No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As The Great Modesto

Episode Date: August 10, 2018

Dan, James, Andy and Alex discuss gold in the sewers, Robert Burn's homemade ink, and why Sweden's highest point isn't any more.

And welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden. My name is Dad Shriver and I'm sitting here with Andrew Hudson Murray, James Harkin and Alex Bell. 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 you, Alex. My fact this week is that the Swiss flush about $2 million worth of gold down the toilet every year.

Are they hiding it because it's Nazi gold and they're embarrassed about the fact they have it? Time to mention the Nazis. Three seconds? No, this is... It's lots and lots of little tiny, tiny gold particles. It's a sort of waste result of the manufacturing process of watches they think.

They're not entirely sure it comes from. All they know is that they've been analyzing the content of sewage and it's got a really weirdly high percentage of gold in it. Can they collect it? They're trying to come up with a way of getting it that's cost effective but at the moment is too expensive. How crazy that it's costing too much to get 1.8 million dollars worth of gold. Except that when you think it's like tiny tiny particles in the water so yeah it's like panning for gold. Can you go panning for gold there? I think they're way too small like it's not it's not like panning for gold in like old times where you had little nugget, so you out with your jeezing.

If you have the choice of panning for gold in a nice river in Scotland, or maybe in a load of sewage in Switzerland, I know which one I'd choose. Yeah, but one definitely has gold at it. One's got $1.8 million worth of gold. There's gold in then the mountains in Scotland. Is there? Did you not see that? That was in the news about two weeks ago, maybe a week ago, where they found the largest gold nugget

ever in Britain, I think. Oh, the guy who was sitting in the river. I think what he does is he lies down, face down in the water, and, he just kind of looks for it. Like he doesn't do that panning thing or whatever. He just kind of lies there and waits and just tries to see it. It's nice because it's like fishing, but without the... Without the fish.

Yeah, you are the fish in a way. You're in the water. In a way. What's it? Do we know, are you allowed to keep it if you find a big gold nugget in a river? I can't remember. I think what happens is the Crown Estates can claim it. The Queen's allowed to eat it.

Is it if you find it on Crown Estate land? Or is it just the queen owns Orphanically? No, I think the queen owns everything actually. Oh, man. If you find it downstairs in the, you know, let's say you're rooting around in the toilets of the QI office. And there's no reason to say that. And I don't know why you would look at me when you're saying that. Well, I'm just saying, like, we've already decided that that's a good place to find gold.

There's no rivers around here. Right. But if you did find some gold, then technically I think you'd have to offer it to the queen. Really? I think so. Unfair. I think the same goes for like bottle tops if you find them in a metal attached. She's just less interested.

A crown made of bottle tops It's not why all these rooms at Buckingham Palace are just full of old bottle tops Do you know there's loads of gold in British sewers as well But it's not from Because we don't have a luxury watch industry The same way that the Swiss do It's about seven parts per million

Which would make it economically feasible as a gold mine As in a gold mine you get less than that But the way it gets into the water in Britain Is from people doing the washing up While wearing wedding rings So tiny bits of goldware of it And also get this, if you brush your teeth and you've got a gold tooth,

tiny bits of gold will come off and make their way into the water. I ask, how often would I have to do the washing up before my wedding ring completely disappeared from my hand? It sounds like you're really hoping to get out of something by doing the washing up. I can say to my wife, I can't

do the washing up because then our marriage will be an old. Probably several hundred years, I'm afraid. I think the divorce and some of the loss of the wedding ring would happen much sooner as a result. We've got In our upcoming book, we've got an article on the Fatberg that was displayed in the London Museum this year. What is that book, Dan?

It's going to be called the book of the year 2018. Okay. And where is it going to be available? You know, places like Waterstones and online retailers that Andy doesn't allow us to say anymore. What I do? It's going to be on Amazon. No, you can't say that. Sorry, you were saying? Yeah, so the fatberg for anyone that doesn't know, it's just a giant lump of fat that they

find in the sewers mainly of London, but they've been found worldwide. And yeah, they're ginormous. It takes them days and days, in some cases weeks, to absolutely knock them apart. They have to use pneumatic drills to get them down. And it was made up 90% of cooking fat that we put down our drains. The others are wet wipes, which is all down to, it turns out, Colonel Sanders and KFC. KFC, effectively were the first people to let the wet wipe out into the public. The man who invented the wet wipe sold it to KFC. So KFC were the original wet wipe people. But now they're

mostly used by parents and stuff, right? Exactly for children's bums. Yeah. They weren't used to wipe the chickens, were they? But yeah, what's interesting as well is that they found a higher concentration of banned gym supplements in the fat burg than they did, say,

cocaine or MDMA. What, like steroids and things? Yeah, exactly. So the fatberg might become muscle bird. That's a German city I want to go to sometime. All German cities are Musselberg. Very well-developed people. So I found a crime from this year where thieves used sewage to steal gold. This is clever.

So it's in Western Australia where there are lots of gold mines. And what they did is they stole a sewage truck. And you remember sewage trucks? They have those big hoses and nozzles which they can suck up sewage with. And they stuck that into a gold mine site's big pick. of gold-rich liquid and they suck that all up Interesting

I didn't know they would have like gold-rich-liquid I don't know how they I don't know how the mining process works I guess maybe if they're blasting it was liquid And they sort of have this goldy soup Which they could then refine And if you're gonna leave that lying around In a big vat labelled gold rich liquid

You're asking to be robbed really aren't you That's like putting it in a sort of bag With a dollar sign on it But it's very impressive though To steal a sewage truck to think of that Because I would have just gone along with a Henry Hoover And tried to take a little bit I think that would be the Great Escape level way of doing it,

going in as a cleaner every day and just like getting a little bit in your Hoover. Yeah. The largest nugget of gold ever found was called Welcome Stranger. Okay. And I say was because as soon as it was found, it was melted down into Golden Ingets. The second largest was called Welcome, only Welcome. And that was also melted down into Sovereigns. But the good thing about that is it was found by one guy with a pickax who carried on mining after his

fellow miners had gone to lunch. So they all went away and he thought, oh, I'm going to carry on mining. And as soon as he saw the nugget, he fainted. And then when the guys came back from lunch, they saw he was kind of face down in the middle of the hole and they thought he was dead. And so they climbed down to try and save him and they saw the nugget and they fainted as well.

Wow. So it turns out the way to find nuggets are gold is just to lay face down. That's true. Why were they called Welcome and Welcome Stranger? That's quite weird names for nuggets. Well, that's a really good question. I don't know why they're called that. I suppose what you might say, if you found a nugget, you might, oh, welcome, stranger.

Yeah, that's a quite an oddly predatory way. Discovering something. The third largest is the largest extant nugget. It's called the Hand of Faith, and it's on display in Las Vegas. Do you know what the Netherlands are doing with their old toilet paper? With their old toilet paper? Yeah, used toilet paper. They're making it into windmills.

Shitty windmills. Oh, I wish it was that. Well, they're turning it into bike lanes. So it is a similarly green. It was a similarly kind of stereotypical Dutch thing. So do they collect their paper on the side and not flush it down? Is that why? Oh, I don't know how it's collected, actually.

That's a really good point. It must be that it's flushed down and they're sort of scooped out. I think it's scooped out. Because what they do, once they've got it, I don't know how they get it, but they extract the cellulose from it. So, you know, it's tree pulp and stuff, which has a lot of cellulose, which is this tough fibre. Then they sterilise it.

obviously, and then they turn it into big pellets, which they can turn into asphalt. But also, bike lanes are usually coloured brown, aren't they, to make them look different to the rest of the road? Right. So they probably don't have to use any colouring. Yeah. A lot of skid marks as well. More the breaking of the bikes, guys.

Watch out for Pouadestrians. Oh, God. Yeah, I'm almost certain that they are, they must be flushing them when they're cleaning the sewers, because it's not like they'd be saying, please, everyone put aside your used toilet paper, and come and get it. That does happen, Alex.

That does happen. Yes, it does. It does. It happens in Greece. Yeah, happens in Greece. Really? Yeah. A film.

I don't remember that song. Okay, it is time for fact number two. That is Andy. My fact is that Robert Burns made his own ink out of old beer, lard, elephant tusk, and sulfuric acid. Wow. Yeah. That's very cool. What a man.

I read the source that you sent for this. it noted that these were all things that were readily available in Scotland at the time. Yeah, I mean, old beer and lard, obviously. But where did they get elephant tusks in Scotland? Ivory, I reckon. Big ivory trade. Sure. Yeah. I mean, I just said another word for the thing.

Capitalism, I guess. Yeah, so I didn't know this, but writers basically had to make their own ink for centuries. You couldn't just go down to the ink shop and buy some ink. So there were all these recipes around. and researchers from the University of Glasgow have analysed. It's really cool. They took original Burns poems

and they lifted ink away in a way that didn't damage the original poems because obviously the original manuscripts. That's amazing. I wonder how they do that. I don't know. I wish I did. Because you wouldn't want to accidentally lift off a whole word.

No. And you forget what it is. And the really cool thing is they've found different recipes from different stages of his life. So when he was young and poor, he used a particular kind of iron gall ink. And then as he got richer, he used this thing called ivory black, which involved treacle and lard and acid and vinegar and ivory.

And it's a way of telling the real poems from forgeries. Yeah, which that's amazing, isn't it? They're starting to apply this now to all ancient manuscripts because if they see the recipe someone uses and then someone else claims to have an original and it turns out it's made from, I don't know, mole and butter and sausages, This is not Sorry, mole as it the animal Yeah, the animal

And moles, human moles Butter and sausages Yeah Robert Burns Used to have some really cool nicknames Go on He used to refer to himself As Spunky

Oh yeah Yeah He used to call himself The Rantin Rovin Robin That was one of his personal favourites Apparently But he never called himself Rabby or Robbie

Which is what Rabby Burns Or Robbie Burns Is what many people in the UK Would associate As his nickname that we've given him. Yeah, never, never called himself that.

But he's calling himself these. He's not really nicknames. Yeah, they're not really nicknames if you call them yourself. No one else is calling him Spunky. I don't think that counts as a nickname. That's more like an online avatar. Twitter handle at Rantan Roven Robyn. Oh, he would have been great on Twitter.

It's very funny, I think. Would he already actually just were tweeting really tedious things about making your own ink? Yeah. Yeah, these recipes are really weird. So there are lots of recipes. that used to exist. Oh, do you know about Gaul ink?

No. Astrix. Gull... Ah, sorry. So Gaul as in gall bladder, I guess. Yes, but not as in gall bladder. Goal wasps? Exactly. Is it? Yeah. So there are hundreds of species of wasps called gall wasps. And what they do is they land

on an oak tree and they lay their eggs inside the leaf buds and then that turns into this weird kind of tumour lump on the tree and the little grub grows inside and it's all protected from the outside. but those galls can be ground up and they're a massive ingredient for ink and they were for hundreds and hundreds of years. There's only one kind of oak gall which makes the ink and it's basically the most important wasp in history. So all of, you know, Mozart, Darwin, Magna Carta, Beowulf, all of that was written in oak gall ink.

Wow. It was for centuries and centuries it was the ink to use. So you could say that these wastes are responsible for all those great works, can't you really? I think you can. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. I mean, also the trees that you made the paper from and, you know, the tables.

It's a group effort. This logic is flawed. But, you know, well done, loss. Yeah. It's not going to be like a hidden figures movie, as it. I recognize NASA site. What do we make it out of these days, then? I don't actually know much about.

I don't know, actually. I think it involves carbon, but I haven't looked it up properly. It's not made out of moles and sausages. A butter, I think. I don't know. It's probably made out of some kind of synthetic resin stuff. Yeah, let's go with that. Cool.

Capitalism. Did you know that the Secret Service has an international ink library? No. And they keep more than 11,000 specimens of ink, and it's for identifying mystery inks when they get, you know, like a poison pen letter or something like that. They've got ink stating all. so it was set up in the...

What does that do for them? Or they can find out like when or where it was made. It turns out we're looking for the author of Beowulf. Bring in the wask. But yeah, they've got ink dating back always in 1920s, and it's pretty cool. So Bloods used often in place of ink. I was just looking into different types of methods of writing. Where?

Where and when? Adam Hussein have a Quran in his own blood. This is what I was going to say. Oh, sorry. No, no, but it's extraordinary. I've not heard of this. So Saddam Hussein, post a assassination attempt on his son, became a devout Muslim. And so I read this in Atlas Obscura.

They, he gave on his, after his 60th birthday, 27 liters of his own blood to a collider. That's nearly an armful. He must have needed a big biscuit after that. So he gave it to this. who spent two years putting together a 600-page blood, Saddam Hussein, blood-inked Quran, which is now locked in a vault in a mosque in Baghdad. But it sits there. It's just bizarre. I mean, there's much more blood than you would need to make a new Saddam Hussein there.

You need more than blood to make a person. That's true, yeah, no. I'm just saying if someone else finds other ingredients, then we're in trouble. I don't know. I've watched Jurassic Park, and I'm pretty sure they only had some blood. That's very true actually, yeah But then the problem is that the dinosaurs turn female so at some point Saddam Hussein might turn into a girl and start

reproducing on the island That I assume we're keeping him on I don't want to go to the theme park or see the film to be honest I think it's a more sensible pitch than the new Jurassic World movie Okay, it is time for fact number three And that is James Okay, my fact this week is that Sweden's highest point Is now its second highest

after the top of it melted. Oh, no. Poor highest point. Oh, good for the second highest point. Yeah, that's true. Finally, that bastard's got what's coming to it. So is the second highest one not covered in ice? So you're right, exactly right.

So they're basically the same part, they're the same mountain, but they're two different peaks on the same mountain. And the highest point in Sweden has a glacier on top of it. But due to the recent heat wave, the glacier has melted, and now the second highest point is the highest.

but in the winter they expect them to swap places again. Yeah, so it must be really confusing for any sort of textbooks that they're going to publish between now and winter because they don't know. They can't confirm that it's definitely going to get cold enough. The real victims in this scenario. And this is, I'll probably pronounce this wrong, but it's something like Kebner-Kaiser Mountain,

which is in the north of Sweden. Oh, man. So it's not a good news story in some ways. Well, I didn't put it forward as a good news story, did I? No, no, completely. you didn't. I think it's just a thing that happened. And I think it's interesting that a country can have two peaks that are the highest, different parts. And there are even worse things about it, actually, because let's say you're Swedish or let's say you're any nationality, but you want to

climb the highest point in Sweden. You've always been able to climb this kind of point, which is the north peak of Kebner-Kheuser. And now you need to climb the other one. And actually, it's a much more difficult climb. So for a safety aspect, they think a lot more people might get injured or killed because they're trying to climb this really difficult peak, whereas before they could do the relatively easy one. Can you wait until, I guess you can wait until

winter. Oh no, it's bad climbing mountains and winter, isn't it? It's easier in spring and summer. Yeah, although it's snowy at the top anyway of the old one. How how much is it melt by to make it? Is it a mash of sense? Because you could just take like a a Calippo up if you really want the other one to be

fine and just stick it in the snow. I don't think you're allowed to make your own highest point. Well, that did happen. That's that movie. I think we might have mentioned it before, the man who went up the hill and came down the mountain, which was a true story of the guy in Wales, who they said that to be a mountain,

it had to be a certain height, so he added a little bit on top of it to make it higher. But I think he did that with ground rather than Calipos. I didn't actually, I thought that movie was going to be some tedious emotional journey, and that was a metaphor. I didn't realize that was literally the story.

I think it might also be a tedious emotional journey. Okay, so get this. The lowest, highest point, no, hang on, sorry. Oh, there we go. Oh, damn it. The highest, lowest point in the world in any country. Oh, okay. So can I guess? Yeah. I think is it in Swaziland? Oh, you're so close.

It's down there somewhere, is it? It's the other one, Lesotho. It's the other small country within South Africa. It's Lesotho the enclave country, which is completely surrounded by South Africa. Okay. What is it? Is it like a cave? is it to be above ground? Yeah, it's just the lowest.

So all of Lesotho is well over 1,000 meters above sea level. So the lowest point in Lesotho is 1,400 meters above sea level and everything else is even higher than that. Are there any countries that are entirely below that point? Oh, well, Tuvalu.

Tuvalu, yeah, all of those places that are going to get... Tuvalu and the Maldives, yeah. So the lowest high point, as opposed to the highest low point. The lowest high point, yeah. Is in the Maldives, which is 2.4 meters above sea level. Whoa. Yeah. So Maldives obviously lots of islands and 99% of the Maldiv territory is open ocean.

But there was this island called Vilingali, which had an eight foot rise on it, which was the highest point. However, in 2013, a golf course opened on that island and it has a small mound on it, which was 16 feet above sea level. And the fifth hole teeing off point is the highest point. Now, in the Maldives. And it's in a resort and they do a daily tour and all guests who can complete the ascent, get a certificate. Wow. That's... That's...

It's... be annoying, though, if you're playing golf and you've got a whole sort of expedition trying to... What with cramp on there. ...mounts and mount the hole. And there's a flag there. Someone's got here away.

I've got a Swedish Mountains fact. Oh, yeah? There is a massive bunker inside... Is this another golf fact? No. So there's a sort of massive underground bunker. inside the Swedish mountains.

And it was built as sort of government protection facility for nuclear events and stuff. And it's no longer used for that. And it was sold to a private data center, so they keep servers in there now. And one of the things that's kept inside those servers is WikiLeaks. Huh? Assange.

Yeah. Actually, yeah. The digital version of Assange is kept in, imprisoned in underground. And you look at pictures. It does actually look like an evil villain's layer. It's crazy. But it's inside a mountain.

made of glass. Wow. It's cool. That's where Wikileaks is, guys. It's inside a Swedish mountain. Wow. That's very cool. That is very cool.

The highest point in the Netherlands is 4,000 miles from Amsterdam. What? Yeah. So there's the Caribbean Netherlands. Oh, like the different... Yeah, I think it was called the Dutch Antilles. And then recently they had a weird admin change. But there's an island called Sabre and it has a mount on it called Mount Scenery.

It's about three or four times higher than anywhere in the Netherlands. That's true. Actually, if the highest point of... Britain, I think, if we count everything that we claim is in the Antarctic. Oh, that's good. Because we claim a little bit of the Antarctic, which has a massive mountain on it. And the highest point in Australia is not, what is it? Cozyosco.

Yeah, it's actually an island off the coast of Australia, which has got a massive peak on it. And the highest point in Spain is in the Canary Islands, Mount Tied. So loads of countries, the highest point isn't really in that country at all. Wow. Who owns, I know. I'm saying in the moon. with the highest... No one owns the moon.

No, but there's the flag. That's not true. I've got a certificate. The highest point of Andy's house is actually up a bit. I have a thing or two about the big heat wave that we've been going through. So this is quite tied in, your fact, to the fact that globally there's been a heat wave. And Ireland, very recently, through the heat wave and through the heat wave and through the drought, has had exposed a sort of huge stone that says ire, so E-I-R-E.

Sorry, I always pronounce that error, but I don't know. I don't know how to pronounce it. Yeah, would you say error? Don't look at me. Would you say error? I don't know. I'd say it is an error. To say, what?

I think it is error. Error, so I'll just say that. Yeah. So it's exposed this giant stone era, E-I-R-E, and it's along the Irish coast, and what it was is during the Second World War they built this to show the enemies that were flying over thinking that they were going to bomb, let's say, England,

don't bomb us. This is Ireland. This is neutral ground. Wasn't it to differentiate Ireland from Northern Ireland? Oh, okay, was it Northern Ireland? Well, I'm just guessing, but I would have thought that pilots would know whether they were over on Ireland or...

That could be foggy, you know, if you're flying. Second World War, they didn't really have... Just assuming everyone in the war was an idiot. It sounds like someone who's using. the excuse of fog for making some really egregious errors in your life. I didn't mean to be in her house. I didn't know. I was 50 miles away. It was foggy. What could I say? Sorry, just to backtrack a tiny bit. There were huge fires as a result of this heat wave and fires knocked out all of the grass and the trees and so on

and it's exposed this giant air, E-I-R-E to mean Ireland. I've found it on the internet, so let's see how they pronounce it. or error. Brilliant. Was that porn hub that you've done to find that? I have a fact about Sweden, which I definitely know how to pronounce. So, in lots of Swedish mountains,

there have been no worms since the ice age. They were all wiped out. It's true. Yeah, great. I mean, bad for the worms. It's bad for the worms, but they've got other places to live, so it's fine.

And bad for the soil in the mountains. This is the thing. So they change. to the vegetation and they have very negative effects on particular trees. I think it even affect deer life cycles. I can't remember how. So the thing is that they are definitely invasive because worm populations apparently are only capable of moving five to ten meters a year. So for them to make their way all the way through northern Europe into the Swedish mountains, they wouldn't have done it for thousands and thousands of years. It's not much of an invasion.

It's not like the Germans going into Russia, is it? No. And so this is how we know that they're invasive. And they're impossible to get rid of if they establish themselves. So this could completely change the European landscape over the next few hundred years. Yeah. Do you know that due to the heat wave, bears in Dundee, in the zoo, got an 80

kilo ice lolly to keep them cool. Wow. What's it made of? Ice. Oh, nice. And fruit. Oh, lovely. That's very nice. That does sound good. It sounds like one of those decoy, healthy lollies. Yeah, like when the ice cream man used to come,

we weren't allowed to go and my mum would instead freeze some orange juice and we had to have that. You're kidding. Would she then cut the carton open as in how would you get at the orange juice? Did you pour it into a glass? You do it in ice cube trays, right? No, so we had special ice cube trays that are like ice cube trays but shape like ice ice ice I remember those. So you pour the, yeah, into the moulds.

That is a better method than just freezing the ice cube, the orange juice carton and then hacking it open. Entire litre of ice cream. What you do is you do is you just. have a pool queue into the Orange's Carson and freeze that? Did the bears get like get it on sticks or I saw a photo of it I think and I think it was hanging on a chain

and they could climb on it I believe it could climb on it yeah on an ice lolly imagine a magnum a big magnum swinging from a chain and you can just clabber on it not very grippable an ice lollies a solid block of eyes I think I've just discovered my fetish

I would love to see that Miley Cyrus video where she's speaking to the highest temperature ever recorded in Scotland was this year but it was

declared invalid because the thermometer was next to a vehicle with its engine running and the coldest temperature ever outside of Antarctica was measured in Siberia

but no one knows if that's right because the thermometer broke due to the cold oh okay it is time for our final

of the show, that is my fact. My fact this week is that when financier William C. Rolston modestly refused to allow a town to be named after him, the town instead called itself Modesto. Modesto or Modesto? Modesto. Modesto.

I would guess. Should we check on the internet? Yeah. Modesto. Modesto. Modesto? Absolutely nailed it. Okay. Modesto. It sounds like a very

demure magician. It does. The great Modesto. Well, I would say great. But yeah, so this fact was sent to me by at Shutter underscore Butter on Twitter. It's an amazing fact. So thank you Shutter underscore Butter. So Modesto is in California. It is a town that has had a bit of fame

via the fact that it's the birthplace of George Lucas. And back in the the day he made a very famous movie called American Graffiti. It was a massive movie at the time. It was pre-Star Wars. It sounds like that's what he's doing. It's not going to say. But I think what you're going to say is that might have been based on this town.

It was. American graffiti took place in Modesto. It was filmed elsewhere, but that's where it took place. Interestingly, George Lucas is so modest that he only introduces himself as the director of American graffiti. Jeremy Renner, the actor is from Modesto. He was born there as well.

This is a significant town. It is. And can I just quickly slip in my favorite Jeremy Renner fact from the year? Just used it. Thank God he was born there. I've been trying to get this fact out. He's starring in the new movie Tag. Oh, yeah.

So in Tag, it's only most of Jeremy Renner that appears in the movie. His arms don't appear in the movie. And the reason is he broke them just as they were filming. And so they were in casts. And so they had to CGI in his arms. Yeah. Yeah, so when you watch the movie, tag, which is predominantly about, I think, using your arms. Yeah, they're not his arms. They're CGI arms.

Are you saying he was running around with two broken arms in casts? Yeah, he was in tennis. Does that mean technically he's still it? Because he hasn't tagged in. It's also really confusing conversation. We're going to recast his arms because he's been broken. Get the casting director in here. Very good. So on this town's naming thing, there's a huge trope of how.

towns get their name. So there's a town in Tennessee which is called Difficult. And it all happens when they write to the post office saying can we have this particular name? And supposedly when they applied for the name, which was a really complicated name, they wanted to name the town. The US Postal Service replied your name is difficult and the people in the town thought, oh, they've just renamed our town, difficult. I never believe

any of these stories. There's one in California called Likely and the legend is always that all the residents got together to decide on the name for their new town because for some reason they were all living there a town with no name. And then they were like, oh, we're never going to grow on a name. And a guy went, yeah, likely. And like, then they were like, great name. And the same happened for town, you bet. Apparently there's a guy who went, oh, you bet. And that's why the town called you bet. Ridiculous. I mean, like, they all of this stuff is on the inside. They need to get more original stories. Yeah. Ding dong Texas. Do you know about that?

Ding dong Texas. Did somebody ring the bell just as they were deciding on the name? They're like, perfect. No, it was named after, um, for governor of Peter Becer. Bell and the businessman Zulus Bell and his nephew Bert, but Zulus and Bert were not in any way related to Peter. So yeah, it was called Ding Dong as a reference. And weirdly, it's in central Texas's Bell County. I thought it might have been named after Leslie Phillips. Do you remember Ding Dong?

Yeah. Blast of the first. There's only one place in Earth that I've found, which is called Earth. okay in Texas that's good and there are various reasons as to why as always

somebody suggested it's because they have a lot of earth there but there's a really good article about it online which points out there are at least two other places in America named after every single other planet Venus and Mercury

in Florida Jupiter there are Saturn guess which planet there are not two places named after Mercury it's Uranus there is one place but it's more of a tourist attraction than a town

It's the little tourist attraction Which contains the Uranus Brewing Company Combat Uranus There's a guy who calls himself the mayor of Uranus They sell fudge which has a label on it saying Uranus Fudge is a great This is a cool place There's a place called Nitro

Which is named after the explosive powder Which was made there in the First World War That's so cool That seems like a proper etymology There's a place in Russia called Asbestos Where a friend of mine was born Wow And it's where they make all the asbestos

And send it to America Very cool This is I don't know how well this is known in Britain, but in the UK, there was a place that had its name change, Staines. Well, there's still a place called Staines. Well, technically not just Staines. It's now called Staines upon Thames. It's not much better, is it?

No. I remember this. I remember when they tried to do this. Yeah. So the reason that they did this is because Ali G internationally had given Staines. Massive. Exactly. Such a bad name that they were always associated.

I remember watching LG in Australia and thinking oh Staines must be, I could see there was laughter but you just associated it sort of as this place where... And Staines is quite nice. Yes, exactly. That's the gag. He's from someone which is quite middle class and quite, you know. So they wanted to change it, but they didn't

really change it. They just added an extra bit on the end. Yeah, exactly. So on the 15th of December, 2011, the Speltthorn Borough Council resolved by 25 votes to four to change the name of the town to Staines upon 10th to try and boost the local economy by promoting its riverside location.

I'm quoting, quoting directly from the Wikipedia article that I found this on. I wonder if there's a calculation for how much adding upon Thames adds to a town's net worth, as it were, as in Richmond upon Thames is quite sort of classic, or upon any river. I do sort of like stains with waitros, and that would probably help. Yeah, stains upon waitrose. My uncle, when he was a counsellor in Bolton, tried to change the name of Bolton to Bolton-Lombolemore. Moors.

Yeah, because there are lots of other places called Bolton in the world, and he thought it would distinguish our town from the other ones, and also we're on the Moors, as in that's where all the fires were. The Moors. Funny, he was trying to bolt on an extra bit of the name. Was he successful? No, it's still called Bolton, isn't it? Surely Bolton is the most famous Bolton.

I don't mean any disrespect to other Bolton's around the world, but... Oh, yeah, Michael. Famously, people are always getting confused between the town. misdirected mail from an entire town to his house every day there's a city Topeka we've all heard of Topeka so it's in Kansas and it's the capital of the state it's no it's no you know no slouch it's no slouch it's no slough

but it changed its name to Google for a month legally and officially Topeka did yeah and it was to win a Google high-speed internet project which would have given everyone internet 100 times faster than the national average at the time. No one would ever be able to search for them online, would they? You break the internet if you Google, Google. Well, it didn't work.

No. Google went with Kansas City, Kansas instead. But the mayor, he said he didn't really mind not winning, and he said, I've often wondered what difference does it make if it takes you 10 seconds or one second to access information. My life goes a little slower than that. Oh. Yeah, he's a very lame back guy.

But it's not the first time they changed the name. In 1998, Topeka changed its name, and one of you will really like this fact. They changed it to Topeka. Pikachu. Because Pokemon arrived in the USA, yeah. Love it. Wow. On Modesto, it's the second unhappiest city in the United States of America.

What? Yeah. Wow. The city's motto is water, wealth, contentment, health. And that was selected in a contest in 1911, where the winner won $3 as a prize. Yeah. And just to say, Rolston, wasn't just this local banker.

Oh, the man who the town was not named after. Exactly. Rolston was, he was one of the most rich people in California, actually, and he founded the Bank of California. So he was a very important guy in his day. He didn't like to talk about it.

I really had to dig deep to find that. There's a town in California called Secret Town. Is there? And why is it called that? Do we know? I can't tell you that. I genuinely know nothing about it. There's nothing in the world. Wikipedia page. It's two-line Wikipedia page article, that's it.

Okay, that's it. That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter accounts. I'm on at Schreiberland. Andy? At Andrew Hunter M. James. At James Harkin. And Alex. Alex Bell. That's right. And you can also go to our group account at No Such Thing. Or you can go to our Facebook page. No Such Thing is a Fish or our website. No Such Such. thing as a fish.com. We have everything up there from our previous episodes to links to our upcoming live shows to our books. We've got a new book coming out, which you can probably pre-order at this point. We also have our great documentary series that we put up on iTunes called Behind the Gills. It's on a few other platforms. There'll be a link there, follows us around on our last tour

of the UK. You can get it in America, can you? Yeah, it's in America now as well, which is very exciting. Probably if you're in Modesto, you can probably download it. No. We'll be back again next week. We'll see you then. Goodbye.