No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As Bananas In The Vatican

Episode Date: December 26, 2024

Live from Brisbane, Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss bananas, businesses, todgers and toddlers. 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/patreon Get 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 this week coming to you live from Brisbane. And Shriver, I'm sitting here with Anna Tushinsky, Andrew Hunter Murray, 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, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that Christmas is a very dangerous time for German penises. This is a little study that was released last year where German scientists were looking into the rate of hospital visits whereby someone has walked in and said,

I think I've snapped my penis. Yeah. Snap. Oh, you hear a crack when it happened. Oh, stop it. No, no, no, too much. Well, that's what we're talking about, unfortunately. Very Christmas.

Yeah. Is this going to be our Christmas special? Oh, yeah. I think, yeah, a Christmas special and a sort of health and safety message. Public service. Yeah. So actually, okay, to say that,

that would happen if people are having sex, right? So are we saying that more people are having sex and that's why they're injuring themselves? Exactly. They're in party mode. I see. And so a lot more sex happens in that period. It says the injury tends to occur during wild sex.

particularly in positions where you're not in direct eye contact. So always maintain eye contact. There's no such... I don't think there is such a position, is there? We're not in direct eye contact. Not in my order. And by the way, Australia, you think you're getting off lightly, it's also a dangerous time for Australian penises.

So, be careful. There was a Queensland doctor who said that cases had spiked by sort of 20, I think, no, 50%, I think it was. Wow, in that period. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Wow. It settles down about New Year's time in Germany for German penises.

There's less sex at the New Year period, so it sort of calms down by the end of the year. But yeah, it's apparently when people go in with this injury, it's quite a sight. The term color of an orbogine is often used. Oh, my God. God. Yeah. I am never using that emoji ever again. And it apparently remained consistent during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Right. Yeah. So that didn't dent it at all in that period. Why would it? No, it snapped it. Yeah. That's why, because that's not the most dangerous phenomenon for penises. Which I thought it might be.

Well, the thing that causes most penis injuries, most penis hospital visits, probably guessable? Vacuum cleaners. Okay. Oh yeah, yeah. I knew I was going to overshare as soon as I opened my mouth then. Yep, you should have waited a split second for that chap in the audience to interrupt you with the correct answer because I think you just said flies.

Oh, flies. I thought you said wives and I thought, oh, that rude. Girlfriends can do it too. Flies, of course. Zippers, yeah, people are getting zipped up in them. Accounts for 0.5% of ER visits altogether, which I think is quite high. That is quite nice. One in 200, mostly children or younger teenagers.

When you're not quite learned, you haven't learned yet that it's there. It takes a few years. Yes. In 13th century England, Christmas was a very dangerous time for testicles if you were a person who made money, if you were working in the mint, because the penalty for debasing coinage was cutting off the moneyer's right hand and right testicle and nailing it to the door of the smithy. and in...

Wait a second. These coins are all made of chocolate. Yeah, because in 1125, on Christmas Day, Henry I first got all of the monies to Winchester and had one of their balls chopped off. Oh, on Christmas Day? Christmas Day. Wow.

Well, so he had one of each of their balls chopped off. Or just he picked one out of a hat. No. No, it wasn't out of a hat. He got all the monies in. I think about there were like four or five of them who got off. Not in that way. Can I ask you guys a quick question?

Yes. Has anyone on this panel, and I'll put this out to the room as well, does anyone know anyone who's ever had a broken penis? No. No. Okay, a few people have. Well, do you mean like hospital level broken? Yeah.

Or Googling it in a panic level broken? But I know both. I know two people. One was a kid on our school bus in Sydney. I wasn't there on this day, annoyingly, but they gave him a wedgy that was so hard that... So they lifted him to, like, the top bar, and then he went, oh!

A different sound came out of his... like a guttural animal sound came out. And he was missing for weeks because his penis had snapped, so that was one person. And then the second person, the three of you do know. Oh, great. It's me. No, it's not me.

It's a guest who's been on our show, someone who broke their member on our show. Sandy Toxwick? Is this someone where this is public information or are you the only person they told in secrecy and now it's going out to the show? I think Stephen Fry said I could say this. It was Johnny Knoxville of Jackass.

That makes a lot of sense. Yeah. Well, he puts himself at risk quite a lot. He went over on a motorbike and he landed and he broke it. And he's always asked about it. He says this has been well documented. So much has been said about so little. And they said that he might not,

it was going to suffer from it, but he's had two kids since it happened. So yeah, it's all fine. Can I talk about Christmas? Yes, please. Let's get away from... Please, please, please. Okay, do you want to hear an absolutely wild thing

that happened in Christmas, 1972? Okay. Okay. This was sent in by a listener called Yara T. Thank you for this. Marie Heffernan was a 13-year-old girl. She had a Christmas dinner with her family, right? In Australia, at their home near Wollongong. And she... Wal-a-gong? Is that how it's pronounced? Is it like that? From the reaction, I'm not sure that's how you do pronounce it.

Wollongong. You can not... I am Australian. You can ask me. Wollongong. Why, are you not looking at me? That's what I said. Because I'm worried you're going to tell me about more penis stuff. And I'm just trying to just... He just wants some eye contact.

All right. at their home near Wollongong. So she had this Christmas dinner. She got bad bronchitis and laryngitis after eating Christmas dinner, right? It cleaned up, that sort of she got better, but her voice did not come back. And the doctors just said, well, you've lost your voice

due to a virus. It could come back any time, but it's, you know, you have to just wait. She waited for 12 years with no voice. And then, suddenly, at the end, age of 25, she started to choke, and she had a little coughing fit, and it brought up this little sort of lump from her throat. She took the lump to the Royal Canberra Hospital, where a doctor

found it was not human tissue, but a 1959 three-penny coin that she had swallowed from the Christmas pudding, or rather she hadn't swallowed it. It got stuck between her vocal cords, so it was thin and in a horizontal position, so the x-ray didn't see it when she was x-rayed. So she had no voice for 12 years, because it had just... stayed exactly in position and stopped her vocal cords vibrating. And then when they got it out, she went, I think there's a coin in my throat. Isn't that...

That is mental. That's like a weird version of The Little Mermaid, isn't it? Yes. It's less good tunes in that one, but yeah. Yeah, anyway. Yeah, so penis injuries aren't the most common injuries at Christmas, but there are quite a lot of very Christmas specific injuries. And I find it really interesting

because they're all cataloged and these stories come out of Christmas about what's the most likely way you'll get injured. And the way they collect the data is from hospital visits. And they're all things where you think, why have you gone to hospital? So loads of people pull muscles

getting turkey out of the oven. Now, what kind of, you know, diligent Christmas housewife is getting a turkey out of the oven, spraining a little bit of an arm and demanding she goes to hospital rather than serving up bloody lunch like she should be.

Honestly. I just like to disassociate myself with that comment. Welcome to Back to the 1950s. Christmas in the 50s. No, there's some other weird ones, like a woman who slipped while stapling a Christmas light stapled her left hand. I've put a stapler in my hand.

They're very small. Don't go to hospital. Is this fair advice? You were such a loss to the NHS, Anna, isn't you? Get out, get out, get out, get out, get out. No, no, no. Just Google it. No.

Google in a panic by... There was one where I thought, that's justified. This was on Christmas Day, a moment where a mum noticed her five-year-old was picking their nose, and when they got up closer

to the five-year-old, they found that a foul odor was coming out of their nose, and it was discovered the child to put a Christmas decoration in their left nostril. But what Christmas decoration emits a foul odor?

Maybe it had... I don't know, maybe it had been there a while, or...? It's only Christmas Day. No, you're right, you're right. Well, there are always dogs that swallow tinsel, and then you have to... Don't go to buy any for them either.

No, no, no, no. But you have to remove it from the other end often, don't you? You do. It's called a linear foreign body, if you're a vet. Do you? Yeah. Is there at any point where it's still coming through the mouth and you're removing it from the other side?

I don't believe that sort of permanent dog floss has been invented. That's interesting. Yeah. Um... Sorry. Yeah, America has a similar database where they log down. all the Christmas injuries. Do you know what it's...

Are you talking about Nice? Yeah. So Nice, N-E-I-S. Sorry to jump across you, but... National Electronic Injury Surveillance System. It records all the data. And Nice is an anagram of Nisa, which is the Danish for Elf.

Oh my God, yeah. Wow. What's going on there? You've flown the shit wide open, Andy. Yeah. And Nice is also naughty or nice. Yeah. What's going on? What are they hiding? Well, I think we'll agree.

That was worth the interruption. But so, yeah, they published a report in 2009. You want to go to hospital for that bird? I feel like I did. 2014, 809 people were admitted into ER in the States for Christmas-based injuries. There's a lot of normal ones, almost similar to the ones that you're talking about, Anna, about pieces getting stuck in and so on. This one's interesting. This was a 21-year-old man who, according to the database, was riding on. a TV when he ran into a turkey and lost control and then ran into a tree.

No more information supplied. Not needed. Another big Christmas setback or mess up that you can have is food poisoning. Oh yeah. So this is, you know, if you don't cook a turkey enough or anything, I guess. So in 2013 there was a group of Norwegian seafood researchers from Norway's National Institute of Nutrition and Seafood Research and they thought, let's have a Christmas party. why don't we use some lovely local cockles and we'll serve them raw

but we'll pour boiling soup all over them so that will theoretically be absolutely fine all of them got horrific food poisoning and then because they were the investigators they had to investigate their own Christmas party to see what it caused it the problem was that the soup was gazpacho wasn't it? Yeah that's right yeah

it is time for fact number two and that is Anna my fact this week is that the The value of goods Americans refund each year is more than the GDP of 90% of the world's countries. What? What? It is a big problem. By some estimates, it takes you to an amount that is more than all but the richest 19 countries in the world's GDP.

So Switzerland is about where you get to, at which point Switzerland is financially a smaller country than the returned goods of the United States of America. It's also more than America spends on roads, railways and airports put together. I don't know what's like here in Oz at the moment, but back in the UK, I feel like there needs to be a lane specifically now for people returning items because that's what you're stuck behind when you're trying to buy something in a physical shop. And what it is is people are buying clothes, going out and partying one night and then returning it the next day. And they found that all these people who are returning stuff, there's just obvious patterns.

So people who buy portable generators during weather emergencies, they'll use them right until the emergency is ended, and then all of those go back, just this huge amount goes back. There's a big culture of lots and lots of refunds as well. Oh, yeah. As in you're entitled to a refund for lots of stuff. So in the USA, Petco will take back fish that have died.

You can get a refund if your fish has died. Like a Monty Python sketch. Pretty much, except they just don't quibble. And Home Depot lets you return dead plants for a year. three years. All you have to do is be shameless enough to wrap up your dead plant and send it back and they will probably give you the refund. So that is... And the key to know there is, they're not selling these things on and this is why it's a problem. Obviously, they don't flog a dead plant to some chump and convince them it's a rare species. Because I think that's what happens. When people

send back their clothes or something, they think, oh, they'll just put it back on the rack. I assume that. They never do that. And most people will order three sizes of the same thing and then keep the one that fits and send the two others back, right? people. I mean, most people don't do that. Don't worry. But people, most people who have done the refunds. My wife. My wife. That's what I'm going to say. And so they'll send back the two that didn't fit. And then probably everyone assume, okay, that just goes back onto, and it doesn't. But when you think about it, it's an insane assumption to make, because I assume that if I send back this pair of socks, then it'll be, you know, returned and it'll be somehow got back into

the stream of new socks that are coming out of the sock factory. And it's actually very difficult to get a pair of socks into the new supply line of socks, and it's not worth it. And you've got to get that weird plastic thing with the two little toggles on the end through it again. Well, I always include that in a separate envelope when I send it back, but still, I think it doesn't do any good. Do you only, like, buy the pair of socks

just to wear them once for sex, presumably, and then send them back? Yeah, but it's a once-yearly thing, so it doesn't matter, you know, it's a relatively low-impact thing. But when you did, there was an amazing thing in the Atlantic about this whole system. So when you return an item, what we see, as customers is you see the label you print out,

you might hand it to a local shopkeeper and they post it off for you and you get the refund. But beyond that, there's this mad system that kicks in of sort of liquidators and recyclers and resellers and they are shuffling it and sometimes they're reselling it. And this is what the Atlantic says. Deep within that system in a processing facility in the Lehigh Valley, a guy named Michael

has to sniff your sweatpants because they have these material, what they call material handlers who have to work out what to do with it. Is this good to be? be sold on? Is it fine? And so they'll look, they'll feel, they'll assess, and they'll take a big old sniff. And they make them change their names, don't they? It's part of the job. It's all Michael. It's Michael one, Michael two, Michael three. Yeah. And we should say this is pretty much all online. It's online,

which has created this enormous industry. But like you said, it was begun the habit of letting people refund their clothes, no questions asked, in the early 20th century. And in fact, I think it was JCPenney stores, which are those big American department stores. It was their innovation quite early on to basically say customers can bring anything back. No questions asked. To the extent that people would bring stuff in that was clearly from another shop, and then they'd refund it there. I think Walmart said the same thing.

Walmart took tips from them. We're like, yep, we'll take it back. They bring a pony back that they've got from the local state. Just take it, give them a refund, give them 10 grand, let them go on their merry way. The customer's always right. And I think the guy who founded Walmart worked at J.C. Penny, didn't he? I think he did, yeah.

And J.C. Penny, billionaire, who created an industry. Do you know what the C in J.C. Penny stood for? Christmas. Oh, no. Cash. Cash. Cash. Cash. Penny. Cash Penny. It's like the rich English family called Money Coots, which is the bank.

It's, yeah, cash penny. I wish I could tell you what the J was, and I forgot to Google it. It's James. James, Cash, Penny. Yeah. All very rich words. Do you know the practice of buying an item once and then returning it for a refund deliberately?

So you buy it for a party, you wear it, you send it back pretending it didn't fit. It's called wardrobing. And all the companies refer to this. If you read it on their websites, they'll be chatting to each other on the forums. Oh, wardrobe being such an issue in our industry. So stop wardrobe.

It's so funny watching, because I'm in the cues, as I say. There needs to be a separate line. I'm behind the... Behind your wife. I'm behind my wife. No, you're behind these extraordinarily hungover people who've clearly been partying all night and they're like, hi, it didn't fit.

I need to return it. And you're like, dude, you literally are still drunk and you're handing this back. Yeah, it's wild. It does happen. And not just with clothes, of course. You get refunds with all sorts of things these days. On delivery services, like food delivery services,

you can sometimes get a refund if there's a problem with your meal. And these days, they're getting to a stage, where they'll just often give you the refund without that much evidence. So there was a guy who got refunded his Just Eat order because he complained his ice cream was cold. Ah.

It's like, I'm going to want a refund. It puts in, what's your reason? He just made it up, made up a reason, and they just gave him the refund. And then the retail is the one who loses out. Sometimes it does hurt your teeth. Yeah. You know, it's too much.

There was also, and it, exchange on Twitter that he saw where there was a customer who said, hello, I ordered a dozen custom masks from you. However, you only sent me 12. It was a beaker, though, wasn't it? There was, I read a lady who tried to get a refund off a holiday that she went on to Spain. She went to this hotel, and afterwards she wrote a complaint saying, I want my money back, and they said, why? And she said, there were too many Spanish people in the hotel. And she was like, shouldn't they be on holiday somewhere else? What are they doing in my Spanish holiday?

And they refused, obviously. So we assume she's very xenophobic, but it could be she's just objected to the logic of the fact that if you're going on holiday, surely it's not in your own country. I was looking at just sort of general returning gifts or refusing gifts as a way of looking at this one. So President Abraham Lincoln,

he was offered some gifts in 1861 by the King of Siam, who said, I would like to send you some elephants. All you have to do, release them. They'll multiply across America. If you give us a big ship and fill it with hay and water, we'll send loads of elephants across to you. And just let them loose and you'll have loads of elephants.

You know, within a century, America will be overrun with elephants and that'll be a really good thing. Right. For transportation purposes. Well, there aren't elephants in America now, so did he just say no? Or... He wrote back with the most diplomatic answer. Like, it sets a good standard for American presidents

in terms of diplomacy. He wrote back saying, sadly America does not reach a latitude so low as to favour the multiplication of the elephants. But thank you so much anyway. It was just a very subtle, nice way. If everyone always sent a letter in advance warning you what the present was they were going to get you

so you could have sent the polite rejection. There was a guy in India who wanted a refund for a train ticket. He'd been overcharged for a train ticket by 20 rupees, which was 25 cents, US cents. And after 100 hearings, Eventually he got his 20 rupees back. Apparently his family tried to convince him that it was all pointless

and a waste of time and money but he says it's not the money that matters. Wow. This is a fight for justice and a fight against corruption. That's the shittest Batman ever. In fairness, the rail company was fined

about $200 US, which he got as well. So he got some money out of it. But that still didn't play for the massive divorce proceedings that followed, didn't they? 22 years of trying to get his 20 rupees back. Customers complaining goes back a long way. It's so exciting.

This is something that I think we've probably been aware of it, but we've never mentioned on the podcast that there's a demand for a refund that is on a clay tablet from 1,750 BC. It's one of the oldest ones we have. It's in Mesopotamia. And it's so good because it's exactly like a TripAdvisor complaint today. and it's a complaint to someone called Ayan Nasir

from a customer who's called Nani and Nani has sent his servant to buy some copper ingots on his behalf and he considered the ingots substandard and the complaint is just an explanation of how these ingots are very poor standard of ingots but not only that the servant was treated very poorly by the salesperson when he tried to buy them he'd been dreadfully rude to them

so apparently the salesperson has said well if you want to take them take them if you don't want to take them don't And it was great. And then saying, you know, you must restore my money to me in full, this isn't good enough. And that's 4,000 years ago. 4,000 years we've been winging. It is time for us to move on to fact number three, and that is Andy.

My fact is, there is a man in America who has tasted 500 kinds of banana and claims he has special banana eyes. He's called Gabriel Sacta Smy. He lives in Hawaii, and he was recently profiled in the New York Times, which is how I found out about him. He is a banana fan. He's a banana farmer. He's a big banana boy. He just loves bananas, he loves bananas, basically. And he hunts bananas around the world. He hunts the rare bananas. They're easy to catch, aren't they? They're slow moving. But you've got to know what you're looking for. You know, you've got a spot and say, I've never seen you before. And so he grows 150 different varieties on the star. Oh, he hunts new varieties. I see, like, special

weird-looking. Like rare ones that, you know, we've got one biggie, the Cavendish, that's the global banana these days. He's looking for the rare, the deep cuts. A lot of them don't look like a banana. So some of them are egg-shaped, some of them are like footloth. Like some of them, it's kind of like with potatoes as well. Like there are potato hunters that go out there and they go,

this is a potato. It looks nothing like a potato. It doesn't look nothing. It doesn't look like a dinosaur, doesn't it? Yeah, no, but it does look like a tree, for example. Like, it just doesn't look like what it is. And it's the same with this. Apparently this is what his brilliant skill is, wherever he is, he can just say,

banana. And people go, that's a postbox. And they'll say, no. I'll tell you, that's my wife. It's a banana. That says what his banana eyes are, that eyes that can spot a new variety of banana. Yeah, he tracks him down. And he has people guiding him as well who might know special local cultivars of banana.

But he's sort of one of the world experts on it. And it's really useful because he, scientists have a secret supply of support. bananas just in case something happens to the Cavendish, which is our big variety. Is that like a banana you bring on an aeroplane if you're slightly emotionally vulnerable? He's sent 200

new bananas to a gene bank in Belgium and they're cryo preserved at minus 200 degrees. They're like Hans Solo, just waiting to be thawed out in case of diet emergency. The Cavendish is just really tasty, right? And the other ones are just all rubbish, like, little brown things. Yeah, Cavendish had been bred to be very tasty,

haven't they? But they might be vulnerable to disease. That's true. They're always working on reinforcing the cavern dish to make sure that that can last as the banana. So there's no imminent peril, I think. Yeah.

I think I read there's a thousand, 600 different varieties of banana in this vault that are like Austin Powers. They're sitting there waiting to wake up in a future that they won't understand and we'll say cancelable things. But it is amazing.

Like the science that is going on. You think bananas are just in the wild? No, we've got people protecting the banana at a huge scientific base. Yeah, a lot is going into it because it is a risk just because Cavendish are clones, so they may not have anything threatening them now, but as soon as the threat comes, they're all done.

And yeah, I love banana heroes who are really into it. Do you know who eats the most bananas in the world? What nationality-wise? Yeah, or individual-wise? Yeah, the answer is monkeys. No, which country? I mean, I'll be honest, you're not going to guess this in a million years. Really? Equatorial Guinea?

Is it per capita? Wouldn't it have been good? It was worth of trial, wasn't it? This is per capita, yeah. Australia? No, Australia eats around one a week. One every five days, an average Australian would eat. Okay.

Okay, and this is, how much these people eat before we find out who they are? Yep, 10 a day. Get out. Eat? It's just not true. It's so true. People... Oh, the Vatican.

The Vatican is a huge... The Pope. There's no any other there. Just they love... They need their energy for the services and, you know... What is the Pope doing with those bananas? Yeah. No, it's a normal-sized country.

A normal size country. But you're not going to guess it. But you weren't a million miles away with Equatorial Guinea. It's Uganda. Uganda, yeah. Uganda eats 660 pounds of bananas each year, which is about 3,000 per year, on average, per person. But the reason is...

is because Ugandan food is basically banana-based. So you have banana bread, you have banana. The most common banana dish, Matoka, is also the word for food in Uganda. You have Uganda beer. You have Uganda beer. You have banana beer. I think I've had one too many banana beers, maybe. It's almost a problem, isn't it?

It makes up about 35% of the Ugandan diet. I think Uganda and Congo are the top two of these Matuque bananas, which are cooking bananas, so more like plantain, I guess. But it is a bit of an issue. People get deficiency. So there's a lot of vitamin A deficiency problems because so much their diet is based in banana

that doesn't have enough. So they've now made a super banana specifically for Uganda, which is a banana that has 30 times as much vitamin A as the normal banana and could solve a lot of their problems, which is very cool. But people don't want to eat it.

There's suspicion because it's a little bit orange. So sellers are saying, People are coming to us saying we just want the natural banana, this banana's gone orange, what's wrong with it? Yeah. Well, it feels like you could just paint it. I think that might take away some of the nutritional value. Will it? It's on the skin. You take it off. You take the skin off. No, no, sorry, it's the flesh. The flesh is orange. Yeah, sorry. Do you want to hear about the Highland giant banana?

Yes, please. Is it a real or is it like a cryptid? It's real. It's the biggest banana on the planet. I wish it was a cryptid, though, because I'd love that. I'd believe in that monster. Well, you decide, I'll tell you about it and you decide if it's real or not. So it's called Musa Ingens, is the scientific name. It's the biggest non-woody plant on the planet. Because it's not woody bananas and herbs, they're not trees. Yeah. But it's 45 feet tall.

And because it's not wood, it gets knocked over by the wind very easily. So it only grows in very deep jungle canyons in Papua New Guinea. Cool. Yeah. And the fruit are very big. Wow, I bet the Pope fucking. He loves them. I didn't write down a measurement for the fruit. What was I thinking?

I just thought I cover it at the end by saying, and they're very big. I've seen photos of them and they are massive. Because we've all seen big trees, Andy. It's big bananas that we're looking for. He's gone for almost the length of a human arm, I would say. The teenager's arm. Size of a chihuahua, I would say.

Size of a very, like, overfed chihuahua. Yeah. Because they're fat. Hey, one interesting thing about the fact that bananas are herbs, right, is they don't have a trunk like a normal tree would do. They have, they're not a woody stem. And so when you see a banana tree, you'll see like at the top the leaves are all kind of shredded, like it's been in a hurricane. But that's to help it if it's ever in a hurricane. Because when the wind blows it, because they don't have the wooden stems, they kind of, they might blow over quite easily.

And because they've got these kind of tattered leaves, it means that the wind can go. get right through them. That's cool, isn't it? That's so good. That is very cool. Britain is another nation that loves bananas. Okay. Currently and historically.

So Britain bananas and Jamaica have a very intertwined history. It was a huge export from Jamaica to Britain around the turn of the 20th century. And in World War II, Britain had to suddenly requisition all of its or a lot of its trade ships to be used in the military. So that included the ships that were bringing bananas from Jamaica. to the UK. But that was going to screw Jamaica's economy. So basically, Jamaica kept on churning out loads and loads of bananas for Britain, put them on a ship and then immediately just tipped them all into the ocean. What? The ocean was just full of bananas. If you went for a

swim off the beaches of Jamaica in World War II, it was just bananas layering. And that's how the banana boat was invented. And that's what it is, yes. Yeah. Honestly, that's amazing. It's so cool. And so they were, of course, they were rationed in Britain. Well, you couldn't get them in Britain because they weren't being imported. And there was this panic that Brits would have lost their taste for bananas because the whole generation grew up without and rationing famously went on in Britain until about 1950. So when the ban was lifted, the first shipment of bananas arrived into Liverpool, actually from Sierra Leone, they arrived and the bananas were overripe. They didn't want to throw them away because, you know, that's a waste and what do you do with them? So they said,

oh, they should have done a big loaf. Yeah. They didn't. They just got all the dot workers and they said, can you eat as many of these as you can? Oh, really? And they got through 37,000. They ate 12 bananas each. Call the Vatican. We have a banana emergency. Code yellow.

So the Ecuadorian banana is a little too big for Britain. Oh. So I read a really interesting interview. What does that mean? Well, I would have read a great interview with the managing director of Fife's in the UK. They're a great big banana company.

He's called John Hopkins. And he said, the Ecuadorian banana is a bit too big for the UK market. It's only a couple of centimeters that it's too big, but it's enough for the housewife to say it's more than a meal.

Whereas he says, and I'm not trying to put any emphasis on any of this, but he says, the German house frow loves the length of an Ecuadorian nana. Well, she needs to take do

after all those broken penises. I'm gonna have to move us on on the sake, guys. You don't want to hear about the shifting ratio between British banana and turnip of consumption. Screw this time frame we've said ourselves. Go, Andy, go, go.

Fly, my friend. Fly my beauty. Listen, better be good. It's just that in the 1970s. The average British adult 84 grams of bananas each week and 40 grams of turnip. But now we... Well, steady, steady.

That's just the setup. Now we eat 200 grams of banana each week and just 12 grams of turnip. So sad. It is time for our final fact of the show, and that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that neo-toddlerism is the idea that you can change the world by acting like a three-year-old. Okay. And I must admit, I did come up with this fact before the recent events in America. What's happened? I've not seen the news.

Don't worry about it then. So this comes from an article by a blogger called Gervinda Bogle. It seems like he came up with the idea. He writes about psychology and the modern world and stuff like that. And he came up the idea that it's like, you know, you get people who are, throwing soup at paintings or going to the Republican convention dressed as babies. And they reckon basically you're trying to, you're having to do these stunts because of the world of TikTok and the world of social media

and you're just trying to get a reaction, just like a toddler would? You're just trying to get people to look at you, get people to see what you're doing. And that is the way to... I see. So it's about protest, basically. It's about the people who are in charge acting like toddlers themselves. No, it's not so much that. It's the modern way of protesting in order to...

But the only way to defeat toddlers is by using other toddlers, right? So maybe it's the best way of protest. Is that how you do it like a war of toddlers? Yes. Fire is fire. The toddlers is toddlers. Whenever my child misbehaves, I bring in the village terror child. But he has all these different theories, and I just like the idea of neo-todlerism. And I just like the idea of acting like a toddler.

You just want us all to do it. Processed or not? I just like having naps. Yeah. Okay, no one's protested by just having a nap every afternoon for two hours yet, but they could. He's very critical of it and, you know, says that he uses some examples of protests that have been happening at the moment.

You know, people in Justop Oil often throw paint over paintings, ironically, to destroy them. It's often soup over paintings. It's often soup over paintings. But they never throw a painting at a bowl of soup. No, they're not trying to destroy soup, aren't they? But I would be interested in that, like, as a just... a cool variation on the thing. The interesting thing that I read and know is they literally never even harm the paintings.

There's one painting which they very mildly harmed. So I think it is quite interesting all the fuss about it. But the other thing that this guy's point is that it's very impulsive and over-emotional and not very thoughtful protests. But he uses an example, things like the release of worms and maggots into Netanyahu's hotel room at the Watergate. And that takes a huge amount of forward planning. I wouldn't be able to...

Where are you sourcing? a huge number of worms and maggots. I was trying to look for worms recently, and it takes ages even to find one. They're in the ground, Anna. Okay, but how do you find enough to overwhelm a hotel room? I don't think he opened the door

and a wall of worms fell out on top of them. And maggots. There's a maximum, happy number of worms in your hotel room, which is zero. So any advance on that is technically a good process, I think. But it can't be just two, can it?

He's not going to walk in and go, uh-huh. Yeah, well, as soon as he tries to cut them up to throw them away, he's got four worms. That's actually true. Do you know, the idea that they're not forward planning is not strictly true. So the very famous incident that happened in London not too long ago was Van Gogh's Sunflowers.

Anna Holland and Phoebe Plummer, they came in and they threw tomato soup at it. But they went in and they staked the joint. They went a few days before and they brought in cans of tomato soup to see if that would make it past security. They went back to an Airbnb that they were staying in and they went into the showers in there. and had to work out at what angle do you throw tin soup at an item? Really? Yeah, so they went in and they tried all the different things that you could do. They had it all planned out to the point where there were journalists planted in there.

So that's how much forward thinking was. They informed media who were waiting silently knowing that this was going to happen, but there was a bunch of kids who was sitting and doing their own little sketches of it. So they had to wait ages for these kids to do these drawings. And eventually they moved away. and they threw the soup, it went on it, they glued their hands to the wall, and then they got arrested, right?

Now, they thought that they were going to get off because they thought there was a good point to it. They have been found guilty, and they are serving time. And the thing that they got busted for is that the frame that was housing the Van Gogh painting was incredibly old, 1700s. It was incredibly expensive, and the suit went on it,

and the acid burnt away a bunch of the frames. Yeah, wow. And so that... How much acid are they putting in my Heinz tomato suit? Sorry, when I spill a little bit of soup, it doesn't burn through my table. It's an excellent point. Do you know why just up oil use orange? So they often do orange paint in their things.

Shows up well? Shows up well, definitely. In fact, I will come to that. So they say it's a symbol of hope because it's a bright colour, all this. But actually, orange has been used in environmental protests for quite a long time. And that is because green and orange are clashing colours. So green and red are complementary colors. They're exactly opposite on the color wheel.

But if you just go one away from red, suddenly the colors really, really clash. And so for ages and ages, it's always been used in green protest because it looks very artificial because it looks the opposite of green. And did you deliberately wear a green and orange shirt tonight that everyone's been having to look at for the last hour and a half already? And Dan as well. Jesus Christ. And you haven't seen Andy's underpants.

Thank God. I was looking at protests, what works, what doesn't. And there's this really interesting study that came out quite recently by a Harvard academic called Erica Chenoweth, who, A, she found that nonviolent campaigns twice as likely to achieve their goals as violent campaigns, which is quite useful, and all these campaigns that are being referred to, it's not violent unless you count kind of drenching something

in a tasty liquid as violence. And the really interesting revelation she had, and she looked at a lot of sort of successful protests basically where they've stated their aim and then their aim has been achieved, found that as soon as 3.5% of the population is actively involved in a movement,

the success rate is 100%. Wow. Wow. And she looks at, I think it was over it was a couple of hundred, I think, protests. So in Australia, for instance, that's about a million people. If you have a cause, if you're really popular, you can rope in a million people, 100% chance

it's going to work. It's the same number of people who will go on a cruise ship holiday this year. in Australia. So if you've got all of them, just tell them you're not returning to shore until you signed the petition. Some things that toddlers are good at.

Ten pin bowling. So the world's... In what capacity? Well, are they... Possibly the world's best ten pin bowler is an Aussie called Jason Belmonte from New South Wales.

He's won 31 world titles and he bowls like a child. because when he was a toddler, that's when he learned. He wasn't strong enough to lift up the bowl with one hand and roll it. So he used two hands and sort of rolled it that way. And he carried it on his whole life and now he's the best in the world. Wow.

Get out. This is so plausible. The number of times I've been bowling. Are you not the same? And you go for like a really graceful, long, hard bowl and it just tips one over. And you have the idiot who's never done it before, who bumps it along and knocks all down. He's the only 30-time winner in. PBA TAR history.

He does use those barriers. What? No, he doesn't. I was so angry then. It's allowed. It's a little known rule of bowling. They're not allowed to turn you down. Can I tell you guys about my favorite protest that I've learned about?

So we all probably remember back in the day when the Beatles were sort of at their height, 1966, John Lennon made some comments where he said that we are bigger than Christ, right? Yeah. And this angered so many people to the point that the Beatles were being boycotted by radio stations, people were burning their stuff, burning all their records in all of John Lennon's books. In particular, there was a radio station called Clue, and Clue organized a bonfire. So it had a thousand people there. They all threw in their records.

It all burnt and so on. That's a famous story that happened. This next bit is less famous. There is a theory that God agreed with John Lennon. Theory? You're going to have to continue with that. Otherwise, you've just said nonsense. So what happened is they did the bomb fire.

They burned all the stuff. No, the next day, Clues transmitter tower was struck by lightning. All the equipment was knocked out completely. And their news director, who's basically running the whole thing, got hit, got knocked out and rushed to hospital, and they didn't get back on for another day or so. So God was effectively going, I love the Beatles. It's a theory. It's a day, that's Old Testament God, isn't it?

It's a proper old school God. I say it's a popular theory. I sort of invented it for this show. It's good. It's got legs, I think. Just another 99,99,999 people to convince. Do you want to hear some toddler things, sort of like genuine toddlers? I don't know if any of you are familiar with the Reddit of why my kid is crying,

but it's unbelievably good. Oh, yeah. Just picked a few favorite examples. Because I wouldn't let her eat a snotty tissue. Both three-year-olds were inconsolable because they wanted to hold the bag of poo I was taking to the bin. And maybe my favorite. Why is my kid crying? Because daddy's fart was louder than hers.

It's a very vulnerable age. You've got to be careful. You have got to be careful, yeah. I find it very interesting, the sort of different levels at which toddlers develop and how it actually is basically even across the world. So the age at which kids walk is pretty much even, maybe give or take a week or two weeks across the world,

except in Tajikistan. What? Yeah. It's so weird. And there's this amazing thing that every single Tajik parent does pretty much, which is that they have these things called Gavikistan. Vora's, which are cradles, but that their kids stay in all the time. So for the first six months of their life, their kids are in it literally for 23 hours a day.

For the next six months, it's more like maybe 16 hours a day. And they're lying in a cradle, and they're strapped down fully, so only their head moves. And there's a whole cut in the bottom of the cradle, and they've got a bare bottom. And so any poo just falls out into a bucket underneath. And there's a tube attached to them so that any wee get siphoned into a bare bottom. wherever it gets siphoned. And this is how they live, and this is what all Tajik mothers do. Almost 100% of Tajik mothers do this.

And they spend nine to 23 hours a day in it until they're three or four. So understandably, they were a bit slower to crawl. So by the age of one, almost all infants in most cultures are crawling. Only 60% of Tajik children do it. The good news is, the fascinating thing, is that by four, they've all caught up. So it doesn't really make a blind bit of difference these things

when you're thinking, oh, my child. not talking or walking. But isn't that mad, their kids are just strapped to a cradle with a poo hole in the bottom for three years, the first three years of their life. That is crazy.

Insane. I know. It's great. What a life. What a great life. That is a good life. I really thought Dan's John Lennon, Christ, God,

lightning thing was going to be the weirdest thing we heard during this fact. Wow. We're going to have to wrap up very soon, guys. Can I give you a couple of old-fashioned words for children? Yeah. There's a squeaker, which was defined as a bar boy, also a bastard, or any other child.

There's a tit, which was an old name for a prim young lass. You tit. That's not how you speak to a prim young lass. It is how I do. A bantling is just a child. Bratling is a 16th century child. Sucker is from 1384 for a child who's still nursing. Oh, yeah.

Sucker. Ah, yes, sucker. Chitty face is a little puny child. If you want to just keep that word, keep it going. Right. So it's handy for if your friends are new parents, you can throw those their way. Oh, what a lovely little chitty face. I found a thing which is a stubborn child law.

And this was used in the General Court of Massachusetts in 1646. So this is the description of what you as a parent are allowed to do if you have a tantrum child. shall his father and mother, being his natural parents, lay hold of him and bring him to the magistrates assembled in court to testify on them that their son is stubborn and rebellious and will not obey their voice and lives with notorious crimes. And such a son shall be put to death. What?

Yeah, it's a real plot twist right at the end there. Is there no option of just having a word with them first? Wow. Yeah. Octopuses, throw tantrums, and at once, especially males when they don't get sex. Sorry, octopuses, you said? Octopuses.

I must have misheard that as humans. Okay. All right, that is it, everyone. That is all of our effects. Thank you so much, Brisbane. That was awesome. It's amazing being here. We will be back again,

and we'll be back again next week with another episode. We'll see you then. Goodbye.