No Such Thing As A Fish - Merry Christmas from Dan, James, Anna and Andy

Episode Date: December 25, 2018

Merry Christmas! Here's a bonus extract from the The Audiobook of The Year 2018, available to download. Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for more.

Merry Christmas, everyone. Welcome to this week's episode of Fish. Hang on a second. It's not Friday. What's this doing here? It's a bonus episode. That's right. You've been good and Santa's brought you an audio present, an extra goodie that you weren't expecting. What you're about to hear is the first letter of our audio book of the year, 2018. We sat in a studio, we read out our book. It lasts about nine hours long. It's all of us interjecting on each other. We really love it and we thought, as is Christmas Day, can you not interject on each other? Just sounds rude, Dad. Just sounds rude. OK. So yeah, we were in the studio. It was a long, long, hard session of us constantly interjecting all over each other. Shall we just say on with the show? It's the letter A and then by the rest of it. OK, on with the show. A, in which we learn why flies can't fly with American Airlines,

whose reputation might be tarnished by working with the White House, who bought Russell Crowe's jockstrap, how to tell your astronauts from your astronauts, and why the Belgian army are such mummy's boys. A, A. OK, we're starting the book with A, A. Good place to start. No hard back news this year. That's tragic. But we found quite a lot of A, A news, didn't we? Too much, I would say. OK, here's one. American Airlines, which is in the A, A, they banned passengers from travelling with emotional support insects. Did that affect many people? No, probably not even that many insects either, right? Yeah, like I don't know how emotionally supportive insects can be.

So, American Airlines, they changed their rules on emotional support animals this year, and that means that insects now prohibited along with any animals with hooves, any emotional support amphibians, emotional support ferrets, emotional support hedgehogs, and the move was a response to an 84% rise in urine, feces, and aggression-related incidents involving animals since 2016. Well, they're going to need to ban me if that's the problem then. We found more A, A news as well, but we found A, A news about the Alcoholics Anonymous. Oh yeah? So, there was a man who bought the original Alcoholics Anonymous document, and he did so,

and then he waived his anonymity in order to help alcoholics. Wow, so he's no longer anonymous? He's not. So, there's this founding book of Alcoholics Anonymous, which is from 1935, and this year it was sold at auction in Los Angeles for $2.4 million, and it gets called The Big Book, because it's very big, because its paper is very thick. And the man who bought it was the man who owns the Indianapolis Colts football, American football team, and he's been battling his own addictions over the last few years. He's called Jim Ursay, and he decided to go public,

and he said that he would make a cabinet for the book and display it for part of the year at Alcoholics Anonymous's headquarters in New York in order to help inspire alcoholics to give up drink. Oh, what a nice story. That's very cool. Another A, A. The first A that springs to mind, really, is the A battery, right? And this year, scientists invented a battery that never runs out, ever. So, it's A, A size. It was created by Osio, a wireless technology company that's based in Washington State, and it's called Forever Battery.

It comes with a transmitter that constantly keeps it fully charged via Wi-Fi-like waves. So, just in the air. The air charges it. You are an expert in this kind of technology, Ella, of course. Oh, absolutely. I practically invented it. Although it has to be that the battery and the transmitter are within 10 meters of each other. It's a small caveat. It's in a small print. But the hope is that one day these kind of setups will be available in every single home. That'll be good.

There's one final A, A. Which is that the automobile association found that there was one breakdown they couldn't fix. A former executive chairman at the automobile association sued the company for wrongful dismissal after he was fired for gross misconduct. He said he was stressed and overworked when he got into a fight with a colleague and that the company had no regard for his mental well-being. So, essentially, his argument appears to be that the A, A couldn't deal with his breakdown. Are they using that on their advertising in the future? There's only one breakdown they can't fix.

And it's your emotional breakdown. Advertising. Roger Federer lost the rights to his own initials. So, this is the RF logo, which, if you've ever watched a tennis game in the last 15 years, you'll know he has sort of sewn embroidered into his shirt in kind of gold. And it's owned by Nike. And they've been a sponsor for 24 years. But this year, he switched allegiance to the Japanese company Uniqlo.

However, the initials are still owned by Nike. And so, he now has to reach an agreement with Nike to get them back because, as he put it, they are my initials, they are mine, which is almost fair enough. But he can draw comfort, Roger Federer, from the fact that Uniqlo is paying him $300 million just to wear their clothes on court over the next 10 years. Well, Uniqlo and most other advertisers are hoping to maximise their public exposure in ways like this. The company that makes Skittles produce an advert this year that will only ever be seen by one person. That's teenager and Skittles fan, Marcos Menendez,

who, as a publicity stunt, was shut in a room and shown an advert that was made specially for him while his reaction was streamed live on Facebook to thousands of viewers. He revealed afterwards what was in the advert that only he saw. Apparently, it featured friend star David Schwimmer shooting lasers from his mouth at Marcos' mother and turning her into Skittles. Cool. So, it seems pretty great. Another company that was probably a bit less happy with the way its goods were being advertised

was team manufacturer Twiningz. So, Twiningz complained to the Advertising Standards Authority after Poundland decided to publish a tweet. This was last Christmas, and the tweet showed a naughty elf squatting over a female doll and holding a Twiningz tea bag above her face. That is naughty. Yeah, the accompanying caption on the tweet read, How do you take your tea, one lump or two? So, yeah, the Advertising Standards Authority ruled the ad was irresponsible.

But hilarious. Meanwhile, the truth of that old advertising mantra that sex sells was demonstrated in the monkey world this year. So, a group of male macaques was shown pictures of either dominant male macaque faces or subordinate male faces or female macaque hindquarters. Bottoms. Alongside logos of brands like Pizza Hut and Adidas. And the macaques showed a very clear preference for the logos they associated with the hindquarters.

You wrote this article, didn't you? I did, yes. And you chose to use hindquarters. That's what I call them. I was just dumbing it down for the masses. Advice. The government advised people being deported to Jamaica to put on a Jamaican accent. Labour MP David Lambie drew attention this year to a leaflet

given to British residents being deported to Jamaica, published when Theresa May was Home Secretary. As he pointed out, it included such tips as, Try to be Jamaican, use local accents and dialect. And the pamphlet's existence came to light during the Windrush scandal when it was revealed that hundreds of British subjects who had arrived in the UK between 1948 and 1970 had been wrongly detained, denied legal rights, lost homes, jobs and benefits, and in at least 63 cases had been deported,

even though they had originally been given an automatic right to remain permanently in the UK. And to make matters worse, the government had destroyed all their landing cards back in 2010 to cut back on stored paperwork, so the Windrush generation had no way of proving their status. That was some bad advice. More bad advice was in preparation for the World Cup, where Argentina's Football Association issued a manual to its players and officials that contained a chapter on how to pick up women while they were in Russia.

Tips included, make sure you're clean, smell good and dress well. Is that bad advice? That's great advice. Bad to give the advice. That's right. And Russian girls hate boring men. Never ask trite questions. Be original. They don't like to be seen as objects. Can I just say, I'm married to a Russian girl, and if they don't like boring men, then I'm in serious trouble.

So, after that leaflet was given out, the Argentine Football Association insisted that it had been mistakenly included, and when it was noticed, they had the booklets returned, and they hurriedly ripped out the offending pages. Wow. Alexa. Alexa got in trouble for laughing at her owners. Numerous customers this year reported that Amazon's voice-activated assistant

was breaking out into spontaneous laughter when she wasn't even supposed to be switched on. Amazon fixed the glitch, explaining it was caused by echo devices mistakenly misinterpreting words it overheard as the phrase Alexa laughed. Amazon was not able to explain why one device started telling random jokes without being asked, and why another woke up its owner around midnight and announced, he's home, he's home, for no apparent reason. In some cases, Alexa even went so far as to place orders for unwanted products, so one woman tried to have an Alexa TV advert banned,

claiming that her Echo Dot had ordered pet food because it overheard someone on the ad asking for it. And White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders tweeted that her two-year-old son had inadvertently ordered a Batman toy by shouting Batman repeatedly into their device. Perhaps even more unnervingly, one couple discovered Alexa had recorded their private conversation and sent it to one of their contacts. They only realised this when he phoned to inform them he'd just received a recording of them

discussing hardwood flaws. Given all of this, customers might not be reassured by the news that Amazon has filed a patent for voice sniffing technology which would theoretically let its Echo speakers listen to people all the time to ascertain their likes and dislikes. It's no wonder perhaps that the name Alexa has declined in popularity by 33% in the US since 2015. I like as well the Church of England launched an app this year

which allows you to ask Alexa questions like, where's my nearest church? Or please read me the Lord's Prayer. What is the Bible? Not doing well as a, how can a benevolent and omnipotent God allow evil? That kind of question. All you can eat. An all-you-can-eat restaurant had to shut after two weeks

because customers ate all they could. Jamuna, a restaurant in Chengdu, China, shut its doors for good by launching an all-you-can-eat membership card, which, for 120 yuan, which is about 13 pounds, guaranteed unlimited food for a month. The owners said that they were aware they might lose some money initially but hoped that their loyalty scheme would not only attract clients but would allow them to negotiate discounts from food and drink suppliers. What they didn't count on was how many customers would take advantage of that deal.

In the first 14 days, the restaurant attracted more than 7,000 diners, of whom were repeat customers or people who had borrowed cards from family and friends. After just two weeks, the restaurant had fallen into debt to the tune of 50,000 pounds and was forced to shut. The owners cited their poor management as the problem. Sounds about right. They also had a problem at Brighton's Big Cheese Festival this year. Did you see that?

They ran out of cheese. They said it was due to the bad weather, which meant that the traders couldn't get there, and the person wrote in social media, hmm, what's expecting more cheese? Someone else said, I'd rather have gone to the supermarket, less queues, more cheese. And a couple of months after that, I think, didn't an all-you-can-eat pizza festival and Notting Hill run out of pizza?

It's just to go to an all-you-can-eat pizza festival. Who can eat more than one pizza? Well, two people on this table could. We're not going to specify which. We can manage more than half a small pizza. Animal Races A snail race in competition was postponed because the snails were too sluggish. Now, that's their words, not my words.

That's not me trying to make a terrible joke. That's the snail's words. They apologized afterwards, they're being too sluggish. Sorry, guys. Post-race interview. So this was a race that was due to take place in February at the Dartmoor Union Pub in Plymouth. But the organizers went to the pet shop to collect the snails, and they were told that the cold weather had made them extra sleepy.

This pub probably should have taken some advice from the organizers of the World Snail Racing Championships, which always takes place in July in Norfolk. Now, they use a special damp cloth to keep their snails happy. The human competitors in that one, though, they don't always show the same compassion. The owner of the winner this year, Joe Waterfield, said, I pulled him out this morning and told him if he didn't win, I would squash him. Also, what a fix that the World Snail Racing Championships always takes place in Norfolk.

FIFA could learn a thing or two from these guys. I think the next one isn't Qatar, actually. So the animal race with the youngest participants this year was definitely the great Hi-Hi. Hi-Hi? Hi-Hi. Ho-Ho. The great Hi-Hi sperm race set up by a New Zealand charity to raise money for the Hi-Hi bird, which is an endangered yet relatively unknown species.

Sperm samples were taken from four different Hi-Hi colonies, and people were encouraged to place a $10, that's $10 New Zealand dollar bet, on which of the samples would swim the fastest. According to the website, the male with the fastest sperm was CP11870 from Tirritiri, Matangi Island. Also known as the male who was famous for his natty pink leg bands, but secure in his masculinity. Sorry, the sperm had pink leg bands?

No. So it was the Hi-Hi bird who had the fast sperm, who also had leg bands, who was also secure in his masculinity. So was the sperm with the name...? I don't know what his legs were like. But is that his name or is that the Hi-Hi bird's name? CP118. The bird is called CP11870.

Oh, not the sperm, because then they would have to name every sperm. Every sperm, and that's even just announcing the race. You get baby name books. I don't think you get sperm name books. Antarctic Every minute the Antarctic loses enough ice to keep the UK in slushies for an entire year. In fact, in the time it took me to read that sentence, Antarctica lost 12 Olympic swimming pools worth of ice,

with more than a gigaton, that's a billion tons, of ice disappearing every two days. What? I know. How much ice is there then? There's so much ice. There's more than that. Thank goodness. Yeah.

I don't know exactly. But we're not going to run out in like six days, which means there's so much ice. I'm not saying this as an anti-Clive exchange piece. It's like that thing about how they say that a rainforest the size of Wales disappears every year from Brazil. And they've been saying that since at least I was born. So that's a hell of a lot of rainforest, isn't it?

Yeah. You guys are really coming across as strong deniers at the moment. Well, things are getting worse, actually, because according to a study published this year, the Antarctic is losing three times more ice than it was as recently as 2012. And if that wasn't bad enough, we've also recently discovered there's a volcano going off under the South Pole, which is only adding to the effects of climate change.

But there was better news for the Antarctic this year. Researchers discovered a super colony of 1.5 million previously unknown penguins on the Danger Islands after noticing streaks of penguin poo in NASA's satellite imagery of the islands. Do we not know about them because we were too afraid to go to Danger Island? I think so. Makes sense. Yeah, because we had to cross the River of Doom.

Until now, it was thought that this particular species of Adeli penguins was on the decline, but population levels are, in fact, relatively healthy. And one other good piece of Antarctic news came in the form of the first ever harvest at the South Pole. It was grown in a giant greenhouse that uses a special liquid nutrients instead of soil and LEDs rather than sunlight. The technology may one day allow us to farm on other planets that are less fertile than our own.

That is every other planet that we know of. The first Antarctic crop was modest, consisting of 18 cucumbers, 70 radishes and 8 pounds of salad leaves. But no iceberg lettuce. Very good. Missed opportunity. Arctic. China called itself a near-arctic state,

despite the fact that its nearest border ends 1,000 miles south of the Arctic. China would love to increase its influence in the Arctic, both because then it could take advantage of shorter trade routes and because the Arctic contains a third of the world's natural gas reserves and various other tempting resources. So this year, China attempted to charm two key regional powers by opening a joint observatory with Iceland and by lending Finland a couple of pandas.

China's first ever polar cruise ship is also going to launch next year. But it's not just China that is invading the Arctic. This year it was discovered that the Atlantic Ocean is doing the same thing. So since 2000, the northern barrens region of the Arctic Ocean has been heating very rapidly. And as the ice cover has diminished, so has the salinity of the water and it's been turning into an ocean with qualities very similar to those of the Atlantic. And the result has been that Atlantic fish have started to invade traditionally Arctic areas of sea.

That's amazing. I know. It's not all bad news for the Arctic. A group of students from Bangor University created prototype ice rebuilding machines that spray water onto existing ice, causing it to freeze, thicken existing ice layers, and hopefully reverse the effects of climate change. So cold climate change? So reverse the effects of definitely happening climate change.

A similar technique has been tried in Canada. But the Canadian machines are powered by petrol engines, whereas the new Bangor method is wind powered and therefore much more environmentally friendly. Sadly, on the day they first tried these new devices, there wasn't actually any ice in the Welsh water, meaning the thing couldn't be fully tested. But it certainly works in theory. Apps.

Favourite apps of the year? I go on here. Stoners. There's an app for stoners now. So scientists at the University of Chicago have developed a prototype app and it's designed for cannabis users so they can determine whether or not they are actually high. They need an app to tell them if that's the case. Am I stoned? It's called. Assesses the effects of the drug on cognitive ability by providing the users with a series of tasks

to test their memory, reaction time, and attention span. Tal was distracted by a bee in the studio a second ago. Is that for use at parties? You know when people sort of take a toke but they don't inhale because they're a bit too scared to when you're 14. And then you get this app out and you test if they're really stoned. When you're 14 or when you're Bill Clinton. Yeah, absolutely.

Is that this year, the Bill Clinton project? It's pretty current. Very current. I really like the app for people who want to become fathers that came out this year. It's this app called Yo and it's an app that allows men to check their sperm count without having to see a doctor. It comes with a slide on which men can place a drop of their semen and the app takes a picture of the deposit, analyzes it,

and assesses whether the sperm count is normal. And when you say slide, we mean like a microscope slide, don't we? Yes, not a playground slide. Incidentally, James isn't allowed in any playgrounds in the Great London area. Okay, here's a couple of apps, Glance Love and Wink Chat. Okay, they're dating apps. Do you fancy one of those, anyone? Yeah.

Well, you are in a relationship. That's right. I'd like to correct my answer. Well, maybe you wouldn't because they were actually built by Islamist militant group Hamas. Basically, in this app, you would pretend to be an attractive young Israeli and then an Israeli would download the app and then you could install malware onto their phone and steal data. They also built another spying program for the World Cup.

It was called Gold Cup. But actually, one senior Israeli Defence Force officer said it was actually very good. Oh, that's nice. I've got one. This is for people who have stomachs. So it was developed by Australian scientists. It's an indigestible electronic pill and you swallow it and then it's paired with a pocket-sized receiver and a mobile phone app.

And what the app allows you to do is track your fart development in real time as it passes from the stomach to the colon. It's not just for leisure use. It is actually for scientific use. It's to collect gut data and to give us a better understanding of which foods cause digestive problems. So can you see if you're in a sort of a very, let's say... A lift.

A lift, a work environment. Can you check in? Oh, God, I've got one coming in 10 seconds. I can see it approaching the door of my body. I think we call it the door to the hind quarters. Can you get it right to the point? I'm not sure it's that good yet, but you never know. Maybe the 2.0 version.

Will we get enough? Ardern, Jacinda. New Zealand's Prime Minister gave birth to a prime miniature. This year, Jacinda Ardern became only the second world leader ever to have a baby while in office. The other was Benazir Bhutto back in 1990. Ardern gave birth to her daughter on the 21st of June. Now that, coincidentally, is Benazir Bhutto's birthday.

That's a nice connection. Ardern then took six weeks of maternity leave. Ardern first discovered she was pregnant with the prime miniature as the baby was dubbed on Twitter, only six days before she came Prime Minister-elect and barely two months after she'd been handed the Labour Party leadership. Labour at the time was in real difficulties.

Its popularity in the polls was at a 20-year low of 23%, and the party had just run through four leaders in four years. Ardern told reporters, everyone knows that I've just accepted, with short notice, the worst job in politics. However, only a few weeks into the campaign, Jacinda Mania, as the press called it, kicked in. And she ended up increasing her party's vote by 50%.

In October 2017, aged 37, she became the world's youngest female leader. Ardern named her daughter Niv Te Oroha Ardern Gayford. Te Oroha is a tiny farming community with a population of 3,900, near to where Ardern grew up. The townspeople were so excited by the news that they announced plans to paint all of the buildings pink and invited Ardern to visit

so that she could take part in the traditional Maori practice of burying the afterbirth in the earth. Jacinda did not respond to the offer. Perhaps because she was considering her options. Earlier in the year, another Maori tribe had suggested she bury her placenta in a spot where Britain signed the treaty that led to the founding of modern New Zealand.

As well as putting a small town on the map, this year Jacinda fronted a national campaign to help put New Zealand back on the map. As she pointed out in a video she made with comedian Rhys Darby, world maps produced in other countries have a worrying tendency to leave out New Zealand. The board game Risk, a map in New York Central Park Zoo, a John Lewis tablecloth, and an episode of The Simpsons

is for the places you won't find it, according to online communities that have been monitoring the problem for some years now. Maybe it doesn't exist. Maybe it doesn't. We went there in May, it exists. Well, they said we were in New Zealand. Good point.

It looked a lot like Wales. Armenia. Armenians had a snowball fight in temperatures of 25 degrees Celsius. Surely more of a water fight at that point. So, the snow was transported from the Armenian mountains in an enormous dump truck specifically to celebrate the fact

that Prime Minister Serge Sargsyan had stepped down in the face of huge public protests. Some said the white snow showed the demonstrator's purity and the desire for democracy in the country, but most just saw it as a way to have a bit of fun. In 2015, the Armenian people voted to swap their presidential system for a parliamentary one,

with a country run by a prime minister. This year, Sargsyan, who had been president for the previous 10 years, said he would not try to become prime minister. And indeed, the opposition planted a farewell tree to say good riddance to him. Two days later, though, the Republic Party of Armenia confirmed it would nominate Sargsyan

to be the country's next prime minister. A role that, thanks to new laws, meant he would be even more powerful than he had ever been as president. During the protests that ensued, opposition leader Nikol Pashinyan led a 200-kilometre march from Armenia's second city of Gyumri

to the capital Yerevan, where he was promptly arrested. Further marches followed, in which some 20% of the country took part. Sargsyan eventually bowed to pressure, saying, I was wrong, while Nikol Pashinyan was right. Pashinyan became Armenia's new prime minister.

ARMYS American soldiers gave away the location of secret military bases by going jogging. There's a GPS tracking company called Strava, which employs satellite information to map the location of people using Fitbits and other wearable fitness devices all over the world. In Europe and America, the devices are ubiquitous,

but in countries like Iraq or Syria, almost the only people using them are American soldiers. Of course, this means that wherever the Strava map lights up red in those areas, there's almost certainly a military base there. The publicly available information on the map has therefore given away daily patterns, supply routes, and even individual patrol routes.

And the worst part of it is that in 2013, the Pentagon gave out 2,500 Fitbits to its soldiers to help fight obesity, hence unwittingly compromising its own bases. But at least US Army personnel are trying to keep fit. The Chinese Army has had to ban fat soldiers from promotion after a fifth of would-be recruits failed the weight test. In some brigades, 40% of the soldiers

failed to complete a 5km cross-country run. Last year, the official state newspaper blamed failure to get into the Army on young men's poor diets and excess masturbation. What? You know, it'll affect... That sounds like I'm at least trying to get into the Chinese Army. Oh, my application's not going to go down well.

Well, just improve your diet and knock it off, you know, it'll be fine. Well, don't knock it off. Hard knock it off. As for the Spanish Army, it was announced in January that 180 legionnaires from the Elite Rapid Reaction Force were too overweight to fight and they have since been put on a diet. But the year's prize for the most mocked armed force goes to the Belgian Army,

which announced plans to let recruits sleep at home during their training so they don't get homesick. As one horrified former paratrooper said, you don't go to a war zone with men who miss their mummies. This is pretty amazing. It was revealed this year that the US has built itself a digital North Korea. So the idea is that American troops can practice fighting

in a virtual reality of what would be the enemy terrain before doing it for real. What they should have done is they should have sent Donald Trump to the virtual North Korea, make him think that he was meeting with Kim Jong-un. We should just keep him in a virtual world where he's like the king of the whole world. Yeah, let everything go, see, see.

Oh, no, maybe we've all gone into that reality. Wow. Artificial Intelligence Scientists exposed their AI machine to an online forum and it became a psychopath. The team from MIT fed the comments from a particularly angry message board into the machine, which they called Norman.

After doing so, they showed Norman inkblots from the Rorschach test, from the Rorschach test, which are often used to give clues about a subject's personality and compared Norman's responses to those of another computer that had not seen the internet comments. Where a normal AI saw a black-and-white photo of a baseball glove, Norman saw a man is murdered by a machine gun in broad daylight.

And where the normal AI saw a person is holding an umbrella in the air, Norman thought it was a man is shot dead in front of his screaming wife. Wow. Is Norman the name of the guy in Psycho? Yes, I think that's why they called it that. OK. Well, you're sort of condemning him there, aren't you,

by giving him that name. Do you think nominative determinism works in robots? Oh, it must do. Yeah. He just really, really loves his motherboard. In more constructive technology innovations this year, it turns out that AI programs can be better than doctors at spotting cancer. In one test, machines were pitted against doctors

in a competition to spot and diagnose skin cancer. The machines got it right 95% of the time, and the doctors only managed 87%. And Nissan invented an AI that trundles around and scans the ground looking for a flat-ish, clear space large enough to make a football pitch. It then paints the markings on that area ready for a game. It's basically the robot equivalent

of putting your jumpers down as goalposts. In other AI news, there was a group from IBM who unveiled Project Debater. That's a new artificial intelligence program that they said could successfully debate against humans. It uses a library of millions of documents from around the world to create its arguments. The one problem with it is that it does

tend to hammer its points home. It was reported, for instance, that during the space debate, it repeated the point that space exploration is beneficial to the economy several times using very slightly different words. So it's not a perfect technique, but at least that should not preclude Project Debater from becoming president of the United States.

Ding, ding, ding, there's a satire bell. Art. So we've got some art awards to dish out. A series of gongs. Does anyone have a bit of art they like? Yeah, there's an award I'd like to give for hyper-realism. And that is, in Hong Kong, cleaners accidentally threw away a piece of art.

And in their defence, it did look like rubbish. This was Swiss artist Carol May's work. She had made an unhappy meal by recreating a discarded McDonald's box, but with a frown instead of the trademark smile. And so as a result, the cleaner saw it, thought it was a bit of old rubbish and chucked it away. She said, initially, I didn't find it funny at all,

but later I realised it meant my imitation had been a success. What a nice positive spin to put on what was fundamentally a disaster for them. I've got a gong to dish out for street art. This is a bit of work by Banksy. So the Royal Academy rejected a work by Banksy, which he'd submitted to their summer exhibition

under a pseudonym. He submitted it under the name Brian S. Gagman, which is an anagram of Banksy anagram. It's very clever, but it didn't get accepted. And then a month later, the Academy contacted Banksy, asking if he would submit a piece to their summer exhibition. So he sent them a very slightly altered version of the same piece, and they accepted it.

And they said, oh, this is marvellous. A gong I'd like to give out for one piece of art is the one called Majestic Splendour in London's Hayward Art Gallery. So this is an exhibit, and it consisted of a collection of rotten fish covered in sequins. And it spontaneously combusted. A fire broke out in the gallery.

It set fire to itself. How does that happen? If anything rots, it does make heat, doesn't it? Yeah, it does. So it must be that. Compost heaps. They sometimes spontaneously combust. They do. Ours once did that. It was really exciting.

It's like a bonfire that you don't need to make. And for more on that, you can hear the audiobook Tales from the Compost Heap by Anthony Diddy. Canon Gate 2020. Here's an award for performance art that we want to give. This is Australian artist Mike Parr, who had himself buried alive in a steel box under an open road for 72 hours

to symbolise the burial of Aboriginal history. Unfortunately, the chief of the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre wasn't exactly impressed. He said, the idea of our Aboriginal history being hidden is a valid point. The most effective way of bringing it out is not climbing under the road. Asteroids.

Scientists concluded that birds escaped death by asteroid thanks to their inability to fly. According to a team of evolutionary scientists, the fossil record shows that the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago destroyed so much tree life that all flying birds who lived in trees died out. This meant that only the flightless, ground-dwelling

emu-like ones survived, and those survivors must therefore be the common ancestors of all birds today. Birds didn't relearn to fly until thousands of years later when the forest returned. This year, to avoid being hit by giant asteroids in the future, Russian scientists blasted tiny, centimetre-wide rocks with lasers, simulating the effect of nuclear bombs.

They hoped to be able to scale this up to work on asteroids that are even wider than an inch in future. Not to be outdone, NASA announced plans for an eight-ton spaceship called Hammer, which will be able to push an asteroid out of the Earth's path. Japan also deployed asteroid-striking technology but for different reasons. Its Hayabusa-2 spacecraft,

which has spent the last four years travelling through space, arrived at its target, the Ryugu asteroid, currently located about 200 million miles away between Earth and Mars. The plan is that next year Hayabusa-2 will release a projectile that will smash into the asteroid at a mile a second, making a crater that will be filmed and beam back to Earth so that astronomers can better understand how craters are formed.

According to one scientist, the Hayabusa-2 projectile is a kinetic impactor, which is what we say in polite company when we don't want to say the word bomb. Look out, he's got a kinetic impactor! Astronauts NASA sent a man with a fear of heights to the International Space Station. Astronaut Andrew Feustel,

who flew up to the ISS in March, confessed to this mild phobia not long before leaving on his six-month space mission. Fortunately, his fear of heights doesn't affect him too badly when he's 250 miles above the planet, but it is there, he said. Three months into his mission, Feustel became the commander of the ISS,

and while on board conducted over 250 science investigations and technology demonstrations. He also started a band called Astro Hawaii, which featured five of the ISS' astronauts and cosmonauts. Their instruments included two guitars, two flutes, and an improvised drum, which was actually a metallic unit that stores all of the Russian cosmonaut's feces. In other astronaut news,

the world said goodbye to two Apollo moonwalkers. In January, John Young died. He was a member of the Apollo 16 lunar mission and was not only the ninth person to stand on the moon, but also sparked a review into the safety of crumbs in space after he sneaked a corned beef sandwich up there. Five months later, we lost Alan Bean, who as well as being the fourth man to stand on the moon,

was also a painter. Buzz Aldrin will call me up sometimes, Bean once said, wanting to talk about space stuff, because he's really into space stuff. And I said, quit talking to me, Buzz. I'm not an astronaut anymore. I'll call you to ask you what colors to paint these things. Meanwhile, in India, a father and son were arrested

after conning a businessman out of £160,000 by pretending to work for NASA. The pair successfully convinced the man they had invented a device that could generate electricity from thunderbolts. They even performed a demonstration for him in silver spacesuits. After the businessman realized he was being juked by the pair, he called, and the astro-naughts were arrested.

Nice. Thank you very much. Attorneys Numerous lawyers refused to represent the U.S. president for fear he'd damaged their reputation. When Donald Trump's lead attorney, John Dowd, resigned over a disagreement with his client, the president hunted for a replacement to represent his interests

in the Robert Muller-led investigation into alleged Russian meddling in the U.S. 2016 election. However, a number of lawyers who were approached later said they turned the offer down because they were concerned that defending him might damage their professional reputation. According to Ted Butrus, one of L.A.'s top lawyers, Trump is a notoriously difficult client who disregards the advice of his lawyers

and asks them to engage in questionable activities. Trump was eventually left with only two lawyers on his legal team, Ty Cobb and Jay Sekulow, neither of whom came from traditional law firms. Eventually, the former mayor of New York, Rudy Giuliani, joined the team. He's had dealings with Donald before, a video from the year 2000 resurfaced this year

showing him at a charity event dressed as a woman and calling Trump a dirty boy for touching his fake breasts. That doesn't sound like the president. I know. Also, we should add the fake breasts were sort of part of the bra. Rudy Giuliani doesn't have actual fake breasts. Right, he has not breast implants is what you're saying. Yeah, he was just dressed up, yeah.

The breast touching video was not the only problem with Trump's new lawyer. The DC bar website lists Giuliani as an inactive attorney, meaning he's not licensed to practice in the District of Columbia. Consequently, should Trump ever have to appear in court during the Miller investigation, his own lawyer won't be able to attend. Lawyers and breasts met again this year when, owing to a computer malfunction,

every single lawyer in Utah received a photo of a woman's naked breasts. Can I just interrupt you just for a second just to say Lawyers and Breasts met again? Best sentence in the book. Thank you. That's my vote. Agreed. The Utah State Bar sent an event invitation to all of them

and somehow managed to attach the image by mistake. But despite technological hiccups, courts increasingly rely on machines to replace humans. For instance, the Sirius Fraud Office in the UK announced they'd be using evidence-sifting robots on all their casework in future, since one robot can scan more than half a million documents a day. Auctions.

Russell Crowe held an auction called The Art of Divorce on his wedding anniversary. The auction, held at Sotheby's Australia, included a car used on the day of Crowe's wedding and some jewellery that once belonged to his ex-wife, Danielle. Crowe said the reason he had decided to go ahead with it was that he was keen to try and turn something bleak into something joyful.

The auction was streamed live on Facebook and lasted five hours, during which time members of the public were able to bid on 227 lots that also included a leather jockstrap and a life-sized rubber horse. $79,788 of the $3.7 million Crowe made in that auction came from comedian John Oliver's TV show Last Week Tonight,

which bought numerous bits of Crowe memorabilia, including the jockstrap, which the actor wore in the movie Cinderella Man. Oliver then lent the underwear to an Alaskan blockbuster video store in the hope that by displaying it, the jockstrap might attract more customers for them. The store has since closed. A joke feud then broke out with Crowe returning the gesture

by using the $79,788 to fund a ward at Australia Zoo's Wildlife Hospital to treat chlamydia in koalas. A plaque on the wall of the ward now reads the John Oliver Koala Chlamydia Ward. Other auctions around the world featured a broken teapot originally bought for £15, which was sold for £575,000.

The original map of Winnie the Pooh's Hundred Acre Wood, which sold for £430,000, setting a new world record for a book illustration, a 1973 job application by Steve Jobs, which fetched $174,000, despite not identifying what job Jobs was applying for. And a lunch with billionaire Warren Buffett was auctioned for $3.3 million.

Was it a Buffett? Sadly not. What a missed opportunity. And lastly, a postcard from a passenger aboard the Titanic failed to sell when it didn't meet its reserve of £10,000. Addressed to a miss screen in Birmingham, it included the words, wish you were here, it is a lovely boat,

and it would do you good. That is so tragic.