No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As A Song In The Sound Of Music

Episode Date: October 10, 2014

Episode 30 - In their first ever live podcast recording, Dan (@schreiberland), James (@eggshaped), Andy (@andrewhunterm) and Anna (#getannaontwitter) discuss cow-based computer code, who won the Bone Wars and how northern accents beat the Nazis.

Hey everyone, welcome to episode 30 of No Such Things a Fish. We recorded a live podcast last night, our first live podcast, and we've decided to put it out tonight for some reason, and basically unedited. So it's pretty long. But yeah, I hope you enjoy it. We really enjoyed it so much, in fact, that we are going to do another live podcast. Tickets are going to go on sale for that on Monday. Tickets will be available at chortle.com or at no suchthingsafish.com.

It's going to be in Camden, London, so keep an eye out for that. And hope you enjoy this one. We run it on QI a few years ago. Yeah. Which was, there's no such thing as a fish. You can have no such thing as a fish. No, seriously. It's in the Oxford Dictionary of Underwater Life.

He says it right there, first paragraph, No Such Things a Fish. Hello, welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you this week. from the Aces and Eighth Bar in Tupnell Park. This is our first ever live recording. My name is Dan Shriver. Please welcome to the stage, the three regular elves,

Andy Murray, Anna Chisinski, and James Harkin. And once again, we have gathered round with our four favorite facts from the last seven days, and in no particular order, here we go. Fact number one, and beginning with you, James. Okay, my fact this week is that the first BBC radio presenter with a northern accent was given the job to make it more difficult

for the Nazis to impersonate newsreaders. So why were the Nazis impersonating news readers? It was, they thought that if they could pretend to be news readers over the radio, then people would believe anything they said, and they'd be able to say, oh, we've got such a strong army, and people would just believe it. So they'd like raid the BBC? It was just propaganda, really.

They would pretend to be BBC newsreaders. And so... War and people like that. Yeah. Yeah. It's also why we've got James on the podcast. It's James a Nazi? No, this was a guy called Wilfred Pickles.

He was the first northern news reader from 1941. He was from Yorkshire. And a lot of people didn't believe the news when he read it out because he had a northern accent. What did they think? They thought that's a Nazi trying to do a British accent. No, I don't know what they thought, really. They just thought, this guy is uneducated.

did he can't possibly know what the news is? That's what they... I read this thing about in the early days of news reporting, particularly on radio, that they never... It was all male presenters. And they said that they wouldn't allow female presenters on because they didn't want them to have to go through reading bad news,

like upsetting news stories. Yeah, they just thought, oh, they're not going to like that. That would be... It's too emotional. And it's true. It's a BBC thing where they announced that. They said, well, we're not going to allow women to do that. They'll be too upset when they hear this bad news.

No, it's terrible, right? They did have one in 19. 1333, the first female newsreader. She was called Mrs. Giles Borrett. I don't know what her real first name was. It doesn't seem to come up anywhere. Mrs. Charles Bolls. Yeah, as in named after her husband.

We were assholes to women back in the day, weren't we? We still are, but, like, I mean, doubly so. That's terrible. There were complaints. She was there for two months, and the BBC took her off the air for technical reasons. Technically, her gender is wrong. Did you know that all news readers, were originally anonymous.

No. So they didn't give their names on air. It was just the voice of the BBC news. And so we have the Nazis to thank for named news readers because during the war, people said that they should be able to listen and kind of authenticate who they were listening to. So the first one was Frank Phillips.

And he said, in July 1940, Battle of Britain time, this is Frank Phillips from the BBC so that, again, you couldn't be impersonated. So today we might have Hugh Edwards just being a man on a screen. Wow. That's kind of what he is to me. Isn't that weird, though, that none of them identified themselves? Do you guys know about the very first ever BBC news report on the radio?

No. Okay, it's great. It basically was on the 14th of November, and I forgot to look up the date. But it's on the 14th of November, so we're coming up to the anniversary. Very exciting. And basically, he read out the news. It was a guy called Arthur Burroughs, and he read it out, but he read it twice, once quickly, and then once slowly

and then ask the listeners, which did you prefer? Wow. Just for future recordings to know which way they go. And then which did they go with? It's not been recorded. I don't know the answer.

So we don't know if now we have quick news or slow news? Yeah, I have no idea. I have no idea. Also, it's really weird because when they started doing the news, they did it post 7pm and Lord Reith joined.

So Lord Reith, if you don't know his name, he's the guy who, in the BBC, they have a big kind of saying which is to entertain inform and educate. That's the Lord Reith philosophy for BBC that everyone's tried to stick to. He joined a week after the very first broadcast of a radio announcement telling the news on the BBC. And he had this thing where he said, we don't want anyone to be doing news bulletins before 6pm because the newspapers will be hurt as a result of it.

And so no one was allowed to do anything in terms of announcing any news. To the point that when they showed horse racing on the, sorry, when they played horse rating on the news, They couldn't have commentators commentating on the horse race. So you listen to hooves and people cheering at like 4pm. And then at 7 p.m. They would wait till the 7 o'clock news to announce. Was there a pause in between the end of the hoos? And blitzer one.

So you were speaking of radio though. Do you know what they did in 1955 when ITV started? I think it was 1955, wasn't it? And what the BBC did to try and jeopardize ITV's chances? No. It wasn't actually on TV because radio was a more popular medium at that time. They killed off Grace Archer in The Archers. Gasp.

20 million people tuned in. The population of Britain was 40 million at the time. Half the country tuned in to listen to Grace get killed off in the Archer. The Archer's fans really hate you, don't they, Dan? Not the... Well, yeah. We make... So, outside anyone who listen to this podcast, might know that we also, the four of us,

work for QI. and one of the QI things is a radio show called Museum of Curiosity. And Museum of Curiosity is played at 6.30 every evening on a Monday. And Archers follows immediately. And we get the shit ripped out of us by the Archers fans. They hate us. And they just, they don't even, they just, they say how much they hate us. And then they do hashtag The Archers.

And so everyone is, why do they hate you? They just cast, they catch the last five minutes of Museum of Curiosity. And we're usually talking about pubic lies or something like that. And this, it doesn't come up on the arches, apparently. No, it doesn't. There was a great, there was a fantastic one this week, though. There was someone who actually tweeted, what is this garbage? I absolutely hate it.

Hashtag the Arches. Someone wrote back going, I know, this program sucks. They should cancel it. The Arches is terrible. No, no, no. Oh, lovely confusion. I have a fact about Lord Reith. John Reith, as he was then.

When he applied for the post of General Manager of the British Broadcasting Company, he did not know what broadcasting was. And he wrote in his diary that when he was called to an interview, he, quotes, still hadn't the remotest idea as, to what broadcasting was. I hadn't troubled to find out. And they gave him the job. God,

in the movies are really different. So do you know where remote controls were for, what was the main attraction of them, how they were marketed? Remote controls? What for TV? Yeah, is that all we're calling them? You don't have to get up and walk over to the thing,

presumably. It is that, but their main strategy in the marketing was it was after ITV came about and adverts came about, and remote controls were just volume controls. And they looked like one of those rotary phones, so they were like a dial. which you just dialed up or down,

and it would say you can mute the adverts. So adverts came onto TV, and immediately they marketed something that could make them shut. There was one really early remote control that was done by light. The problem with it was that when the sun shone on it, it would turn the channel over. There's a great...

I was talking about this in the office a few days ago, and I can't verify this fact, and I really want to... Here we go. Anyone who knows this show? I'm known as the dubious one on this show. Not just on this show Just in life

The way I do any research for this show Is to put in the fact And then put plus Yeti That's my kind of research for this show That's how bad I am at it But I read a fact in a book Years ago when I first moved to England And it was a fact that when they did live TV dramas

They would have a thing where Obviously it was black and white Everything had to be done live As they were going along And the actors, if they forgot their lines As they were doing this play live They would mime speaking And then the other actor

Would mime speaking back at them so that while the production we're quickly trying to find cards that could show them what the next line was the people at home were going, what the hell's wrong with the TV? Our sound's gone again and get up and hit it

and then by the time they remember the line, they'd be like, we should go to the shops and then they're back into the play. But I can't prove this as a fact. So if anyone listening or anyone in this room tonight knows it, please let me know. Don't wait up for the post.

Accents? Oh, go on. No, what was yours? Well, I've got some accent. Accents start to talk about. You know, foreign accent. syndrome. Oh yeah. It's a real thing.

So it's not just mad people making it up. I kind of use, you know when someone wakes up and like terrible psychiatrist? Yeah, I would. But yeah, it's a real thing. So it happens if you have a particularly bad

migraine, you can get foreign accent but it's not where you wake up with a specific foreign accent. It's just where you wake up with an accent that sounds kind of like a foreign accent. So there's like an interview with this woman Julie Matthias who just had a migraine and now speaks in this bizarre

kind of Scandinavian Indian South African hybrid and I think it's really horrible for her It must be tough right Also Capgras Syndrome Do you know that one? It's where you believe that One of your loved ones has actually been

Has died and been replaced by a robot Or something like that That's a real syndrome Yeah Yeah What? No like we all had it Like that time when my dad

Died and was replaced by a robot Yeah but that actually happened Yeah But for people with the syndrome Woof Yeah Rough But if you Google this and look for examples of it happening,

there's like one, pretty much one or two examples on the BBC News, and the most famous person to have it done was called Alan Davis. Really? Yeah. And I always wanted to run that on QI, but thought, no, not really. Just in case it's actually him. Yeah, oh right. You can't believe you're mocking me on QI.

Do you want to hear something cool about the Queen's accent? Yeah. So they've done a study on her, but without her. Okay, they've lived. They've listened to the Queen's speech from three, from different decades. So they listen to loads from the 1950s, and then they listen to loads from the 1980s. And they found that she no longer speaks the Queen's English. So they measured loads of her sounds.

Surely by definition what she says is the Queen's England. That's true. But it was a study at Macquarie University on Australia, and they said that her accent has drifted a bit, so she sounds a bit like some younger, and I'm using their words lower. She sounds Jamaican now. She sounds Jamaican now. They said cock. She has cockney influences now.

Apparently, yeah. I mean, you can't tell. Apparently most of the changes, it was 12 or 13 vowel sounds. She says, you get me. Yeah. Why can't we tell if she has it? Machines can hear it, apparently. Computers can hear the...

Machines? Your father? My dad. Your dad, yeah. But they were so happy to study her because, and these are the words, she hasn't lived in different communities that might alter her accent. No kidding.

So you reckon she got it off TV or something? I don't know, maybe. Yeah, she is a huge fan of... I think the Arches of the Archers. It's a miracle museum is still going. You should see her tweets to me. They're terrible. She didn't do a speech in 1969.

There was no Queen's speech on TV. And the reason was she had already done one interview that year in the summer for a documentary. And it had changed her accent so much because she couldn't bear. No, she just said, that's enough. You get one dose of Queenie a year. and that was it for 1969.

Wow. Yeah, that's great. We used to speak Rotic English, didn't we, which is how the American speak English. The way Americans speak is the way that is proper English, is the English that we were speaking in the 17th century. Yeah, we don't pronounce our ours, and that's wrong, and that's because spelling hasn't kept up with the way we speak.

What do you mean don't pronounce it? Oh, God, I'm not going to be able to think of any examples now. So, you know, if we said, I've just got the word Somerset written down here. So if we say Somerset, they'd say Somerset. Summer set. Summer set. But that actually just sounds like a Somerset. Since I'm my foretay.

Say Somerset, Dan, you've got a... Summer set. Yeah, exactly. Like Cover and Garden. Coventon. Yeah, but there's no R in Covence. He's got it wrong. This is the biggest contention.

I have a messed up accent. I know I have a messed up accent. The main tweet outside of Archer's hatred towards me that I get is people listening to our show saying, why are you saying Coverent Garland? I get so much shit from my accent. What about the child who listens to the podcast? Oh, there's a child who listens to our podcast. They're...

Three, four years old? Yeah, three, four years old. The godmother wrote into us to say that, James, every time you talk, my little goddaughter, she smiles and she's so happy. How nice. Yeah. And then when Dan comes on, she frowns and looks disappointed and stops less. Really splitting accent. Okay, let's go back to the point in hand.

Yeah. I want to speak about Wilfred Pipp. So this was a guy with a northern accent who read the news. He also was the host of the first British quiz show to give away prizes. It was called Have a Go and the jackpot was three pounds. Wow. That's good, that's good, isn't it? Well, it was more then, I suppose, but still.

It's not who wants to be a millionaire, is it? Who wants to own three pounds? But they got an audience of 26 million. When was that? If you think about what, breakoff got, what, 13 million less than 12 million? This was up to 1967, he did it.

Yeah, a lot more people used to watch. Yeah, but they didn't have bakeoff. They didn't have bake off back then. That's true. What was the fact that you told me in the office the other day about like attire and stuff when they were recording? In radio, early radio, about what they had to wear. I actually know the fact.

Oh, yes. No, I do remember, Dan. Yes. In the 30s, the British news readers had to wear a dinner suit, even though you couldn't see them when they were reading the news on the radio. I really like that. You can tell, though.

You can tell with the voice when they're setting up properly. They won't be slouching like I am now, are they? Is that why? Was that their justification? Yeah, I think it gives you a better, you know, posture, a better accent. Just, you know, just being annoying about it.

Sure, yeah. For anyone listening, we're all wearing dinner jackets. Some animals have accents, don't they? But not all. What? I'm trying to distinguish which animals do and which don't. No, yeah, they do. So people tend to think that hardly any animals have accents.

Like animals is in their dreams the way they speak. But then farmers in the north of England reported that I think it was, I think this might have been where I just read Somerset. It was a Somerset farmer who said that his cows had a different accent to the farmers in surrounding counties. Oh, yes. They do. They do have, they moo in accents.

That won an Ignobel prize, didn't it? Cows moo in regional accents. Yeah. A period review scientific paper that, And babies as well. Babies have regional access. They move in different accent. No, babies go, French and German babies

have different ways of saying, nah. Neither of them sound like that. German ones go, and I'm paraphrasing, and French babies go, yeah. Okay, there is a difference.

And machines can hear it. My dad, if he would say it. We should wrap up on our first facts. Have we got anything else? Does anyone want to add anything? Apparently the announcers on the BBC, if they would cough during a broadcast, they would be inundated with cough lozenges and woolen underwear, because everyone was scared that they had a cold.

So, guys, whenever you want to start throwing. Oh, that's really good. Okay. Yeah, yeah, go for it. Just to go in case we don't come back onto the subject of radio for loads of podcasts. When Women's Al began in 1946, it was hosted by a man. Early items on the show included cooking with whale meat, I married a lion tamer and how to hang your husband's suit.

True. Great. In fact. Okay. Time for fact number two. And that is my fact. And my fact this week is that in China, if you want to empty a building of people, a building full of people, if you want to empty it, you play this song. Don't get up and leave if you hear this.

And it doesn't work, apparently. So, this is a song... Does anyone know what that is? No one, okay. Anyone can even guess the artist? Yes, Kenny G. Oh, five points. Yeah.

Now, this is a weird thing. No one in this country in the UK seems to know who Kenny G is. Kenny G is one of the biggest artists in the world and in my heart. He's sold 75 million albums worldwide. He played at the inauguration of Bill Clinton. He worked on the... bodyguard soundtrack. If you watch the Grammys in the 90s, invariably at some point, Michael Bolton would rock on stage next to Kenny G, and they would own it.

And the interesting thing is that since the year 2000, in 1989, this song came out, and it got really big. It's called Going Home by Kenny G. And for some reason, it got adopted, and no one really knows why, in China as the Going Home song. So at the end of the day with the name... I think because it's called Going Home. Why? Why did they choose a song? You wouldn't do it. Why didn't they choose melody and B? Wake me up before you go, go. What? So they basically, it's a tune that just gets played everywhere at schools.

At the end of school, they play it to kids to go home. If you're on a train that's entering the final stop of its destination, the terminal, they play that song. Everywhere in China, in a marketplace, they'll play it on loop for an hour and a half to tell you to get out. And Kenny, people are really getting the hints if you have to play it for an hour and a half. At the end of a party, presumably, you play that when you want everyone to leave. Because as a result, this song, he doesn't get any royalties from it, but he plays a lot of gigs in China now.

He had to make sure that he put that song at the end, otherwise people, some leaving during the gig. But this is an insane thing. If he did get royalties, though, he would be richer than Bill Gates. If they play it for an hour and a half every day at the closing of a market. Not only that, when TV used to end at, say, like, 12 a.m. or 11 p.m. whenever it is in China, up until 6 a.m. when it came back on, it would be on loop.

That was the song that played. Kenny G is massive in China. I read a few accounts from Chinese people saying, I'm pretty sick of this song now. I liked it the first time I heard it, and now I really don't. So I think... So I hadn't heard of Kenny G.

Oh no, I had heard of him. I didn't know what he was, but I think that's us being musically illiterate. I think everyone else in Britain, I think you're tarring British people with our brush. By saying no one's heard of Kenny G. No, no, no. No one in this room except one person, right?

Oh, no. Oh, loads. Oh, no. Oh, well, done. So the only thing. So I was like, I'd tell him. haven't heard of this guy. I don't really listen to music that was, you know, made in last 40 years. So I just decided I'll look up something about music. I know he's kind of jazz.

Let's look up a circular breathing. The longest musical note ever held lasted 45 minutes and 47 seconds. And the record was set by Kenny G. It was so great. This guy is phenomenal. All I know about him. Well, I like playing golf and I looked up who's the best musician who plays golf. And it's Kenny G. It really is. He's off plus 0.8. And many years ago, Kenny G. woke up one morning when his uncle said,

I have a business. My friend is running, and I think you might be interested. You should buy some stocks into it. They make coffee, and he went, I'll buy some stocks. And he now has made almost as much money off the back of the fact that he put stocks into Starbucks before it launched as much as he's made from his 75 million albums. So should we boycott him now? I have been doing an unconscious boycott. of him all my life.

I don't know who it was. No, I didn't know who Kenny G was either, and I Googled Kenny G is, and the first two are, Kenny G. is my imaginary friend. And Kenny G. is Katie Perry's uncle.

And I looked it up, and he isn't. So I have no idea what that's about at all. And then I spent the rest of the afternoon Googling Katie Perry's uncle, who is even less interesting than Kenny G. What's he do? Who is he?

He's a director of movies. He's dead now. Oh, okay. A bit of a downer. You didn't even know him. And in fairness, guys, he was a robot. Circular breathing. There was a thing in Greece called the disfigurement of Athens. And it's written about by some Greek writers.

And apparently that was a weird facial disfigurement you would get if you did too much circular breathing. Oh, really? What's that like? Don't know. I don't know how you do it. How you do circular breathing? I read about how to do it the other day, and I can't do it. You save a little bit of air in your mouth, and then you breathe through your nose. Is it how people beatbox?

Is that, it's beatbox? And it's to help you sustain notes. Yeah, yeah. So, jazz. He's jazz, right? That's what he does. Otherwise, I've been reading about everyone. Yeah, yeah, yeah, he's jazz.

Let's say he's jazz anyway. He plays his saxophone. Does he go less be round for president? Did you know that? What? Of America? of America in 1964, he ran a joke campaign for president. He promised to rename the White House, the Blues House, and appoint...

And he was going to appoint Duke Ellington as his Secretary of State and Miles Davis as head of the CIA, which would have been... Miles Davis had been bloody brilliant. He also, Dizzy Gillespie couldn't hit... Since 19... from 1949, he was unable to hit the B-flat above high C on his trumpet because he had a very, very minor bicycling accident. But he got $1,000, which I think was quite a lot in 1949. in compensation for it because it's damaged his art

but could never hit that high B flat. Yeah. Wait, a minor cycling accident. Just a twisted ankle, yeah. Stopped him from being able to hit a high... Weird. Yeah. Maybe he was winded or something.

You can sue for damaging your art. Your art? Dan, I don't think you've got a case. Just checking. Another influential jazz person, most influential guitarist of all times. time? Jimmy Hendrix?

I was going to go with Django Reinhart. Maybe we're talking like jazz guitar. Oh, okay. Was missing the two main guitar playing fingers, isn't he? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So only ever did solos on two fingers. Didn't he die? Because he refused to go to a doctor.

Yes, I think he did. Yeah, he had a minor medical condition. He didn't go to a doctor, and then it got bad, and then he died. Does anyone know what, can you all remember what he had? I don't remember, no. Just speaking of Django, this is a very weird link, but it's something I was when I was looking into all the stuff about Michael Bolt, sorry, Kenny G. being massive in China.

It is curious when you find out about people who are big in other countries who aren't sort of as... like Norman Wisdom being massive in Albania. Like Norman Wisdom is huge still to this day in Albania. When he died, it was almost a national holiday and they just... The national holiday.

Yeah. Sal... National day of morning. I think you were going to say. Finally, finally the hated wisdom is removed. When Kenny G. dies, a lot of Chinese society will celebrate not having to listen.

to this song anymore. That's true. It's true. Oh, come on. There's a lot of Kenny G. love in the room. People are more famous in other countries. Yeah, yeah. So I was reading about people who are more famous.

The list of Americans, or just people, foreign people to China being big there. It's quite interesting. The most famous person in China is Kobe Bryant, who's a basketball player, which I did not expect. The most famous person in all of China. Well, my theory is it's actually Mr. Bean.

And then in at number three, Mao Zedong. Yeah, it's phrased it, Dan. No, it's the most famous foreigner. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not clear.

But as, so, these people are getting bigger and bigger, and as a result, there's a really interesting thing going on with the movie world at the moment, which is that the Chinese movie world has now overtaken Bollywood. It's taken over everything except America. They're the second largest movie makers in the world.

And so as a result of these people's names getting quite big, they're getting put into movies now, and being sold to China. And as a result, so the top film in China last year was Transformers, above anything in the world, right? They absolutely loved it. The latest Transformers movie that came out.

But they do this really interesting thing where they have to edit out certain bits of the movie as it exists because it turns out there's a lot of anti-Chinese government stuff in movies that we don't realize. So when movies go out, suddenly there's a missing five minutes

where a character has been taken out and it suddenly just doesn't make sense. Cloud Atlas, they took out 43 minutes of the movie when they took the China. You can argue that it could miss 43 minutes, couldn't you that? I haven't seen it.

I haven't seen it. When the Sound of Music came out in South Korea, it was really, really popular and like cinemas were playing it four or five times a day, and one cinema owner wanted to work out a way that he could play it more times a day to get more paying customers in,

so he edited out all the songs. Amazing. That's like, if anyone heard an episode that we did, I think it was last week of the week before, Chuck Norris, when he plays his movies, his kids doesn't like the idea of his kids seeing the fight scenes in the Chuck Norris movies. So he personally edits out all the fight scenes from his movies and his kids just watch it.

And I cannot think of a worse experience than watching a fightless... Sound of music without any songs. It's just called of. I can. People must have left us in my so confused. What was with the title? Just to qualify. When I said Django, the reason I said that is Django Unchained,

the Quentin Tarantino movie, went into China and it was pulled minutes from all of the cinemas when it started because they had a nude scene and they don't allow nudity in movies now. That's not anti-China propaganda, to be fair to Jang-on-on-Chay. No, it's just they have strict laws still with cinema. The other thing is that China is the biggest, as in the amounts of money they take, not the number of movies they make, I think. Yeah. Yes, because it's not Hollywood, Hollywood, which is Nigeria.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, they do this thing as well now. So, you know, like, when we watch a James Bond movie, how they take out... Oh, you just see Richard Branson suddenly in it, and it's obviously a virgin ad, or it's just product placement the whole way through. They reshoot scenes with Chinese product placement. So, which movie was it here? It was during World War Z.

Oh, yeah. Great movie. Great movie. It is a great film. What's it World War Z? You like Pacific Rim as your greatest ever movie. I love Pacific Rim. Come on. Thank you.

Oh, my goodness. Yeager's forever. All right. I saw an edited version of World War Z because I was on a plane watching it because that's when you should watch World War Z. And they edited out the bit with the enormous plane zombie scene which ends with the plane crashing.

Really? Really? Yeah, weird, right? We sensors. Let us watch the scene. That's fair. We should move on. We've done quite a long. I just want to say one more thing. So this, Kenny G's real name is

Kenneth Gourlick Kenneth Gawlik And I thought I'd check and see if I had anything on him In my files on my computer And I didn't have anything on him But I did have something on another Kenneth Gawlik And this is That is a weird

Coincidence, isn't it? Kenneth J. Golic, this is. He's a medic and he wrote a paper called a four-letter word in the medical literature And he went through all medical literature Looking for instances of the word fuck Okay, he found 70s instances since the 1960s.

Four were about a fungus called fuck. Two were sexual and six were the author. Okay? What do you mean? As in the name of the author. Oh right. Sorry. So he wrote, the most prolific single contributor was Dr. E. Fuck, whose four German language publications on the malic acid

metabolism of saccharolitisis constitutes a major contribution to the field. This may be about to change, with the emergence of Dr. L. Fuck as a co-author of a publication in 1999. So look out for those new fucks. Okay, let's move on to fact number three, and that is Chazzynski.

Yeah, it is. My fact is that the two leading paleontologists of the 19th century used to destroy their fossil sites after excavating them so that their rival wasn't able to find anything on them. That's insane. And so, and these really were the two, by far and away, the leading paleontology.

So they were Edward Drinker, Cope, and Othniel Charles Marsh. Offneal. Offneal, yeah, that's right, that's his name. Strongly. Got a problem with that? No. No ma'am. It's just a brilliant name.

It's good. So before they came along, there were nine species of dinosaur had been discovered and named, and between the two of them, by the time they both died, they'd named 136 species between them, including, all the ones you've heard of, all the big ones, Stegosaurus, Diplodocus, triceratops, all those guys. And they kind of liked each other at first. So they met in 1867, and they named species after one another. So a giant serpent from New Jersey was called Mossosaurus Copianus after Cope and vice versa.

Yeah, but I'm not sure that was because he liked him because it actually is Cope anus. Copianus. Is it? That's what it is. Yeah. So I think that might have been an insult. For only you've been there to tell him. He thought they were best friends.

I think this is why he was so upset. And dickheadosaurus? When is that? So, relationship went sour when Cope showed off this fossil of an elasmosaurus at a big showing of new fossil to be discovered. Classic faux part. Not at the end yet.

Did that. Put the head on the wrong end of it. And Marshall, I think you put the head on the tail. And Cope was like, no, I haven't. You're wrong. And they called in the museum curator, the academy curator. who said, yeah, you put the head on the wrong end. And he was so humiliated by that that Marsh wrote that after that he's been my bitter enemy.

And it was so extreme. They spent 25 years stealing each other's fossils. They both employed teams of sort of spies to go and jeopardize each other's sights. So they'd steal and break each other's fossils. One of them Marsh got into government so that he could withdraw funding from the other guy. There was this constant exchange of letters where one would say, some of my fossils are damaged and have disappeared. I know you're responsible.

And the other one would write back going, It's outrageous that you'd accuse me of that, but since you mentioned it, some of my fossils are fun and it's just 25 years of this. Wow. It was called the Bone Wars. The Bone Wars. How would they destroy each other's sort of... Well, dynamite was how Marsh did it.

Dynamite? Yeah. So they would just, they would find their bit and then go, there may be lots more here, but I'm just going to... Yeah, just in case there is. Or I think if they couldn't carry stuff back or if they'd found the thing they needed to find. They couldn't carry stuff back. Well, that's all I can get. Well, maybe they thought they would propel it back with the dynamite.

I read that on one occasion, there are two teams of researchers even had a stone-throwing battle against each other. They hated. Yeah. They hated each other. It was throwing fossils at each other. Yeah? No, I think they're stones.

And it was quite, even though they were obviously really successful, A, what are we missing that we could have? and B, it was quite damaging to their, like, how good they were at their work, because they constantly rushed to have stuff published before the other person, and this is whence the brontosaurus cock-up came about. So Marsh, Othnil Marsh, named the Apatosaurus, and then he thought he'd found a different dinosaur, and he named it the Brontosaurus,

and that was a really catchy name because it means like Thunder Horse or something. And it turned out that it wasn't a bronosaurus, it was just another Apatosaurus, and that was just because he'd sped it through, because he was going, he must publish more papers than... And he won the Bone Wars in the end, because he named 80 new species and Coponey named 56. I don't think there were that many winners on this really. The boys of moral authority in the corner.

What are you, my teacher? When bones fight each other, nobody wins. I read that they died. Yes, they did. Dinosaurs. They've got a great fact about it. That was your fact next week. So, yeah, so after Cope, Marsh, when he got into government, he devoted his, yeah, as you say, he made himself hugely powerful just so he could spite the other guy.

But then he tried to take, he tried to take Cope's fossils away from him. And that was his crucial misstep because he said these were found with government money and dug up with government money. Therefore the government owns them, and we're going to take your collection away from you. But Cope proved that he paid for all of his own. He kept the receipts, right? He kept the receipts, yeah. And he destroyed Marsh's reputation by showing that Marsh had behaved so unethically. So then Marsh lost his job in government, lost all his income, lost everything.

Cope died 56 years old, penniless. Marsh died two years after that, and he had $186 left. You see, Anna, no winners. I've learned my lesson. The dinosaurs are all, they named 142 dinosaurs, but only 32. That is true. are actual, they're still dinosaurs. They got over-excited.

A lot of them were mistakes. They made, what, 110 fake dinosaurs. A rush to beat the other guy. They're not fake, we just weren't as good at classifying species then. Cool dinosaur thing. The most complete, or one of the most complete fossils we have of a T-Rex, was wrapped around and with its teeth embedded in the most complete fossil we have of a triceratops. Wow.

It's really cool. So, annoyingly, it went straight to Bonhams, and they're trying to sell it for something like 12, like, $10 million or something. So they haven't got signed to see very... Was that quite recently? Yeah, it was last year,

but it didn't go. And they were saying about how T-Rexes would have eaten them and they would have like taken the head off like a tin opener kind of thing. Is that wrong?

Because his teeth were embedded in its neck. The teeth had come out of the T-Rex and were in this... So that was a theory that they would just cut around the neck and take the head off and eat the inside.

So then it was doing this and there was an earthquake, they think, and which caused sand to fall on top of them and they sort of sunk into the sinking sand and they were forever embraced for six

60 million years they've been embraced. As if it wasn't exciting enough with dinosaurs fighting, then there was an earthquake. That's incredible. You don't get that kind of entertainment anymore. I read the very first dinosaur bone that was ever found was at the time not thought to be a dinosaur bone. It was in retrospective kind of looking at the drawings of the thing that was described. And it was a guy called Robert Plot. Oh, yeah.

And Robert Plot, he thought what he'd found was not a dinosaur. but a giant, which is incredible. He thought he was looking at this bone, he was like, this must be a giant man. And so he told everyone that that's what he thought it was. Yeah, it was actually, it was a top of the thigh bone. And because of the shape of the top of the thigh bone of a dinosaur, it's quite hard to imagine that.

But because of its shape, they called it scrotum humanum, because it looked like a giant scrotum. And the thing is that they... Giant balls. Is that what he thought it was? That wasn't him. That was Richard Brooks. who thought that, but he came a little bit later.

He thought it was a giant, like an elephant or something like that. But then they came along, called it Scrotum Humannum, and then they realized it was a megalosaurus bone. But according to the rules of nomenclature, they should keep the first thing that it was called, so the megalosaurus should really be called scrotum humanum. That's so good. So the thing I really liked about this guy, though, Robert Plot,

he was quite an influential character back in the day when it came to science and classifying things and pushing forward ideas. he also wrote about and I'd not heard about this until today when I was looking into him he wrote about the first ever noted double sunset what

yeah double so have you heard about this okay so he noticed it in Leak which I've not heard of either I don't know what that is famous for it I think if you're from anywhere near Leak like they're known for the double sunsets yeah it's amazing what is it then no no I don't know it's a real thing it's a real thing

it's just where the contals of the earth are aligned such that when the sunsets on a certain day of the year I think it's on the solstice it looks like it sets over one hill and then because of the distance a certain hill behind it is it rises up again and sets again just look at it on YouTube

it's a real phenomenon it's a double-sac it's not magic it's just the angle of the sun and it's in England it's a double sunset it's really it's pretty great yeah it's amazing another thing just on rivalries that I really like is that

there's so much academic warfare that goes on it's not just with the dinosaur hunters you look through any bit of history up until now I tweeted once saying where does out of space begin, and that sparked a huge debate on Twitter for ages where no one knew where out of space technically began. So I love collecting these little things, and I found this thing that the first mobile phone

call ever placed was on April the 3rd, 1973. I was a guy called Martin Cooper. He invented it, and he basically worked for Motorola, and his very first phone call, when he was like, we've made the mobile phone, let's do this, his very first phone call was to the rivals at AT&T to say that they've got there first. How cool is that? He called him, we got there, suckers. Bye!

That was the very first mobile phone call ever made, 1973. We need to move on, by the way. Oh, should we just quickly talk about what a bastard Edison was? Go for it, yeah. It's about bloody time. I think it is. So, obviously, Edison is credited with a great deal.

He was propaganda maestro, and he came up with DC Current. Well, Tesla was coming up with AC Current, which is what is used mostly around the world now, because it's much more useful, it travels longer distances, etc. But Edison waged such a strong campaign against Tesla and against AC Current. To the extent that he wrote to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in the US and asked them to send him a bunch of dogs, cats, sheep, horses and elephants to electrocute,

using AC current to prove that it was dangerous. And the prevention of cruelty to animals, said, yes, of course, here you have some animals. Feel free to electrocute them at your convenience. They're not really doing each other, are they? He did that in public. Something was going on there. Yeah, and he electrocuted Topsie the elephant, didn't he. He elected Topsie, which is just the most traumatic thing.

So Topsie was a circus elephant who basically she killed one guy who poked her in the face or something. And so she was supposed to be hanged, as elephants tended to be when they were executed. Hanged. They used to hang elephants. What? Best way to do it. It's not the best way to do it. I mean...

This is a... of a lot of contentious in the QI office. Can I just see the KeniG song? Yeah. On the normal circumstances, we would have cut that bit out. But we... It's live. I've just admitted to hanging elephants. Okay, time to move on. To our final facts. Andy Murray.

My fact is that Mozilla Firefox translates its computer systems into hundreds of different languages. But lots of the metaphors don't... translate so things like cookies or files or mouse things like that so in Senegal in the Fula language a computer crash is known as a hookie which means a cow falling over but not dying isn't that good and they have all kinds of these things they're translating them using local idioms and local languages so a timeout is a honama which means your fish has gone away

and I don't really get this one but aspect ratio is translated as Jean Donderelle, which is a rebuke from elders when a fishing net is wrongly woven. You don't get that? I don't know. Do you know what aspect ratio is? Not really. I'm thinking about it now I do get it.

I think that's quite good. It's kind of like a fishing net, isn't it? When it's wrongly woven. I'm bluffing. I still don't know what it is. Never mind. I do like it when, yeah, so when interesting linguistic metaphors, I guess. And I think we might have been more fun with them in the,

olden days. So in the 1800s, they referred to ducks or any birds with feet quite close to their bums as arse feet. And if you read, like, um, natural science journals and stuff, they'll say the arsfoot duck present here, or the arsfoot present here was... Wasn't the grebe formerly known as an arsfoot? It would have been, yeah, yeah, grebe. Which one is known as a wind fucker? That's a kestrel, or a kite, because they stay hovering against the wind. Yeah. So, computer words, in Hawaiian, the word for computer literally means electric brain.

That's Lolo Uila. Yeah. And in Iceland, the computer is known as a tula, which means number prophetess. Oh, that's good, isn't it? That's really nice. I like, it's a female as well. Yeah. Yeah.

And they, their old, standard. Their old word for a pager was, oh, I can't pronounce that, Thrift, Fleur, which means thief of the priest. peace. Wow. That's good that, isn't it? That's incredible. Yeah, so speaking of women and computers,

first person to write computer code was a woman, right? Who I think we've talked, who, yeah? She's here tonight! Welcome to the stage, the 150-year-old from come up. Ada Loveless, or Lovelace, I never know how to say. Byron's daughter? Byron's only legitimate daughter,

although she was never allowed to see him because, understandably, her mom hated him so much. Yeah. Yeah, she wrote the world's first computer code in 1842, and it was because she worked with Charles Babbage, didn't she, who made the analytical engine. Is that what it was called? Yeah.

And it wasn't called a computer, because originally computers were people who did sums. Yes. You would say, I'll just go and turn on the computer. No, you wouldn't. That's too wrong in too many ways. My mom always, you know, parents have really lame jokes. They do your whole life.

Whenever you say to her, could you turn on the lights, please? She starts flirting with the lights, which. Well, I think everyone here is shown. That's not a lame joke, actually. That's pretty good. She'll be thrilled. The first search engine was called Archie. Oh, was it?

Oh, yeah. And so it was set up by this guy called Alan Emtage. It was in the 80s in 1983, and he was Barbadian, or Bayesian, whatever, whichever we're going to call it. And, yeah, so he set up this search engine. did computer science and it was called Archie and because I think like comic book fans overlap quite a lot with computer geek people sometimes

and so everyone assumed it was named after Archie the comic book guy and so eventually he did an interview where he came out and he said it's not named after Archie it's named after Archive and I took the V out Archie the comics are the most insipid thing I've ever read he was not invited back to Comic Con the next year was he anyway he hasn't owned a computer since 1983 They probably haven't let him have one

So it's so rude about their nice car too The word bug supposedly was coined in 1946 when a lady called Grace Hopper Found a moth trapped in a relay at Harvard University And she freed them off And then she taped it into a book But still the computer then worked again And that's where people thought

We got the word bug from But it's not true It's been in use since at least the 1870s However she is amazing She is not only a great computer scientist She was also a US Navy rear admiral she's badass there are photos of this little

when was this? When was this? In an enormous rack of medals on her chest and you know she's got the proper naval admiral hat amazing Yeah very cool In the what year? She died in about 1980 or 1990

So in the mid-40s, 50s 60s was when she was in her admiral and computer heyday Yeah, look her up, Grace Hopper, very cool Brilliant I was looking at language because of the language part of the fact I was looking at the language of Vanuatu which is called Bissel

Lama. And this was brought to the islands by sailors, so they're a bit, you know, a bit racy, the, the words. And a lot of their words have the word shit in them. Their word for shit is sit. So sit-belong fire is ash. So it's the ship which is left over after a fire's burned, which is quite good. Sits water, obviously, is diarrhea. And sit-belonged spider is a spider web. Oh, I fell into that one. Yeah, that's reminiscent. And then I spent all afternoon looking at Vanuatu. Go on. What have you found?

I found that they have pseudo hermaphroditic pigs on the island. And these are the pigs that they've bred and bread and bread to have less and less testosterone. So their penises have got smaller and smaller and now you can't even tell they have penises. And they're pseudo hermaphrodites. And they're so precious on the island that they're used as currency. so they use pseudo hermaphroditic pigs as currency which is the best sentence I've ever heard do they carry around in wallet

no it's just like owning it and then you would if you wanted to buy a house and you have 10 of these you would like use I think they use tusks as currency as well so it takes seven years for a tusk to grow in a full circle at which point it is valuable after the pig it's removed from the pig obviously or taken but if it and if you get a double tusker that's 14 years worth of accumulated money so that's how they calculate

what's worth more? I was looking at language as well and so fun words that exist in other languages that we don't have words for in English I think we should so I think my favourites are which one

Jaius or Yeas in Indonesian is a joke so unfunny that you have to laugh at it which is weird that that's my next Edinburgh show title if anyone wants to come along Mangata in Sweden it literally means moon street

so it's guessable actually, but it's the do you know what it is? No. It's the, so when the moon's reflecting over a lake, it's the reflection of the moon that looks like a road. And then Sobre mesa in Spanish is the time spent in

conversation after a meal and it literally means over the table. But I really like that because that turns it into an activity that's then kind of justified in spending six hours doing, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sobre meza. Post-burning the washing up, basically. Sorry.

The word, this is a great, it's a Swiss word, and it's altus and hinterlassenever sigerung. And it's the Swiss word for a pension. And they just say AHV. But what it means is old age and survivors insurance. How cool is that? Okay, just one more thing about Senegal, because that was... Yeah, the original fact. The original facts all the way back was about Senegal.

The main language in Senegal is Wolof. And the Wolof language doesn't really have words for colours. It does have them, but they... don't use them. So they don't have the word for blue and orange and red. They use the French. But they do have lots of words for shades of grey. Loads and loads and loads. No, no, really? How many? We don't know? I don't know. The reason they have so many shades of grey is because of their caste system,

because the shade of your skin matters so much to them that the different shades between black and white are really, really important to them. And that's why they have so many shades of grey. And the good thing about it is, if you're a person, person who does a lot of art with pencils, especially in Africa, they use all these different shades of grey when you're deciding how much you shade things in. So they are actually useful as well as... As well as a bit racist. Yeah. I'm so excited that you've mentioned Wolloff because when I was reading about jazz, it's in the Wollof language that they think the word hip comes from. And it's a word in the Wollof language called Hepy Cat. And obviously, so it's like a black

culture thing, jazz. And so they think hip comes from Hepy Cat. And then a bunch of other etymologists think that that's rubbish, and that's just sort of post-talk rationalization. And they say there's no actual evidence that it comes from Hepycat. And so apparently among etymologists, instead of saying to cry wolf, you say, to cry walloff. And this is etymologist banter. To cry wallop.

Start using it, guys. Okay. That's it. That's all our facts. Thanks so much, everyone, for listening to this show. We'll be back again next week with another episode. But if you want to get in contact with us, if you're listening to this right now, you can get us on our Twitter accounts. We have a main account, which is at QI podcast on Twitter, but you can get us individually.

I'm on at Schreiberland. Andy. At Andrew Hunter M. James. Egg-shaped. Jizzynski. Can email podcast at QI.com. And, yeah, we're going to be back again next week.

This was our first live show. We may do it again. I don't know. Thanks everyone in the room for putting up with it. Thanks very much for coming. We hope you enjoyed it. And we'll be back again next week with another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish. Thank you so much.

Good night.