, Wailon,
Starting point is 00:14:12 and Yolo. Storm Yolo. You've been killed by Storm Yolo. Well, you owe me die once. There's a paper in Canada that came out this week that warned people against eating snow.
Starting point is 00:14:28 Because, apparently, snow is really good at collecting bits from car exhausts or bits of toxins from the air. Snow is really, really good at picking it up. So if you kind of take a little bit of scoop of snow from the ground, like a lot of people do,
Starting point is 00:14:44 and just kind of eat some of it. Yeah, like everyone does. It's snowing. Tonight we eat. The South Korean government a few years ago made an explicit thing to people saying, you must not eat yellow snow.
Starting point is 00:15:00 There was an actual press release saying you must not eat yellow snow. And that's because they'd had this snow that had come which was yellow and it had heavy minerals and stuff from some power stations. Oh, really? Oh, wow. And so that's the one reason
Starting point is 00:15:16 that you should never eat yellow snow. Minerals from power stations. We're going to have to move on. There's one thing which is a new theory that's erupted this week. Penguins, they think may... I mean, there are so many qualifications
Starting point is 00:15:32 in this already. You can get away with saying anything at this point, though. So penguins, they think... They... Think may... Possibly. When they're about to mate,
Starting point is 00:15:51 they will need a nice... Wait, is this the they who think this? No, this is the penguins. No, the penguins, if it's true, know it. It's our true thing there. So they think that the penguins are like, oh, we need somewhere to have a good time. Why not here? But, oh, it's really...
Starting point is 00:16:08 It's really cold and icy and snowy. So they'll poo on it and then the poo melts the snow and then they go, now, that's where we have sex. There's a new theory. It's true that they poo. Blah, blah, blah. OK, time for fact number three, and that is Andrew Hunter Murray.
Starting point is 00:16:27 OK, my fact is that this week we have discovered the largest prime number ever. We would have discovered it in September, but the computer which found it forgot to tell anybody. So this has happened. So there are computers all over the world looking for new prime numbers, and they're up to really enormous ones now,
Starting point is 00:16:50 and they're very useful in encrypting stuff. Yeah, they're called GIMPs, aren't they? Yeah. Something massive prime... Great internet, Merzine, which I think, yeah, Merzine prime search. Yeah, Merzine. It's Merzine primes. So these are prime numbers named after a French guy
Starting point is 00:17:06 called Merzine, and you can download a computer program onto your computer and it will look for these prime numbers. And if you find one, then you get like 100 grand or something like that, or $100,000. And everyone... A lot of people have put it onto their computer, but the people who found it this week,
Starting point is 00:17:22 or last year or whatever it was, they have so much computer processing power that they've managed to find loads of them. Right. Yeah, I think they found like four of the last five or something like that. That's right, yeah. So the new one... I'm going to read this out from here.
Starting point is 00:17:38 The new number is 5 million digits longer than the previous largest one. It's 2 to the power of 74 million, 207,281. All of that. Minus one. If you were going to write it out and you could write 10 digits
Starting point is 00:17:54 in four seconds, this is a calculation by a New York Times correspondent, it would take you three months without slowing down. It's got 22 million digits in it. Like my phone! LAUGHTER It starts...
Starting point is 00:18:10 LAUGHTER It starts... It's not me when you get bored. Stop, stop! And then it ends... And for people at home... So you've just given away the ending. There's no point in reading the middle now.
Starting point is 00:18:30 For people at home, we edited out the other 22 million. I just didn't say. And you can download the actual number on your computer and have a look through it, which I did. LAUGHTER It contains my six digit code to access my bank account.
Starting point is 00:18:46 James, don't say that! People will know! It contains it 21 times. Wow! That's how big this number is. It contains my library number twice, and at one stage it has eight sevens in a row. So I'm just giving you the edited highlights here.
Starting point is 00:19:02 LAUGHTER I was watching an interview with the guy who discovered it, or rather the guy who set the computer up that discovered it, and there was a moment that, like, this is amazing. There's the big new prime number it's beyond any that we've had before. What can we do with it?
Starting point is 00:19:20 He was like, we have no idea. So most of them can be used for encrypting things on computers. Unfortunately, this one is now such a global celebrity that it will be noticed immediately by hackers. The thing is, you use prime numbers in encryption
Starting point is 00:19:36 by taking two prime numbers, multiplying them together, and then it's finding the factors of that secondary number. Now, if you have a number which has got 23, 24 million digits in, you know that one of them must be this number. So everyone knows that it must be this one,
Starting point is 00:19:52 so it's really easy to crack. So the only time this will be useful is when we get some even bigger numbers that we can use. Which we will do one day. I'd never heard prime numbers described like this, but they're the building blocks of maths really, and they're the equivalent of atoms in science, because prime numbers
Starting point is 00:20:08 are, because nothing goes into them, everything else is a factor of something else. So everything else can be split up, but you can't split up a prime number. Like that, the equivalent of an atom. And something else I didn't know about prime numbers, because you think that they're kind of so randomly distributed if we've taken this long to work out
Starting point is 00:20:24 what, you know, the pattern is, is that all prime numbers, if you square them, are a multiple of 24 and then adding one. Now, you just write that down. Not the really small ones. Not the ones under 5.
Starting point is 00:20:40 Anything over 5. How are we going to go through them all? Yeah. 11 is, 13 is. 11 is. Yeah, so they found this using the GIMPS software. And this is a weird thing
Starting point is 00:20:58 about GIMPS is I don't know. If you go on to Google and type the word GIMPS into Google, all of the first 5 things that you get are about this prime number thing. The same is not true of Google images.
Starting point is 00:21:14 This is amazing. So, Cicadas, you know, there's that kind of Cicada in North America, which only comes up to the surface and breathes every... Every 17 years. Well, it's every prime number of years. So, in some places, it's every 13 years.
Starting point is 00:21:30 In some places, it's every 17 years. In some places, it's another prime number of years. And, which sounds ridiculous, but it was hypothesized in the article I read that that actually does make sense because if you come up in a prime number of years, you have the least chance of coinciding with predators
Starting point is 00:21:46 which also have, like, periodical patterns. Because, so, let's say you come up every 8 years, then if you're hunted by a panther that appears every 2 years, then they're going to bump into you a lot. But if you're coming up every prime number of years, then you're not going to bump into predators every prime number of years.
Starting point is 00:22:02 Do you think there's a Cicada that comes up every 2 to the 74 million years? And the only reason we haven't seen it is because, you know, you'd be pretty lucky to see that, wouldn't you? I don't know what a Cicada is. It's a little insect. Cicada fact, there's only one Cicada
Starting point is 00:22:18 in the UK. One species of Cicada. Not just one lonely Cicada. Lonesome Trevor. There's only one species of Cicada in the UK. It's called the New Forest Cicada. And we think they live in the New Forest, but they might have died out, because no one's seen one for about 10 years.
Starting point is 00:22:36 And you should be able to hear the call, but you can't really hear it because it's outside of human hearing range. But you can buy an app and the app can hear the Cicada call and so you can walk around the New Forest with your app listening for Cicadas and if you find one, then you'll have discovered
Starting point is 00:22:52 that they still exist. That'd be cool, wouldn't it? So I didn't find any prime number stuff, but I started looking into numbers of the week and there's a very famous set of numbers now. There's going to be a long list now. Six? No, there was this week
Starting point is 00:23:08 a set of numbers which was, there was this massive lotto, the big lottery draw that went and there was a story about this lady who thinks she's won the lottery, has found the ticket that she's won with all the numbers, but the barcode is missing. She put it in the washing machine, didn't she? Yes, she put it in the washing machine, it's missing.
Starting point is 00:23:24 It's one of those things where you think that must be the worst situation, right, that you've won the lottery and now you've not won it because you've lost the thing. And so I was looking into, is that genuinely the worst situation anyone's had in the lottery? And I found a guy that I think contends. So this guy won the lottery.
Starting point is 00:23:40 Okay. But this is what led up to him winning the lottery. His name is Franz Seller. He was a teacher who was born in 1929. In 1962, his train derailed and plunged into an icy river and he managed to escape and not die.
Starting point is 00:23:56 The next year, in 1963, while flying, the door blew out and he got sucked out of the plane and he survived. It was all good. Three years later, in 1966, he's riding on a bunch. He's riding on a bunch. It's Australia, it's an Australian term.
Starting point is 00:24:12 I was riding along a bunch, mate. Whatever you do, don't check that on the Urban Dictionary when you get home. So he's riding on a bus and the bus suddenly the bus plunges into a river. He gets out and survives. So this is 1962, 1963,
Starting point is 00:24:32 1966, 1970. He must take no public transport by this point. Exactly. He's in his car. Oh! He's in his car and it just blows up in flames. So he escapes and he's all right.
Starting point is 00:24:48 So that's 1970. 1973, he's still weary of public transport. In his car, once again, another fire blows up in his car, loses all his hair, manages to make it out. There's a whole nice period between 1973 and 1995 when nothing happens. He stayed at home.
Starting point is 00:25:06 But then he went out and got hit by a bus. So that's 1995. Then in 1996, he's back in his car. He drove and another, either it was a truck or a car, is coming towards him. He swerves away. He manages to escape his car as it plunges over a cliff, lands in a tree and then the car
Starting point is 00:25:24 goes 300 feet down and breaks into an icy river. In 2003, he won the Lotto. One million. That's divine justice. That's amazing. I think that's worse than losing your ticket and not winning. There was a couple, there were two other
Starting point is 00:25:42 very bad lottery stories. So one couple, I think this was actually last year, Ed Wiener and David Nyland, who had an Lotto app and they got the right numbers and they sent them off in the app and they'd won 35 million pounds and their app broke and it failed.
Starting point is 00:25:58 So they had the photographic evidence that they tried to send it on the app and it only sent it after the deadline and they sent it on their phone to search for cicada noises in the new forest. OK, let's move on to our final fact of the show
Starting point is 00:26:14 and that is Chazimski. Yes, my fact is that in a press release about the new English language test for migrants, the British government misspelled the word language. But yeah, this has been a big story over the last few weeks.
Starting point is 00:26:32 There's the new test for migrants and there's lots of controversy and people who even if they're on spousal visas if they fail these language tests they might be made to leave the country and it turns out the people who are releasing the press release spell language with the A and the U the wrong way around.
Starting point is 00:26:48 There was a very snotty reply from the government. The Prime Minister's official spokesman said all of us are open to mistakes at times. The Prime Minister is fully confident that his team speak English competently. LAUGHTER Touched a bit of a nerve. LAUGHTER
Starting point is 00:27:06 I went through, I basically haven't researched that much of this because I just went through trying to find the mistakes in all government bits of legislation over the last 50 years. Well, first of all, the independent put together a list of 10 questions that are taken from the government's list of possible migrant language
Starting point is 00:27:22 questions and here's the independence introduction to the questions. Listen to the sentence, the questions below are taken from practice exams for the B1 test that those who need to prove their knowledge of the English language to gain their indefinite leave to remain full stop.
Starting point is 00:27:38 Wow! Ooh, it's like a cliffhanger of a sentence. LAUGHTER Full stop. And then, so one of the questions is, maybe I'm wrong about this, but it's multiple choice questions and it's a completely under the sentence. So one of them is, have you finished with the newspaper
Starting point is 00:27:54 and it's ABCD ? Is this to gain citizenship? Yeah, yeah, to gain citizenship. You have to say whether you've finished with the newspaper. LAUGHTER That's the only criteria. Just give the frickin' newspaper back, you can come in the country.
Starting point is 00:28:10 LAUGHTER No, it's have you finished with the newspaper and then it's what is the grammatically correct ending to the sentence? Have you finished with the newspaper now, still, yet, or already? Now, the answer they want, and I did the test, yet is the answer they want, already is completely correct.
Starting point is 00:28:26 Yeah, if you want to be really passive-aggressive about it. LAUGHTER You can say, have you finished with that newspaper already? No, it's not that. It's the opposite of that. So they want you to find the trap of the American, have you finished with the newspaper already? But you could also just ask the valid question,
Starting point is 00:28:42 have you finished with the newspaper already? Hasn't have you read it that fast? Have you finished with the newspaper already? Completely correct. You could also passive-aggressively say, have you finished with the newspaper now? LAUGHTER What more British than that?
Starting point is 00:28:58 LAUGHTER It doesn't make any sense. Yeah. So my wife, who's Russian, she will have to take these tests quite soon. And she was trying out some questions from the citizenship test, which is like a general knowledge test.
Starting point is 00:29:14 And she tried them out on me, and literally I got none of them right. Really? Yeah. And my general knowledge is not bad. Right. I brought along one to test you, because I think your general knowledge is quite good. OK, well, one of the ones that she was asked in the practice test was, what is a national dish of whales?
Starting point is 00:29:30 Oh! Oh! Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh, yeah. Cool. Well, you might think that, according to the government... Well, exactly, but according to the government, it's Welsh cakes. Sorry, fellas. Sorry, guys.
Starting point is 00:29:46 The Home Office will be sending them. Oh, dear. Welsh cakes? Yeah, apparently, Welsh cakes. But the other thing is, if I want to become a citizen of Russia, I would have to take a Russian language test. And the Russian language test has all the normal things that you would expect.
Starting point is 00:30:02 But you also have to be able to interpret hidden meanings. Wow. That's cool. You know, Bill Bryson released a new book, The Road to Little Dribbling. And it's all in the beginning. He talks about taking a test to become a British citizen.
Starting point is 00:30:20 He decided to become it. And he was saying that not only are there mistakes in the test, but in the books that guide you into how to take the test are just completely filled with mistakes. One that he pointed out was they were talking about Anthony Hopkins and saying that he's someone to be proud of
Starting point is 00:30:36 as a British person. They spelled his name wrong. And also, he's taken up American citizenship. He's not a British anymore. Tina Turner is Swiss now. Is she? Wow. So, I was looking into the news
Starting point is 00:30:52 for other language mess-ups over the last week. And I found one that happened in Sweden. They were having at their parliament a political debate about very serious issues, actually. It was like a really long debate. They made a mistake, though, of when they transmitted it.
Starting point is 00:31:08 They put the wrong subtitles onto the debate. So, you had guys like Jean Borglund, who's the Minister of Education, looking really serious, saying something really serious. But the subtitles are reading, I will build the best sandcastle in the galaxy. I built for him.
Starting point is 00:31:28 And then you had Stephen Loffen, the Prime Minister, going, the latest invention, the Fantastic Dinosaur Submarine. And then the Minister for Environment going, Greetings, Earth Creatures. I have two pairs of boots.
Starting point is 00:31:48 One red pair and one yellow pair. Which one should I take? I'm going to ask my dolls. I don't know where they got those original subtitles from. Yeah, it was a cartoon animation about dinosaurs. Sounds great. You know that Godzilla
Starting point is 00:32:10 has just been awarded Japanese citizenship? It was done as a press PR stunt, obviously. But it was in a particular district of Tokyo that he got a Shinjuku, which is a very cool, extremely busy one. I think that it's very near the famous crossing in Tokyo, Shibuya Crossing.
Starting point is 00:32:26 But they released the certificate which they'd done. And it said, previous visits to Shinjuku ward three, Godzilla, 1984, Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah, 1991, and Godzilla Millennium, 1999. That's very good.
Starting point is 00:32:42 We're going to have to wrap up in a sec. So yeah, anything you want to... Just to get South Korean citizenship, the test requires you to sing the first four verses of the national anthem. Sing it in tune. Wow. That's a tough gig, isn't it? And the Dutch citizenship,
Starting point is 00:32:58 you have to watch a video that includes beach nudity. Where's the film? Do you know what? I'll do it even if they don't give me Dutch citizenship. It's because they're such a liberal country, they want to show you what to expect if you come to the Netherlands. If people come from other countries
Starting point is 00:33:18 that are a bit more conservative, they might turn up into the Netherlands and think, wow, what's going on here? Beach nudity. So they want to show it so that you're not shot when you see it in real life. Or you cry then. Or both.
Starting point is 00:33:34 Feelings are confusing, Adam. OK, that's it. That's all of our facts. That's 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 we've said over the course of this podcast,
Starting point is 00:34:00 we can be found on our Twitter account, so I'm on at Shriverland, James. At Eggshapes. Andy. At Andrew Hunter M. Cherzinski. You can email podcast.qi.com. Or you can go to atqipodcast or go to our site, no such thing as a fish.com. We've got all of our previous episodes up there.
Starting point is 00:34:16 We're going to be back again next week. Thank you so much for being here, guys. We'll see you then. Goodbye! Thank you.

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