No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As A Fence Made of Sausage

Episode Date: July 23, 2026

Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss Lou Bega, the black keys, and the travelling wheelbarrows.Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes. Join Club Fish for ad-free episodes and exclusive bonus content at apple.co/nosuchthingasafish or nosuchthingasafish.com/patreonEdited by James HarkinProduced by Leying LeeTeam includes Tara Dorrell, Joe Mayo and Ethan RupareliaGet an exclusive 15% discount on Saily data plans! Use code [fish] at checkout. Download Saily app or go to https://saily.com/fish

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Hobern. My name is Dan Schreiber. I am sitting here with Andrew Hunter Murray, Anna Tashinsky, and James Harkin. And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days. And in no particular order, here we go. Starting with fact number one, that is Andy. My fact is, in 1886 there was a national craze for pushing a wheelbarrow the entire length of Britain. Fun. Didn't have TV.

No TV. A problem that can be resolved by TV. Craze. Craze is a big word. That means a lot, a lot of people were doing that. The roads were jammed. The main guy was called Bob Carlyle. He did this in 1879.

He pushed a wheelbarrow from Land's End, which for internationalists is the very very, very, very fast southwest corner of the UK to John O'Grote's, which is the very, very furthest north-east corner of the UK. It's in, obviously, the furthest tip of Scotland. It's, what, a thousand miles? As a crow flies, it's 603 miles. Yeah. So you wiggle around a bit, and depending on your route, it's sort of, it'll come to maybe 650,700 miles. 800. There we go. So he did this, and it was kind of funny, and it was a good stunt, it got in the papers. He did exploits and sort of fun stunts all the way through his life.

And then several years later, there was a bit of a resurgence in popularity and lots of people started doing it, again, as stunts. And really between the lines, it seems to have been a bit of a, not a charity thing, but if you were broke and you wanted to raise lots of money for yourself, you know, this was a thing you could do. I mean, it's grueling to do. Yeah, so he'd just lost his job, this Carlisle guy, right? he'd lost his job for walking a tiger without a leash.

Right. And Dave said, right, you're not coming back to Woolworths after that. No, he worked in a circus. I think it was without a muzzle as opposed to a lead. Yes, sorry. And he got kicked out of the circus and he thought, well, I don't have any money, but I've heard that in America a lot of people are walking around. So maybe I'll copy what they're doing over here and become famous.

Yeah. Okay. And add a wheelbarrow. Well, there was also a couple of Americans who'd walked from the east coast to the west coast of America with wheelbarrows. So we probably took the idea from them. He was inspired by them. Yeah, he was, I mean, he had an amazing career, didn't he? He was a clown. He was a sailor. He was overseas a lot. And he was a real promoter. He used to, when he was in the circus, go to towns ahead of them arriving and he would build up the enthusiasm, the ticket sales,

posters, PR. And that's exactly what he did with this. He would make sure that when he was in a town and taking rest that he would write to all the papers saying, this amazing guy is coming to your town next. Be ready, have everyone out to meet him. And he would then arrive in the town and give improvised speeches on the steps of the town hall, but not about the walk, just about, I was a clown who walked animals.

I was overseas. I think he was talking about temperance a lot. Yeah, that was a big thing for him. He was a big temperance guy? And then was it him who sort of reneged on that? Didn't he say that he was going to do the whole walk being teetototero? And then at the end when he was interviewed, he said, do you know what?

Actually, I realised it was better for me to have a little bit to drink on route to make it a little bit more enjoyable. He basically said at the start, he was like, everyone shouldn't drink alcohol. And then by the end he went, you know what? Some people should drink alcohol. Like people who have walked 800 miles, those guys can probably do with a pint. Absolutely fair enough. Yeah, yeah. It's a bit tragic because he did this.

He got some attention and a little bit of money, I think, but not a huge amount. And then when the whole craze kicked off seven years later, he was in China. He missed it. Did he? Wow. Was he looking for new types of wheelbarrow? That's a niche callback, isn't it? Oh, my God.

Wonderful. I think that's like episode two callback, basically. What's it to again? It's a fact that I read in a Paul Theroux book, which is he was talking to someone in China and they said all the things they invented, paper, you know, dynamite, all this stuff, fireworks, wheelbarrows. And then he leans into Paul Theroo and says, we've even got wheelbarrou. wheelbarrows here in the east that you guys don't even know about.

So he wasn't the first person to walk from John the Grotes to Lands End or vice versa, right? He was the first to do it with a wheelbarrow, I think. But there was a pair of brothers called Robert and John Naylor, who first did it in 1871. And they wrote a book about it. And so that became quite famous. Ah. The book was called, I don't know what the book was called. I've got it. It was called from John O'Grote's to Land's End. Oh, okay.

Yeah. But what they did, we've said it's about 800 miles, but they walked 1,372 miles because they just kept going on little detours if there's something nice around the corner. God, that would be so annoying. Was there one of them who was always saying, oh, go and look at this?

Because I hate, don't you hate being on a walk with that person? No, I am that person, Anna. Oh, Jesus. Me too. I think I could see an information board over there. Let's just pop over and read it. Yeah, people were doing it all over the shop after that, weren't they? It was very popular.

and people did variations of it. Lots of dogs did it. People, with their owners, it wasn't like a separate dog contest. There was a woman called Rosa Simmons. Should you guys read about her? No, no. Again, it's pre-TV and pre-women having jobs days. So she, between 902 and 1907, she did it seven times.

But she didn't do the John O'Grote to Land's End. She did because she lived in London, so she had to get to the start point and the end point. So she did London to John O'Grote to Land's End to London seven times. Two of the years, she did it twice every summer. So, you know, she did 25 days on the hoop doing that whole thing and then thought, I'll do it again. And she said that it really kind of cured her,

that on vegetarianism. Of what? Of being very sickly. Oh, okay, you hadn't mentioned that she was sickly. It's just a casual cure. Yeah. I was reading about John O'Grote. It seems to have been named after a 15th century Dutchman

called Jan de Groot or John of Groot. And he used to apply a fairy. between the Scottish mainland and Orkney. So he supposedly had a house there, which has since been knocked down. There's a hotel sitting on it today. And it was him and seven other members of his family who had all their families there.

And they used to have a dispute when they got together for big meals who sat at the head of the table. So what they ended up building is an octagon building with eight doors. Well, and then did MMA fights to decide who would get it. Exactly. They had eight doors to the house.

Because I think, didn't they also have fights about who had precedence when you entered the house? Before even sitting at the table. Exactly. It was just, it was a whole thing about, I'm the major person in this family. I think this family's got problems that are beyond the structural. Are you sure, Andy? Because I thought at the start that sentence you were going to say, I see a format. Okay.

Now we're talking. And so what would happen is they would open the eight doors. The heads would walk in and there would be eight tables that were positioned facing each other, that each of which had a head at the top. And so they could each sit at the... Like an asterisk kind of thing. Like an asterisk, exactly. It's not just eight people coming in.

No, no, and their families. Oh, okay. Yes. I think eight doors is nuts. I'm sorry. Oh, I don't think I pitched that as a story of logic and why are we all doing that? I would agree that was nuts. But yeah, John O'Grote.

It was very run down John O'Grote for a long time. I think it's a fair bit nicer now. Nice. It was pronounced the most dismal place in Scotland. by a magazine, Scottish magazine called Urban Realm. You had to pay a tenor to have your photo taken with the sign. There's a famous sign saying, this far to London, this far to Land's End. A tenor?

Yeah. In those days as well. In Scotland. Oh my God. That was until 2013. I think there is now a free sign that you can have your picture taken out. But yeah, that was... Because, you know, I guess the bloke had to go and get the sign out of the shed or whatever.

No, sure. It's just tough times. Put it in the ground, mate. I think the sign says like Lanzend 870. miles or something because that's if you go by road that's how long it takes I think that's what it says but that is the old version that it was 874 miles and now it's 814 miles so it's actually 60 miles shorter distance than it was when people were doing it 100 and a odd years ago are we riddling me this we can do okay coastal erosion yes each coast has been eroded by 30 miles and that part of the

countries disappeared. Final answer. Look it in, Chris. Chris. That's the last time you watched, who wants to be a millionaire? It's been gone for like a decade. Whoa, it's got to be just highways,

tunnels kind of thing. It's bridges. The seven bridge is a big one. Because actually, if you go from Lanz End to John O'Grote, you go through Wales for a little bit of it. So you go over the seven bridge, and then you're in Wales for a tiny bit,

and then you go up the west coast of England. But yeah, there's seven bridge. there's a few other bridges, the Kesset Bridge, Cromisi Bridge, the Dunnock Firth Bridge. They've all shortened the route that you have to take, whereas you used to have to go round these rivers. Hard to go round a river, isn't it? Yeah, you just have to wait until there's a ford that you can get over. The fords, okay. That's amazing that our country's got smaller on the inside due to infrastructure.

I think that's really cool. Yeah, it's normal by some measures. One thing about John O'Grote's is that it's not actually the most northerly point, and nor is land's end the most southwesterly point. So none of it's true, is it? It's all rubbish. It's actually nearby Dunnett head near John O'Grote, which is the most northerly point, but I think it's just a bit less accessible. I think the guy who had that sign charged £12 to picture.

And the longest journey possible in the UK isn't even that route. It's land end to Duncan's behead, because that's another place in Scotland, which is further away. And also, what's Great Britain's westernmost point? Well, you want us to say something cornish Because it feels like it's sticking out But it's probably that we're at an angle So it's somewhere in Scotland Yeah, it's in Scotland

Ardnamurcan Point On the West Coast of Scotland Which is when you look at almost any map of Britain Obviously Cornwall sticks projects massively But again, our maps are screwed, don't they? Britain's doing a wheelie basically Yes, yeah Which is how they did the wheelbarrow's as well, yeah

All right, here's one Which of these has taken less time? Okay the record for the penny farthing journey So that's on a giant wheel It's like a weird looking bicycle old school Yeah yeah penny farthing Or

Some people might not know it For overseas listeners We actually we all commute on those You can get an app and just hire a penny farthing So penny farthing The fastest shed record Or skipping with a skipping rope The fastest shed record, carrying a shed?

No, that would be a motorised with wheels, I'm guessing, because we've done speed records for sheds before. For overseas listeners, those of us who can't afford to get a penny farthing app, we actually get a shed app. A few people get in those ways. That's why it's a bit cheaper. And you drill holes in the bottom, you put your legs through, and then everyone just runs, didn't they?

Like the footstones, yeah. What was the third one? The shed and then. Skipping. Skipping. Skipping rope, as in, yeah. Do we need to explain? For those in overseas countries.

That's a rope. We're doing overseas listen as a disservice here. So sorry, penny farthing, skipping rope, shed. Well, skipping rope famously you just stay in one place, so they haven't got anywhere. Perfect. Probably shed. Yeah, it's going to be shed. Is it motorised?

Yeah, if it's motorised, you would think that would be the quickest. It's motorised, but the penny farthing got there faster. What? So the penny farthing record is four days and 12 hours. Like a normal penny farthing or an e-penny farthing? They're so dangerous, those. No, it's a normal penny farthing, four days, 12 hours, which is very impressive. I mean, normally takes cyclists about a fortnight, I think.

This is a guy called Richard Thodey of Matlock in Derbyshire, so congratulations. Shed record six days. They did take a little break halfway through to try and break the world shed speed record. And I think they got it to 96.8 miles an hour, which is very impressive. Yeah. And again, we're talking a shed on top of a flatbed truck. It's a motorized shed. It's a shed with wheels.

No, they put wheels on them now. It's, yeah. A car. No, no, Dan's being silly. No, to break the speed record, they do. There's an engine. It's a car, or is it a shed? It sounds like a lorry.

It's not, it's more than that as a shed. Okay. Okay. I don't understand what a difference between a shed and just a car. A car with planks on it. Yeah. Yeah, if we're being really finicky, it's sort of a car with planks on it. Flanks arranged in a certain way, though.

Who would have thought when you were mocking me for describing the Pennyfarthing that here you'd be sitting? moments later explaining a shed. You know the penny farthing guy? If you have a big enough difference between your big wheel and your little wheel, you only have to turn the wheel around a few times and you'll go really, really fast. Yeah. Yeah. You have to have very strong legs.

And you're very high up, aren't you? On top of that wheel? I mean, if you fall off, you're in serious trouble. You'll be able to see if there's a traffic jab in front of you. Really good point. I didn't answer because I know the skipping rope one because this guy's from Bolton, right? I think he's planning to do it. Yeah, it's not done it yet.

Yeah, he's doing it about a month after we record this. Very exciting. This guy called Chris Patel. He does a lot of charitable things and spreads the word and brings people together. I think they kind of pick someone every week who's in poverty or something and then improve their lives. Yeah. So he's planning to do it in 35 days. Nice.

Nice. A month longer than it will take in a shed. Anything to get out of Baltimore for a month. Stop the podcast. Stop the podcast. Hi everyone, we'd like to let you know that we are sponsored this week by Saley. Yes, I don't know if any of you has ever been lost on a holiday abroad. It happens to me pretty much every day I'm ever away.

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Hmm. Yeah. So the piano was invented, as we know it now, in the 1700s. We don't know the exact day, but the beginning of the 1700s. And it was by a guy called Bartolomio Cristofori, Italian. Brilliant man. And at the time, the keys were white, and then the little in-between notes were black. Then, at some point, it swaps over. And everyone starts playing with black keys that were white, and white keys were black. But then they swapped back to white keys that were white, and black keys that are black.

And Mozart would have composed on a piano where all the keys were mostly black. And, yeah, there's many reasons why they changed it. But one was, it's actually quite hard to see the keys when they're all black. Oh, right. It's much easier on the eye to have white keys as your main set with the black breaking them up. Because the space in between is also black, isn't it? Because space is black. Space is black. There you go.

There you go. With the contrast. Yes, absolutely. I think also one thing was like Italian pianos tended to be, as we know them today, and the rest of Europe had the black keys. What I find amazing is that they were invented around 1700. And the organ had been around for 2,000 years. Wow. Isn't that amazing?

Yeah. Like we had organs for 2,000 years and then people thought, oh, let's do a piano. Because you kind of think of it the other way around. It feels like the piano is a simpler instrument. Yeah. Yeah. Organs with keys and everything. Organs with keys.

They were often done with water pressure or sometimes with like a leather bag that you would blow air through. Really? A bit like a bagpipe kind of thing. But yeah. an engineer called Ketisibus of Alexandra invented something called the Hydrolus the 3rd century BC

and that was the first organ. Wow. Yeah. It definitely is one of those things that looks basic and isn't. If you thought that you could build a piano yourself at home using logic, which I've always thought.

Have you? Yeah. Then you actually probably can't when you read about it. I think you could Anna. I don't think that's fair enough. I didn't know that the main differences so there were lots of proto pianos

weren't there? Harpsichord. The harpsichord, the virginal, the spinet, the spinetone. And that was a kind of pastor, actually. That was kind of pastor, which is very nice. But they couldn't vary the tone of an individual note. And the brilliant thing about a piano is that the amount, the strength with which you press the key is how soft or loud,

how forte or how piano the note is. And that was the amazing innovation. Yeah. Although I'd always. thought that, for instance, Bach wouldn't have had dynamics because, you know, and all those old composers until about Beethoven wouldn't have had dynamics because they were not. Dynamics is loud and soft. Okay. Because they're composing on harpsichord. So we all imagine like Bach, and that's why he didn't really include much 14 piano because it didn't exist. But I learned that there actually

was the clavichord, and this did have dynamics, and you could make it louder and softer. And this was Bart's preferred instrument. He preferred it to the harpsichord. But the thing with the clavichord was that, so it worked in the same way as a piano, which is that it, bangs the strings rather than plucking them, so you can get dynamics. But because the technology for the piano hadn't been invented yet, it was only very, very, very, very, very quiet. So it was either very, very, very quiet or very, very, very quiet. It was softer than human conversation.

So you could have little recitals where everyone would have to have their ears just leaning right in towards the keyboard while Bach played his latest piece. But he did prefer it because it was more expressive, so you could introduce some loud and soft. Is that Johann Sebastian Bach that you talked about? Sorry, Johann Sebastian, yes. Because there's quite a few barks. Yeah. And the other one was much more famous back then, yes.

Well, there was a few. So C.P.E. Bach was the most famous thing. Johann Sebastian Bach. And there's also Johann Christian Bach, who was one of the first people to play an actual piano and actually made them really popular. Right. Yeah. So when it was invented in around 1700, people didn't really care about it because the

harpsicle kind of did the job anyway. They didn't really need a piano. But then this guy called Johanna Zumpur came to London, started making pianos. this guy, Johann Christian Bach, started playing Zumpur instruments. And Queen Charlotte really liked it. So that's why it became popular. And you're one of your favourite things, Andy, the burgeoning middle class. Decided they might need a status symbol.

And so they brought in pianos to their. Friend of the podcast. Get up on the t-shirt. Plucking is always uniform, right? You can't pluck with modulation. We should say, and a piano you bang the strings. Yes. And this is the thing.

What is a piece? piano. And I didn't know this debate that's been raging for three wheels on it. Is that a car? But is it a string instrument? Because it's all strings on the inside of that. Or is it a percussion instrument because you're banging the strings with a little hammer? I was always taught it was percussion. Yeah. It is a percussion in terms of what you'd read in a book. But I agree. It's a raging debate. It feels like the debate's been shut down on this show pretty quickly. By big hammer. Yeah. But, yeah. But, yeah. Yeah, it's pretty amazing.

This guy, Christophori, the inventor of the piano. We have three of his original pianos still in museums. And I find that just fascinating. I don't think there's many instruments where we could say, here are basically the inventor of a whole instrument. Here is what he built with his first three. Because by the time it took off, he'd been dead for 40 years. It wasn't a huge success in his lifetime, for sure.

If he was asked on his deathbed, he probably wouldn't have said they were his big invention. What do you think he would have said he'd invent, socks that worked both ways out? idea for a shed that moves. He wouldn't have said that the piano was his favorite invention because he didn't call it a piano. What did he call it?

He called it an Apisembalo. Yeah. Which literally apparently means harp, harpsichord. Okay, Sembalo was harpsichol. How did I said hopscored, wasn't it? And it was, he used this term to describe his new invention. And because that term was not very common in his day, we think probably that's what he wanted it to be called.

Inventors are so bad at names, a lot of the time. Do you remember the guy who invented tennis wanted to call it Sphiristica? I like that. And everyone said maybe tennis would be a better name. What does that word mean? I think it's a Greek word. I can't remember the etymology. But I think like we only like tennis more because we're used to it. Yeah. I'd happily say Sphiristaker if that was the accepted common way to say it. And I think piano is a bad term because until you actually read into it, you do spend a lot of time when you learn it thinking, why is this instrument named after the dynamic, which is. instructs you to be quiet. Before you

realize it's short for piano forte and it was named after the fact that it can be a piano quiet and forte loud. Why is this called quiet? Thinking a lot of other languages it's still called piano forte. In Russian it's called piano forte. We're busy in England aren't we? It's got a lot to say. One of these other instruments, the virginal

was a kind of proto proto piano keyboardy instrument. Why is it called a virginal? Invented by Richard Branson. That's right. I actually know the answer to this. They wanted to create an instrument that was presented as if it was for maidens to play and not seem rock and roll. It was like playing a cello.

You would play a cello in between your legs, right? And women weren't allowed to do that because that was seen as quitely sexualized. So they invented a side saddle cello position that you would play. The virginal piano, similarly, was a piano that protected their virginity, as it were. Interesting. There are a couple of other theories as well. So one is, as you say, played by young women. One is that it's named after the Virgin Mary

Common move back in the day Or it's named after the Latin Virga Meaning rod Okay sort of the opposite of Virgin Mary in a way Yes Yeah okay Why would it be rod It's not very rod like is it

It involves rods I think at some point Okay cool rods in it Yeah sure Let's not overthink it Oh I don't know how virginal works That's no excuse I was reading a book about music by Dudley Moore, who was a fantastic piano player. And he was.

No, it's just so amazing. Every fact we have, you find a way of linking it to one of your rotation of 10 favorite people. Anyway, it's called Musical Bumps, and he says... We're not going to explain for international listeners who the quite long-dead comedian Dudley Moore is. That's fine. That's a very good point. Yeah, he was in Arthur, he was in the movie 10 with Bo Derek. He was in Beyond the Fringe, which was a landmark moment in satire within this country.

Yeah, okay. Sure? Yeah, yeah. I was having fun. He says that a lot of great piano players don't have white and black keys. They have yellow and black. And it's because the heaviness of which they play it and slam their keys, it discolors it. And so the white keys go yellow.

Is it sweat or do they all smoke? I think it has to just be a. mixture of what they've eaten, what they've like, it's just, it's wear and tear, basically. They all eat watsetsets. But yeah, he said to the point where anytime he saw the color yellow, he associated it with loudness because it was usually on a piano player who would slam the keys that you would see yellow. And when he died at his funeral, he had a bouquet that was made into a big piano, and it was black and yellow. And I think that was in reference to, yeah. Most remote piano in the world? Antarctica.

Mars. Oh, in the world? No, no answer. I refuse to play your silly questions anymore. Oh. Yeah. Gosh, I remember they did take once in Antarctica. They did. That's Antarctica. That's correct. And that's a player piano, right, I think. It was, no, I think it was just a standard upright. But Captain Scott took one to the Antarctic.

Yeah. And this is the very sad trip where they all died. But this is not the fault of the piano, which they did not take all the way to the South Pole. They left it at their base camp, which was sensible. And it was... Some of them were still questioning whether they should have brought it in first place. But it's really interesting why they brought it in the first place, which was just that music was so important for morale. Moral, yeah.

When you're there in the dark polar night. And it's just, it's so bloody cold and you can't go outside. And you need morale. And so one of them said, we should have gone mad in the long winter nights if they hadn't had the piano with them. So it was used a lot. They would all stand around singing and they practically had a full choir going around it.

They would sing a lot together in the evenings. And it's still there to this day. Is it? Yeah. Playable? Is anyone in the play? I think a tuner would probably manage to improve it a little bit. Yeah.

The white and black notes are made of ivory. Ebony and ivory. Ebony and ivory. And Ebony. But you can't sell ivory anymore. So they don't make them. They make them. Because of woke.

Because of dead elephants. Yes. Or woke, whichever way you want to put it. That's what I call it. But also, did you know, Ebony is also endangered? The wood? Yeah, the ebony wood. So it grows really, really slowly.

It takes about 200 years to get dense enough that you can turn it into piano keys. And so to save the trees, there's real strict controls on the ebony trade. And also, the ebony trees, the fruit is. eaten by elephants who poo out the fruit to get more trees. So actually, ebony and ivory come together in perfect harmony. So that they all grow. Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is Anna. My fact this week is that until the mid-19th century, the official language of Hungary was Latin.

And this is amazing. This was just much longer than any other country continued to use Latin. So a lot of other European countries used it as a sort of legal and sometimes administrative language until the Reformation, Enlightenment period. But Hungary just kept it on and it continued to be used, first of all, in official circumstances like the law, state administration and things like that, but also everyday chat. And foreign travellers would go at the start of the 19th century to Hungary and say, this is absolutely bizarre, I just went into a pub and the innkeeper was chatting in Latin to me.

It's crazy. Imagine that today. It's almost like going to one of these old times places. We talked about that big French. Pue de Fu, that's it. You're back in time. Yeah. Hungary was one big puy de foe. So bizarre.

There was a record written actually by Casanova of sex fame who did write about all the things. He would be delighted with that. Do you mean Casanova the librarian? He met a Hungarian traveler at one point who said he'd been incredibly disappointed when he visited Rome

because naturally he thought it was Hungarian who was speaking Latin every day to his kids. He thought he'd go to Rome and obviously they'd all be speaking in a decent society and he said I was greatly mistaken nobody can speak it not even the priests who only pretend to write it. That's so funny. Is it because Hungarian is so

hard to learn? There's various reasons I think I mean it was a ruler called Maria Theresa who sort of stamped this in stone in the 1700s when people were thinking, sure we give up this whole dead language thing. Yeah, she was a haps Right. Yeah.

And then there was the war of Austrian succession where someone had died, she was in charge and all the other princes around Europe, because the Habsburg Empire was absolutely huge. All these princes decided, oh, well, we've got a chance here. We can set up our own countries. And so she decided to fight them and sort of knock them all down. And when she won that war, she decided to kind of bring a new enlightened state and get rid of Latin from all these countries. but in Hungary she couldn't really do it because it was so diverse.

It was the aristocrats spoke French, the gentry spoke Maja, the peasants were kind of Germanic. So everyone spoke different languages, but if we keep it in Latin, then everyone can kind of stick together. Right. She had a lot of kids, by the way. Did she? Very interesting lady.

She had, I believe it was 16 kids. And the 15th kid during labor, she had a tooth taken out while she was having her 15th kid because she hated time wasting and she thought, okay, if I'm going to be in pain anyway, let's do this at the same time. That's a really good idea. Really? It's right, yeah. Yeah, do those things in the lead up to birth during labor while you're in agony as it is.

It seems like an interesting thought. I think that's a good new business for a dentist, isn't it? Yeah, during labor. Just turn up and go, would you like me to do anything while this is going on? Yeah, exactly. But she gave birth and she gave birth to her daughter called Antonia, and Antonio went on to become Marie Antoinette. Yeah.

Oh, plot twist. Yeah, plot twist. Yeah. She also had 50, I think it was 52 grandchildren, like 56. A lot of grandchildren. I mean, that's a hell of a lot of grandchildren because her kids, a couple of her kids went on to have 16 or 17 or 18 kids. And if all the parents want you to do one day a week with one of the children,

that's a nightmare. One more thing is that the Habsburg realm had a lot of Latin going on, which means that actually Croatia also had Latin as its main language until 1847. again because it was an old Habsburg. And it was part of the Hungarian Empire at this time, which is one of the reasons they didn't go Hungarian. Because they didn't speak Hungarian. Another thing about Maria Theresa,

she couldn't be crowned, properly crowned, because she was a woman and that was against the Hungarian rules at the start. But then she did impress the nobles by, you know, trampling all over them in her first year. So then they did say, all right, we can do it. We will crown you. Empress? Queen?

No, not queen, because they didn't have a concept. top of it. King? So she was crowned king. Yes. She was King Maria Theresa. Girl boss. Absolutely girl boss. Rex Hungariani. Yeah. I just couldn't come up with the feminine. Do you think Latin's going to come back? Yeah. Yeah. There's a group called Villanova who wants to revive Latin in Europe. Like in the EU, for instance, at the moment everyone kind of speaks English or French or their own languages.

But they think maybe if we bring Latin back, then there'll be no like cultural baggage that comes with saying, oh, we have to do this bit in Serbo-Croat and we have to do this bit in Italian and we have to do this bit. How many people are asking for this? Well, there's a small group. But anyway, there's a linguistic scholar called Jennifer Jenkins who says, as far as I understand it, the EU doesn't have any problem using English at the moment, especially now that Britain isn't in there anymore.

Oh, thank you, Jennifer. And also, there is no way that the Chinese are going to learn Latin. That's a fair point. Which I think is a good point. No point. Hey, I've got a quiz for you guys. What do you think this term means in Hungary? His mouth is walking like the ass of a duck. Oh.

His mouth is walking like the ass of a dog. So an ass of a duck is wobbling. Like, so maybe you're going, Blu-whol-l-l-l-l-l-l-l-l-l-l-l. Did they do that enough in Hungary to have a friend? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So he's just talking bullocks? He talks a lot is basically, is what they say for someone who's talking about.

Here's another one. Why are you giving drinks to the mice? That's just literal. If someone gives drinks a mice, that's a perfectly normal thing to say because it's a ridiculous thing to do. Is it a waste? You're wasting them. They won't enjoy them.

It's why are you crying? Why are you giving drinks to the mice? Presumably the film Terminator 2, I think includes that line, where Arnold Schwarzenegger says, why do you cry to a little boy? Yeah. So when they translate it into Hungary? I'm going to see him. He said, why do you give drinks to the mice?

Oh, we've got to watch that version there. Your dad was not a glassmaker. Oh, your dad was not a glassmaker. So glassmakers, they work in hot conditions, don't they? In Venice. He was clumsy. He's really clumsy. Your dad's really clumsy.

You're blocking my view. Hey, your dad is not a glassmaker. You are not made up glass. You make a better door than a window. Yes. That's a proper way of saying. Yeah. And the last one, the fence is not.

made of sausage. The fence is not made of sausage. So stop chewing on it. So pigs make sausages and they need fences to keep them in. So you wouldn't make the fence out of the stuff that the pigs are going to be turned into. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's like poster-turned-gamekeeper stuff. No, it's not as good as you think is what they would say for if they were saying it's not as good as you think.

The fence is not made of sausage. I mean, it would be good, wouldn't it? Yeah, exactly. Imagine coming home every day to your fence made of sausage. I can see that it's your fantasy, Andy. For a farmer? I don't know. The matter thing about Hungarian, aside from these bizarre phrases that they have,

when they did decide to go with Hungarian as the official language, it was quite out of date they decided, and it couldn't have words for things like, you know, a... microwave. Or, I'm thinking more like mid-19th century, a plow. Train? A motor car. A train, yes, that's better.

And a lathe, I would have said. They probably had those for about... Two thousand centuries. A piano. Oh, good. Well, they were invented a century ago, so Hungary's probably got a one for them. Can we just have a give or take here? So they had lots of stuff they didn't have words for.

Okay. Charles Dickens. They didn't have a word for Charles Dickens. The telegraph. Very good. So they had to invent some new words. A guy called Ferenk Kaczynski was the leader of this, an academic. This is a lot like what Ataturk did in Turkey, right, when he was redoing Turkish.

But guess how many words they invented? And if I tell you that in ordinary day-to-day language, the number of words that you probably probably know from your native language is between 15,000 and 20,000. And that's word family. So run, running runs. That would all be one way. Okay. So how many new words were created for the Hungarian language? A thousand. Yeah. With family words as well? I think it is. Yeah. Well, this is the claim. I haven't heard. And this has said in all like books about it. History's of Hungary. So he's going to be a lot or a few. I think James has shot himself at the foot with guessing a thousand because that's quite a reasonable guess. The way that this works is the first

person to say something gives a reasonable guess, then the next two spoil the game. That's how this always works. And it is not fun for anyone. Six. Love that. Thank you. Andy and what do you want? A billion? Two million. Yeah. Andy's closest. It was 10,000 words. Okay. Sorry, why did you say okay? That's two thirds of the total number of words that you would know in a native language. This is the language everyone's been speaking for thousands of years. And some bloke comes along and says, I've added 10,000 words. Here's your vocabular. list, memorize it by next week. Yeah, that's unbelievable.

I know one word in Hungarian, Eger Shedra, which means cheers. Which tells you a lot what I did when I was in Hungary. But do you know how, we talked a bit about space earlier, do you know how there's this idea of like if there are aliens, where are they? The Thurby paradox. Well, Leo Slyzzard, who was a physicist, said that the answers to the Fermi paradox is that the aliens are among us, but they call themselves Hungarians. There was this kind of group of really genius Hungarians that came across at the start of the 20th century that were just like transforming all of science and everything. And they were known as the Martians because they were just like so far ahead of everyone else in the world.

Really? What that was about? Maybe it was because they learned Latin for so long. Well, Hungary was a very big country, like a very big important country for so long. And then they lost a lot of, they kind of slightly got on the wrong side during the war. And then when the war finished,

they lost all of their land. Which war, first war? Both, actually. Because as we've ascertained recently, there was no wrong side to be able in the First World War. What I mean by the wrong side is the losing side. Ah. So their GDP would have been the same as Britain, if not more.

and then suddenly it just all went wrong. I think in 1946, after World War II, if you went to a restaurant in Hungary, which very few people could do, but if you went to a restaurant in Hungary, it was better to order your meal and then pay for it at the start of a meal because by the end of the meal,

inflation was so high, it would have gone up. I think their... Really? Yeah, it was mad. What was it? Their currency was like the pengo or something, wasn't that? Yes. And you could, like, get five billion pingo notes.

Yeah. It was like, it was basically when you went to pay for a meal, It was like they were spoiling one of our guessing games How much is this burger? Oh, is it two billion pengos? Yes, it is. I can't believe we're sitting in the fact where we literally could have had the quiz question

that did that. Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that Stephen King's wife threatened to divorce him for playing Mambo number five so often. Wonderful. Boom, bum, bum, bum, bum. B. Bollum. Do we know how often?

I once is enough, I think. No, Judge, would you be granted all the assets. So this was an interview that the horror author Stephen King did with Rolling Stone. And he said, my wife threatened to divorce me. I played that a lot. I had the dance mix. I loved those extended playthings, and I played both sides of it. and one of them was just a total instrumental

and I played that finger until my wife just said one more time and I'm going to have to fucking leave you. Wow. So it just seemed that he really liked it. And I don't think, I don't know because this is all the information I have on it, but I don't think it's the Lou Bega version. Because this is quite an old Mambo song, right?

Not that old, but it's a mid-20th century Mambos song. Was Stephen King listening after the Lou Bega version was? He was. He was working on a. book. He thinks he was working on a book called 112263, which was a time travel novel in which someone goes back to try and prevent the assassination of JFK. Of Lou Bega. Yeah, so who knows? You could be right, James. It could be a dance mix. I think so. If he was listening to the words and then the instrumental,

maybe he was doing Lou Bega and then the... Yeah, maybe. I see what you mean by there, but I went on Spotify and looked for all the different versions of Mambo. Number five I could find. And most of the instrumental versions would not be the Lou Bega version. That's interesting. So, correct and if I'm wrong, this was an old Mambo song by a guy called Perez. Perez Perez Prado. Perez Prado. But that didn't have words?

No, it's just like the background Mambo song. Yes. The version I know and love is the one with a little bit of... Yeah, yeah. Okay, okay, okay. So he sounds like he was listening to both versions, maybe. I think he must have been listening to both. If he was listening to a word version, then that can only be Lou Baker.

I do see that. Yeah, yeah. Stephen King, he's lowbrow, let's face it. He's gone new beggar. Do you like me to hold your coat? I think that's right. I think, and, you know, I don't know if you guys have done it. I certainly do. If I'm writing something when I wrote my books and Andy, when you write your books,

you don't want lyrics and you want something on repeat going over and over. And it might be a horrible song, but if it's chosen you, as it were, to help your creativity. I would never listen to something on repeat. I listen to J-pop because I can't understand the words, right? I wouldn't listen to anything on repeat Interesting I wrote my school's dissertation To the Cores live version

Of only when I sleep over and over I think I did it like a thousand times And that has lyrics But I think once it's just going You forget Interesting But yeah Let's get into Mamba number five

Yeah And also let's just say When Dan says if it's a terrible song This is not a terrible song This is a brilliant song It's definitely one of my favourite Mambos It's in my five top members Yeah

So Lou Be named after his own surname because he was called David Loubager. I think middle name may be. David Lubiga Balimesey? Yeah, David Lubbager is what he goes by now. So he's recently written an autobiography called Mambo number one, which is under his name David Lubiga. Who is reading how many copies of that autobiography being sold?

Well, one to Monica, once a reader. And yeah, he was, I think he was, German, wasn't he? He is German. Yeah. Born in West Germany. I don't think of Lou Bega and the Cold War in the same space. But one of the first times this was ever played was

very, very sadly, his father died a few weeks before the song came out. But Lou Bega visited him in hospital with an early version of the song. And I think this was on his father's deathbed. Was he played him? Number number five. Fantastic. His father apparently said this will open door.

and kind of gave his blessing to the song and said, you've done a great, great thing there. Because I think he hadn't had a huge commercial success before that. This was definitely his biggest hit, you know. But I just find the idea of having to go in to the bedside and then put on the desk. That is that we did expect. I wonder if he got confused at the line a little bit of Sandra in the sun

because Lou Bega's sister is called Sandra. No. That might have sounded a bit odd to the dad on his deathbed. There are so many other women's names with two syllables. I'll name one. How have you had to resort to that? You'll never think of another one. Wow.

Yeah. I was trying to see if there was anything deeper to the fact that Stephen King really latched on to this song. So, Mamba No. 5 was the debut song for Lou Bega. Yeah. Back in 1974, Carrie was the debut for Stephen King. And so I had a look through Carrie. And remarkably, in the song,

We've got Monica, Erica, Rita, Tina, Sandra, Mary and Jessica. Rita, Tina, Sandra, Mary and Jessica are all characters in Carrie. And then Erica appears in Carrie the movie. And then Monica in the sequel to the Carrie movie, which came out many years later. So all of them appear as part of Carrie. Do you think maybe Lou Bega was reading Carrie when he was writing this?

It's possible. It's possible. I mean, I think it goes deeper as well because Stephen King. Of course it goes deep. This goes all the way to the top, I think, Dan. Stephen King released Carrie in 1974 as a hardback, sold modestly, but didn't do as well to make him who he is today. It was 1975 when the paperback came out, exploded, sold millions. That's why Stephen King is who he is today.

That was released in April 1975, the same month and year that Lubega was born. So something is cooking. Something is cooking underneath that. I mean, if Stephen King isn't turning this into a tedious novel, right? now. That's very novel. How dare you. Here's another slightly interesting thing.

It's lovely. Don't oversell it. Mambo. What does Mambo mean? It's a female priestess in the, in, what did they do in Haiti? Yeah, voodoo. In the voodoo religion.

Isn't it? I think wasn't it named after a thing that meant kind of conversation, chat, chat in Swahili, although I always thought of it as meaning kind of shagging. Well, it is, also a word that the Bantu languages use and it translates as King. Stephen King, Stephen Mambo. How many languages did you have to go deep into to find out?

Well, what's more interesting is that there are... Even more interesting. There are six major Shona languages that use Mambo as the title King, one of which, one of the language dialects is monica. It's called Monika. M-A-N-Y-I-K-A. I would love to see your string cork board at home where you have been plotting this out. I'm just shocked I'm not getting a standing ovation right now. This is wild.

That's so good. I'm wild by the work. It's just interesting. Here is a fun mathematical thing about M-Ban number five. I found a really nice essay by a article, Dami Pack, which is based on these names. So we've got Angela Pamela Sondra Rita, Monica, Erica, Tina, Mary, Jessica. Here I am. A little bit of you makes me a man.

Well, can you predict the song's date of release based on the names of the women? Oh, I see. When were they most popular for children? And then presumably they're in the 20s when he's dating them. So is it Bayesian reasoning or the Bayes formula? Yeah. Yeah, and you're measuring the distribution of the names and their popularity, and you combine, you've got several different probabilities, right?

Because you've got all these different names, so you can combine them and come up with a kind of, I'm sure I'm absolutely buttering this explanation, but, you know, some names like Jessica only really came in in the 60s and 70s, whereas if Pamela was popular a century before, it's probably not that one because you're combining it with the Jessica. As the writer said, Mamba No. 5 was released in 1999, but the popular baby girl names of 1999 would not automatically tell us the song was released that year.

Lou Beger wasn't meeting newborn infants, that was most flirting with adult women. So we need to look at the popularity of names from the 60s and 70s and 80s, you know. I'm sure he's relieved we've clarified that. And lo and behold, this formula comes up with 1999 as the date of release. Is that right?

When you combine the names and you do the reasoning. Do you think that they, because they knew what answer they were aiming for, didn't they? I'm not mathematically qualified enough to say. James, are you saying the kind of academic? who would write a paper like this might be not being the most rigorous they possibly could be statistically. I'm absolutely not getting on the Alitashinsky. Let's attack on Academics Madleggard. I forgot I did that. I thought you were going to say that here's a mathematical thing about Mambo number five.

Isn't it weird that there's a song Mambo number five and then that same original artist wrote a song Mambo number eight? But there aren't any others. Well, I think they were. I couldn't find any. I could find Mambo number seven but by a different artist. But I couldn't find one to four. This is Perez Prado that we're talking. about who was the original writer of Mambo number five, but he wrote so many songs with the

name Mambo in it. He didn't necessarily record all of them. So it's quite possible that he had live versions, Mambo one, two, three, four, five made it big. Yeah, Lou, Paris Prado. I have, I as a child had one of his records in my record collection because he did the theme for a Guinness advert where there's like a guy dancing around a pint of Guinness and that song became absolutely massive. Well, he also wrote quite a few other songs that you'd recognize. So one of them is called Patricia, which is the first number one track in America that has an organ as a lead instrument.

And it's in loads of Tarantino movies, so you definitely know it. And he originally did cha-cha-cha-cha music, but then went on to Mambo and then went on to loads of other stuff. So he wrote a four-movement tone poem that combined. jazz and Afro-Cuban themes. And then in 1967, Che Guevara died. And in Cuba, they announced the, they did the newscast. But at the start of the newscast, they played one of his songs, which was called the

exotic suite of the Americas. And then whenever they had any commemoration of Che Guevara's death, they always played a... I almost said a Lou Bega song. The Perez Prado sung. Oh, really? A little bit of shame in Bolivia. There's no lyrics in his original Mambo number five,

but he did do a lot of different Mambo's, Mamba No, No, 8, and so on. But apparently there's a really good way. Let's say you're sitting in a cafe and you hear what sounds like a Perez Paredo song coming on over the speakers. How do you tell that it's him and not just a random Mambo song? There is apparently a little way, a little trick. Ooh. Sort of an audio signature.

Yeah, exactly. and you did it earlier when you were saying the lyrics to the song when Andy went in all his songs there's just a little wait but no but Lou Bega does that or does he that I probably Lou Bega does do that we're back to the wrong board Lou Bega probably does do that but he's doing it in tribute to

Prado because that's what Prado did all the way in every song it definitely is him who does it it's not the ghost of Prado suddenly comes on over the record and knows this sucks so well Yeah, he was known as seal face, Peres Prado, because of this thing that he did whenever he was playing and he got, wah! And it would make him look a bit like a seal.

Yeah, I can see that. It's good. I think we should fold in some kind of audio signature like that to our show. Yeah, okay. Any suggestions? Oh, just a suggestion to get us off the blocks. So everyone knows that it says.

Yes. When you're just in a cafe and a random podcast comes on and you hear, they're like oh I know this one you know to skip so Mambo came from Danzone which is Cuba's national dance I'm sorry the Danzone The Dan zone

Oh God And we're just supposed to believe this means nothing That was the worst part of the crystal maze Wasn't it when you went to the Dan zone I'll go for another mystery game Fine No no you're in the Dan zone now And he's explaining to you about the time that Peter Sellers met the aunt of Barry Humphreys.

I don't want the money. I'm afraid Danzone is Cuba's national dance, Danzone. And so that is what Mambo grew out of. It was like building off that. Manbo just added an improvised section to the end. But Danzone is very interesting because it's a dance and it's split into two sections, the music. the music, one type of section you dance to, the other you don't dance to. And so there are these long sections of no dancing.

And the way to spot a novice who's in their first dance is that they don't know when the non-dance sections come. So there are subtle hints in the music, which mean stop dancing. Can I just say, what you're describing is musical statues? So is it halfway through a dance zone? Everyone stops and if someone moves, they're out. That's exactly that. That's amazing.

They invent the Cubans invented musical statues. Okay, that's it. That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we've said over the course of this podcast, we can all be found online. I'm on at Schreiberland on Instagram.

Andy. At Andrew Hunter M. James. No, so sing us James Harkin. And Anna, if they want to get us as a group. You can go to Instagram at no such thing or email podcast.cuI.com. Yep, podcast at QI.com. the most important one of all because Andy receives all your emails and he cherry picks the best

to bring to two new shows that we've been making over the last few months. There is Little Fish, our bonus Monday show, where we put down our facts and we just say your best facts from the last seven days. So send them in there. Or if you do have things that you want to say about the stuff that we've mentioned, that all gets cherry picked and taken to our extra bonus hidden show, which is sitting in Clubfish called Drop Us a Line. Now Clubfish is on Patreon. Patreon.com slash We have lots of rewards for different tiers. You can get videos of some of the shows that we make. There is extra long versions of the shows that you hear. There's a bunch of stuff there. Check it out. Otherwise, just come back here next week because we're going to be back. Thank you as ever to

Leying Lee, Ethan Rupertorelia, as well as the larger fish buster team for all their work. And we'll see you again next week. Good time.