No Such Thing As A Fish - Audiobook Of The Year 2019 Preview

Episode Date: December 27, 2019

A clip from the audiobook version of the latest Book Of The Year instalment - buy it now from audible.com! Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes.

Hi everybody, welcome to No Such Thing as a Fish. We have a special episode today. Yeah, this is an exciting episode. We've done this for the last two years. This will be our third episode where we are going to present to you an extract from our book of the year 2019, the audiobook of the year in fact. Yes, this is going to be the letter A. So it's more like an extract. That's so good. Thank you. It's really fun. We went into a booth for three days and we all came out older. Yes, wiser. Yes, sadder. Yes, but also we had a whale of a time in there. So we hope you enjoy listening to it. Yeah, and if you would like to get the rest of that book, just go to Audible or go to anywhere online that sells your online audiobooks and check it out.

There's a whole 25 other letters that you can explore in there. That's true, although X and Q are extremely short. But if you're more old fashioned and you want the book, that's still available and just go to Amazon or your bookshops book of the year 2019. And thanks so much to everyone who's bought it this year. It meant the world to us. Okay, on with the show. On with it. Hello and welcome to the audiobook of the year 2019. My name is Dan Schreiber. I am sitting here with Andrew Hunter Murray, Anna Chazinski and James Harkin. And we are four fact nerds who host a weekly podcast called No Such Thing as a Fish. And once again, we have gathered around the microphones to tell you about the most interesting things that have happened on your planet in the last 12 months.

That is correct. So if any of you out there are just sick of reading the same old news stories, fear not, we're not going to cover them. We are going to tell you about the stuff that you might have missed. The weirdest wackiest stuff out there. So things like the fact that three new lawnmower records were set this year. Wow. Yeah, pretty big deal. Or that a winner of the first ever heavy metal knitting championship was crowned. Big stuff like that. We might mention one or two things about the big news of the year. So we might mention a few things about Trump, I suppose. Oh, yeah, I think climate change might get a look in. Yeah, but there will be absolutely no mention of **** it. Oh, what was that? I don't know. So I'll try it again. The debate between Britain

and the EU about the membership and that, of course, we refer to as **** it. It's happened again. Okay, that's weird. Maybe they'll fix that glitch. There'll be no mention of **** anyway in the book. It's not going to happen. So it won't be relevant. It won't be relevant, but I guess if anything slips in, hopefully that little noise will remain and you'll know that that's what we're talking about. Why do you say remain, Dan? Wait, is this subconscious propaganda? This is bullshit. Just looking at the list of articles, there's news about whales and wigs and bees and Bezos and pigs and posts and creepy crawlies, all sorts of stuff. It's all in there, weird articles,

full of fabulous news. Indeed. And you said bees and Bezos and pigs and what was the other one post? Yes. And that gives you a clue that this is actually a book in alphabetical order. We'll be going through all 26 letters one at a time, but actually, there may be some of the letters that aren't recorded in this very room where we're recording at the moment. Yep, that's right. We are going to record some of our chapters or some of our letters or just some of our extracts on the road as part of our live tour. It's basically a cheat, so we don't actually have to come up with an actual live show. We're just going to read this on the bits from this book and then we're going to insert them in here. So if you hear audiences laughing raucously or booing

heinously, then it's not because we've invited a thousand people into our recording studio. That'd be very distracting. It's because we're doing the live show. That's right. And we should say before we begin that we would like to thank all of the incredible journalists around the world who've made it possible for this audiobook to exist. And we're talking about everyone from The Birmingham Post to The New York Times, from Meet Management Magazine to The Uranus Examiner. If we didn't have them finding all the incredible stories that you're about to hear, we would be nothing. So thank you to them. Okay, that's it from us. We hope you enjoy the book and we will see you on the other side of it for the credits. On with the audiobook.

Or. Two tourists planning to visit the Norwegian village of Or ended up 1,310 kilometres away in Or. Doesn't Or begin with O? It does sound that way, doesn't it? What a confusing way to start the audiobook. But does audiobook begin with O, James? You're quite right. It doesn't. Exactly. Very good point. Can you spell out these O's? Can you spell out every word you say from Certainly, it might take a bit longer. So Or is a Norwegian letter which is spelled A, A, sort of capital A, small A sometimes, or it's alternatively spelled sort of like an English A with a little weird blob on top of the A. It's called a hat, technically, I believe, is it? It's like the little ring on top of a Christmas bauble. You could hang it on a tree.

Yes, bauble demonstrating the Or sound. So yes, it is a confusing way to start the audiobook, but essentially it's the last letter in the Norwegian alphabet, but it looks like the first letter in O's. And basically these two tourists, these Chinese travellers, were spotted by Or's deputy mayor. They were literally in her front yard, and she realised they had mistakenly put Or, one spelling into their sat-nav, and they'd actually intended to go to Or, the other spelling. So which spelling was she living in? Yeah, was it Or, Or, Or? It was Or, James. Okay. So yes, it was in... So Or, one of the Or's, the place they ended up, was in a village called

Hyen, which is more than 1300 kilometres south of Or. And since the tourists didn't speak Norwegian, they were Chinese tourists, and the deputy mayor didn't speak Mandarin, she was completely unable to help them. And in the midst of the confusion, actually, it probably didn't help, that the deputy mayor's name was Or Burger, so spelled with another Or. A third Or? It's a third Or, yeah. The tourists vanished before anyone could do anything about it. If you're on a date in a boat, you don't want to be the third Or, do you? There'll be a lot more of those puns, as this one goes on. Oh, okay. So just falling out of his bed as opposed to the Atlantic.

Falling into the sea, yeah. He thought of everything. Savane cast off from the Canary Islands on Boxing Day last year, and he hoped to make it to the Caribbean within three months. Things did not go quite to plan. He was blown 600 miles off course almost immediately, and the weather remained against him for five weeks. On the upside, as there was no need to spend time maintaining an engine or all the sails he didn't have, he was able to dedicate himself to writing a diary, playing the mandolin, and looking at passing fish through a porthole in the bottom of the barrel. Although he also had to spend three hours a day replying to emails

forwarded to him by his secretary. As any good Frenchman would, he celebrated his 72nd birthday with foie gras and a bottle of bordeaux. Finally, after 2,930 miles and four months of bobbing around on the ocean, Savane made it to the Caribbean Sea. He was then given tow by a friendly oil tanker to the nearest land, the Dutch island of St Eustatius, some 230 miles away. Although that wasn't his plan, he had been hoping to end up on a French-owned island because, as he said, that would be easier for the paperwork. For his next challenge, Savane is thinking of crossing the Pacific in a barrel. His friends are trying to dissuade him. Amazon versus Amazon. Amazon bribed the Amazon with $5 million worth of kindles. 25 years ago, Jeff Bezos decided to change the

name of his nascent company, Kadabra.com, after a conference call when people misheard it as Kadabra. He finally hit on Amazon.com. The Amazon is the largest river in the world, he said, and he wanted to build the largest bookshop in the world. Amazon.com is certainly now the world's largest bookshop, but Bezos still wants it to expand. And to help him meet this ambition, he hatched a plan to create websites that, instead of ending.com, end with .Amazon. Unfortunately, that idea didn't go down well with the governments of Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru, Suriname and Venezuela, all of whom argued that since the River Amazon runs through their countries, they should own the rights to web addresses that make

use of its name. At one stage, Amazon.com offered these countries $5 million worth of kindles to try to break the impasse. The gesture was rejected, and the matter was eventually turned over to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, also known as ICANN. After five years of wrangling, ICANN finally judged in favor of Amazon.com, but with the proviso that each country the Amazon runs through will be allowed a single domain name ending in .Amazon. They will also be able to request a veto to up to 1,500 web addresses. What the ruling did not reveal was whether or not they still get the kindles. Do you think if you're a good looking and you work at ICANN, you get called ICANND? Not in the Me Too era, I don't think. You've been more suited to the

late 70s, I think. Thanks, guys. Apollo 12. On July 20th, the world celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission, which landed the first humans on the moon. But few remembered the crew of Apollo 12, Pete Conrad, Alan Bean, and Richard Gordon, who arrived there just under four months later. So this is one of the greatest feats of mankind. It got no press because old Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong were stealing it. This was an amazing mission. There are so many great facts we have here. My favorite one, I think, is that when Pete Conrad, so he was the third person to stand on the moon, when he did, his words, his opening words were, whoopee, man, that may have been a small

one for Neil, but that was a long one for me. Okay, why did he do that? Well, two reasons. It's a sort of pun on his height. He was five for five. So it was a longer step than it would have been for Neil coming off the ladder. But the second thing is that when he was talking to a journalist, the suggestion was made that they were scripted by NASA. Everything that was said was by NASA. And he said it's not. And to prove it, he made a $500 bet that he would say the exact words that he said to her right there in the interview. And that's what it was. And so he won the bet, but he never got the money. I think she lived in a different country. It was a bit of a hassle getting back in contact. You're right. They made it to the moon, but they couldn't transfer

money between countries. Did you write this article, Dan, because I'm seeing a fact here which says the Apollo 12 moon landing footage was faked. Absolutely true. Come on. How incredible is that? So this is that Alan Bean. So he was the fourth man to stand on the moon right behind Conrad. And he made the huge mistake of pointing the only video camera that they had with them directly at the sun. So all of the components inside it burnt out. And so now we had a moon landing without any visuals. So back on earth, you had news channels like CBS who had the audio coming through, but no visuals. So what they had to do was improvise and they threw to studios where they had set up two people dressed as astronauts walking around and sort of half mimicking what

they were hearing through the audio. That's amazing. Incredible. Yeah. And then there was also NBC who had marionettes on hand that were made by the puppeteer who had made the ones and performed in the sound of music. The lonely goat herd. So a generation of people grew up thinking that the second bunch of people to land on the moon were just yodeling the whole time. They also, speaking of Alan Bean, I love this, when they returned to earth, so it all gone really well, they returned to earth. And then Alan Bean, as they splashed down, was knocked unconscious. So as a command module that they were returning in, sort of came down to earth, this camera was jolted out of place, hit him on the head, he was knocked unconscious. The last minute needed six stitches.

Wow. Do you think the camera was getting its own back for being pointed at the sun a few days earlier? Yeah, ruining its big chance, its big moment. There was also, there was a lot of pranks that happened on Apollo 12, which is really interesting. So there was a backup pilot called Dave Scott. So if one of the astronauts had been sick, he would have stepped in at the last second, but he was very involved in setting up things like the checklists. So when astronauts were on the moon, they would have a sort of wristwatch, but it was a sort of booklet to tell them the things they need to do while they were there. And he snuck on into this booklet pictures of playboy bunnies from the day. So as they were

looking through the checklist, suddenly as they flip the page, there is Angela Dorian, aka Miss September, and he'd written special captions underneath. So for hers, it was seen any interesting hills and valleys and just nude shots of women. Oh, he's a man after your 1970s heart. There wasn't the only saucy incident to take place on this mission. Saucy, you're not helping yourself. So when Comrade and Bean, they had finished their spacewalk, and then when they were returning to the command module, they had to do so nude. And this was specifically at the instruction of the pilot of the command module, Richard Gordon, because he was really worried

about moon dust getting into the systems of the spacecraft, because it is extremely fine, and it might have damaged their machines. So he made them strip off all of their clothing, which feels a bit unnecessary, all of it, before he let them pass back from the lunar land onto the main ship. So one more fact. This is quite apposite, actually. Pete Conrad died on the 8th of July, 1999, sadly, after crashing his motorcycle while riding through Ohio, California. And apparently, Ohio comes from the word Hawaii, which is a Native American word from the Ventureño language. I really regret reading this one. Please, if you do, if you are someone who knows about the Ventureño language, in fact, you probably won't know that because I

probably pronounced that wrong as well. Do not write in. But anyway, that word translates as moon. That is amazing. So eventually he did die in moon, on the moon. Incredible. A populips. The population of Lake Elsinore tripled thanks to the popularity of its poppies. Heavy rain this spring meant that the hills around the Californian city of Lake Elsinore, population 68,000, became covered with a super bloom of millions and millions of poppies so extensive it could be seen from space. Unsurprisingly, their beauty attracted eager, selfie-seeking poppy tourists. Over 150,000 arrived in the city in a single weekend to admire them. At first, the local mayor declared the phenomenon poppy pelusa, then it became the poppy apocalypse,

and finally, the poppy lips. Other officials described it as a poppy nightmare, presumably with slightly less good imaginations. Feels like a step down, doesn't it? It does, doesn't it? All of this might sound histrionic, but the fact is that the super bloom was a disaster for the people of Lake Elsinore. Local services were overrun. Medical assistants had to be offered to the many tourists who fainted in the heat. The authorities had to watch out for those who cut through barbed wire fencing to get at the flowers, and one couple even illegally landed a helicopter in the middle of the poppies to skip the queues. And then there was the problem of rattlesnakes, which were coming out of hibernation at the time,

and which bit at least one visitor. Eventually, the town felt it had no choice but to bar access to the main poppy site, Walker Canyon, and plead with people to stay away. This weekend has been unbearable, said the city's officials, adding that it had caused unnecessary hardships for our entire community. Once the poppy nightmare was over, the city posted on Instagram, we survived the poppy apocalypse, and the LA Times recommended that poppy fans should not thank the city authorities by sending them flowers, as that would be horrifically insensitive. A SHARK, which had just eaten a shark, was caught by a man called The Shark.

Former professional golfer Greg Norman is known as The Shark, because he's from the home of the great white shark, Queensland, and because he plays very aggressively. While fishing off the coast of Jupiter, Florida, he managed to hook an 80-pound black-tipped shark which was then immediately attacked and eaten by a hammerhead shark ten times as big. Norman and his friends eventually wrestled the hammerhead along the boat, swam next to it for a bit, and then released it. There's been other apposite news this year. Gillette had to recall 90,000 disposable Venus razors, because thanks to a manufacturing error, they posed a cutting hazard.

There was a Disney cafe which was closed because someone spotted a mouse, so that cafe is located in Birmingham. It's inside the world's biggest Primark, imagine that. What are we still doing here? Exactly. Yeah, so they serve mouse-shaped pancakes there. They have pictures of Mickey everywhere, but when a customer saw an actual real-life mouse, that was too much, and the cafe had to temporarily shut down. That's proportionate. It's better than shutting it down forever. Speaking of fast food, this was quite apposite. Five guys were arrested at Five Guys. They got into a fist fight inside a Florida branch of the burger restaurant,

and the police got cold. Do you think there were only four guys involved in the fight, and the police said, we've got to get the headlines? What about you? You, get over here. Also, there was a lunar eclipse in the UK on the anniversary of the moon landings, which is nice. Yeah, so I've got to remember that. I saw it. Well, I heard about it and looked out the window and noticed there was cloud cover. That's a great story. Thank you. There was also the fact that the spirit of Britain abandoned the UK and fled to the continent. Mine did a long time ago. This was a P&O ferry, the spirit of Britain, and the firm changed the country of

registration to Cyprus to avoid problems after... A rapper who wrote songs about credit card fraud was actually charged with credit card fraud. He's 25-year-old self-made cash. Surprisingly, that's not his real name. He was born Jonathan Woods, and he's written songs including, in Swipe I Trust, where he describes making a killing from credit cards. Prosecutors said, Woods claimed to be sophisticated at credit card fraud when, in fact, he is not. And if you're really sophisticated at credit card fraud, you don't tend to tell people about it? No.

The better you are, the lower the odds that you'll be caught, unless you write a song and release it. His next song is basically his credit card number. His mother's made a name. Let's first pat. Arcs. The owners of the world's largest replica of Noah's Ark sued for rain damage. Ken Ham's Ark Encounter is a fundamentalist Catholic theme park in Kentucky, whose centerpiece is a full-sized replica of Noah's Ark. It's probably the largest wooden structure in the world. In 2017 and 2018, Kentucky suffered extremely heavy rains, which, while not quite heavy enough

to cover the entire planet with 15 qubits of water, as happened in the Old Testament. Citation needed. They were enough to cause landslides in the park. Ham's company demanded $1 million from their insurers and claim that so far they have refused to pay out. The case continues with barely an olive branch in sight. Armageddon. If Bruce Willis managed to blow up an earth-threatening asteroid, it would simply reform and hit the planet anyway. That reference requires that you've seen the film Armageddon or know about it, which I assume you

have, but this was the conclusion of a group of scientists at Johns Hopkins University who built a computer simulation of asteroid collisions in order to study what happens when the space rocks break apart. They found that asteroids are stronger than we thought and that existing weapons would not be capable of fleeing the pieces far enough apart to stop their gravity from bringing them back together. One way or another, the world scientists had a pretty bad year fighting theoretical apocalypse scenarios. Around the same time as the Johns Hopkins calculations were being made, some of the world's greatest minds gathered at the International Academy of Astronautics' Planetary Defense Conference and failed miserably to save the

earth from a fictional head-on asteroid impact. The simulation, which was created by a NASA engineer, began with an alert that a 200-meter-wide asteroid had been detected and had a 1% chance of striking the planet in 2027. The team challenged to deal with it, decided to build six kinetic impactors, which are probes designed to hit the asteroid to change its trajectory. Remember, this is all a simulation. The probes managed to deflect the main body, but they caused a fragment to break off, which then headed for the eastern US. So, despite having eight fictional years to devise a plan to save the world, the team was unable to stop New York from being flattened. The European Space Agency tweeted, along with the simulation, although every tweet had to be

accompanied by the hashtag in caps lock, fictional event, so that people didn't freak out about it. The threat of an asteroid strike isn't entirely theoretical. In July, a 100-meter meteor with a deceptively unthreatening name, 2019 OK, came within 40,000 kilometers of the earth, and it was discovered only a day before it skimmed past the planet. If by skimmed past the planet, you mean it was 40,000 kilometers away, but that is a relatively small distance in planetary terms. Had it hit the earth, it would have exploded with the power of a large nuclear bomb. Scientists who subsequently tried to work out why they'd missed it until the last minute realized it had actually been captured twice by telescopes, but no one had recognized what it was. And 2019 OK isn't alone. There are an

estimated 30,000 asteroids between 100 and 300 meters wide that are out there, but we have only spotted 16%. So, if an asteroid is heading our way, it's unlikely Bruce Willis would have time to do anything about it anyway. How can you tell it 300 meters wide as opposed to 300 meters high or long? Because they're tumbling around. Yeah, but normally with spheres, you call it width rather than height. It's like diameter or radius. If you saw a circle, you wouldn't say, how high is that circle? No. Or how long is that circle? You'd always say, how wide is that circle? To be honest, I've come across so few theoretical 2D circles in my day-to-day life. No, I'm not doing GCSE maths anymore. It almost never comes up. Can I ask why they called it OK?

Yeah, it does seem like a misnomer, but it comes from the year it was discovered, so that's the 2019. And then the OK comes from the O, which is the designated letter for the half month of July, as in so July 16th to 31st, when it was spotted. And the K is because K is the 11th letter of the alphabet, and the asteroid was the 11th such discovery in that period. So the one that came for after would have been 2019. Aussie election. A pre-election poll revealed Australia's most trusted politician is the Prime Minister of New Zealand. When he called the election, Australia's Liberal Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, asked the electorate, who do you trust to deliver that strong economy which your

essential services rely on? The answer, according to the polls, was increasingly nobody. The controversies that plagued the election didn't help. Liberal candidates were forced to step down over claims of Islamophobia and homophobia. The Opposition Labour Party had to drop candidates for alleged sexism and anti-Semitism. And the government was caught up in a scandal that centred on a claim that it had improperly spent $80 million to purchase water from farms. Nicknames about scandals tend to end with dash gate, like Watergate or any other gates. Can you think of any other gates? Plebgate. Plebgate. Yeah, do you remember Plebgate? I was thinking Squidgey gate. Do you remember that one? Oh, dimly.

Yeah, that was someone calling someone Squidgey in a phone call. Prince Andrew and Fergie. Was it? Was it? Was it Prince Charles and someone else? Well, it was one of the princes. Garden gate. Garden gate. Is that one? Or is that just? No, it's just a gate. It's just trying to contribute. But yeah, that's just a... Well, this scandal was about water, of course. So the Aussie press, somewhat lacking originality, dubbed it Watergate, which also made it impossible to Google. Despite the failings of the main parties, voters didn't really flock to the smaller parties, such as the Great Australian Party, or the Love Australia or Leave Party, or the unnecessarily

shouty Climate Action, Immigration Action, Accountable Politicians Party. There was lots of exclamation points in that name. I think you conveyed that. Did I? Yeah. Or the party with probably the world's most contrived acronym. They were the Help End Marijuana Prohibition Party or the Hemp Party. It was probably because some of the candidates from these parties didn't show much more integrity than the front runners. One activist from the United Australia Party was fined for exposing himself at a polling station. While a candidate for the anti-immigrant One Nation Party shared a Facebook post of a naked woman photoshopped to look like a centaur with a caption, interesting thoughts. There were also some exclamation points in that.

He managed to avoid deselections somehow. All of which meant that although Scott Morrison managed to hold onto power when it came to naming a politician they trusted, many Australians looked to the country on the other side of the Tasman Sea. New Zealand's Prime Minister Chisinda Ardern has been gaining plaudits around the world thanks especially to her response to the terrorist attack in Christchurch where she refused to mention the name of the attacker. Her personal integrity has been similarly unimpeachable. When a school child wrote to her asking that the government do some research into psychics and dragons and including five dollars by way of a sweetener, Ardern returned the bribe.

Avengers. Avengers assembled against their biggest enemy, spoilers. So Avengers Endgame is the last of a ten-year run of films for comic book franchise Marvel and has become the highest-grossing film of all time. When it was released Google searches for How to Avoid Spoilers reached a record high as fans desperately sought ways to avoid accidentally finding out what happens in the film. In fact, in recent years Marvel actors themselves have been the main culprits when it comes to spoilers. Tom Holland, who plays Spider-Man, has a reputation for repeatedly giving away details of films he's in. He once talked about the plot of a film at a screening not realizing that it hadn't yet been shown to the assembled fans and Mark Ruffalo,

who plays the Hulk, once accidentally livestreamed the first ten minutes of a Marvel film from his seat at the premiere. The makers of Avengers Endgame tried to ensure details of their film wouldn't emerge too early by giving members of the cast fake scripts that included fake scenes and fake plot twists. They did, however, break cover to poopoo a sizable online campaign to introduce a plot twist that would have involved one of the heroes, Ant-Man, who can miniaturize himself. The idea was that Ant-Man would make his way into the arch-villain Thanos' bottom, then rapidly expand back to full size, tearing Thanos apart in the process. Now, explaining their decision, co-writer Christopher Marcus pointed out that if Ant-Man

expanded, he would simply be crushed by the immovable walls of Thanos' mighty rectum. As someone who's never seen Avengers, that sounded like complete gibberish. Even if you do have a mighty rectum, it's still going to be uncomfortable, isn't it? It'll be uncomfortable. Yeah, I think it would. Sorry, I actually visualized it and tried to feel the pain in my own rectum, and I thought, yeah, not painful, but definitely... You think it wouldn't be painful?

I think it'd be uncomfortable for someone as powerful as Thanos, who is basically immortal and destroying the entire universe. Yeah, I think it'd be a little tickle in his bum as opposed to a stabbing sensation. I can't comment because I don't know what Ant-Man is. It's fine, Dan's done enough thinking for all of us about this.