No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As The Mice Of The Fruit Bowl

Episode Date: July 30, 2026

Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss stress, sentences and supermarkets.  Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes. Join Club Fish for ad-free episodes and exclusive bonus content at apple.co/nosuchthingasafish or nosuchthingasafish.com/patreonEdited by James HarkinProduced by Leying LeeTeam includes Tara Dorrell, Joe Mayo and Ethan Ruparelia

Hi, everybody, Anna and Dan here with some very exciting live show news. Now, unfortunately, some of us are too lazy to commit to doing a real, full-on tour of the UK before Christmas, speaking about yours truly. But that doesn't mean you can't get your fish fix because Dan, you're not too lazy, turns out. Yeah, I'm going to be on tour, everyone, around the UK. I'm doing my first solo tour in over a decade. And it is going to be such an awesome night. It's called This Changes Everything.

If you've heard my weird redstring theories, my Dan's own obsessiveness of connecting everything, this is a show that is perfect for you. It's going to be full of mind-waping facts. It's going to have jokes. It's going to have scary bits, goosebumps moments. Please come along.

Yes, do. Please make it worthwhile the fact that Dan's entire house is smothered with weird sketches and strings and drawings freaking out the rest of his family and any guests who come along. He has actually told me a couple of the extraordinary kind of plots he's weaving through this show. And I've got to say, it's draw-dropping stuff. You've got to go. And how can people go?

So, if you want to come along, I'm playing places all over the UK. I'm going to be starting October the 11th in Edinburgh, then Newcastle, Birmingham, Cardiff. And then in November, I'm going to be doing Manchester, Liverpool, Cambridge, Oxford, Norwich, York, Hastings, Brighton, Lester, Bristol, Exeter. there's so many places. All you need to do is go to this changes everything.com.com. To get your tickets, these are really cozy venues. It's like 20 quid a ticket. I'm going to hang around after every show. So if you want to say hi, just come along. So just one more time. Tickets are at this changes everything.com.com. UK or just go to my Instagram bio. You'll find a link there. 18 dates. Hopefully I can see you at one of them. Do it. It's a once a decade experience,

the Dan Shriver, live experience. See if he even remembers which way to face when he's on stage. Go now. Check this guy out. And for now, on with this show. On with the podcast. Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Hoburn. My name is Dan Schreiber. I am sitting here with Anna Tyshinsky, James Harkin, and Andrew Hunter Murray. And once again, we have gathered round the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days. And in a particular order, here we go. Starting with fact number one, and that is Andy. My fact is, the biggest supermarket in Europe has 12 people whose entire job is to sort out coat hangers.

Give me a break. 12 people? Yeah. 40 hours a week. Yeah. Come on. It's so big. That's the thing.

It's biggie. It's so big. How big, Andy? What do you mean? The supermarket? Go to the coat hangers. How big are they? Okay.

So this came from a brilliant article. by a journalist called Ralph Jones who went to Gekas Ulared which is a Swedish supermarket and it's a one-off right? It's not a chain across the world and its total area including

the warehouse bit is 114,000 square metres which is 20 Trafalgar squares it's one and a half Buckingham palaces it is the biggest tourist attraction in Sweden it gets four Give me a break What?

What about the house where Abba used to live? That's not even second Is it? Yeah, no. The Viking Museum we went to doesn't even get close to it. That's a museum? Yeah. The ship, that's a 17th century ship, which sank on its maiden voyage.

That's the second place, but it's second by a long distance. But it's, like, stats are pretty amazing. I think my favorite one is that every day, staff can fill about 400 trolleys of items that customers have just discarded in different bits of the shop to make their return journey to where they actually belong. 400 trolleys worth every single day. How many people must be employed full time to fill up and move those trolleys? Is it more or fewer than the co-hangers?

We don't know. That's a good point. They have like a 10,000 item off you were. Yeah. This place has its own reality TV show and I thought, oh, well, often they'll do a little tie-in TV show. This thing has had 11 series. It's incredibly popular.

It's the most watch program on Sweden's Channel 5. So just to say, is this in Stockholm? You said it was in Sweden, but... It's not in Stockholm, no, it's called Ulered. It's a town which is, I think, quite far out. If you were driving, it's about a five-hour journey, I would say, roughly, by car, yeah. It does seem to be in the middle of nowhere. Yeah, the town next door has a few thousand people,

and this supermarket gets four million visitors every year. I mean, it just... I think they're okay with it, but it is crazy. It seems to be quite beloved. It is. He's like being a resident of Venice living in that town. You know, and you feel like it was a beautiful thing that's been destroyed by... descending.

Oh. I quite like, I looked into it. They do have a smaller supermarket in the town as well that they can use. I just wonder how much action that gets versus the vain one. I absolutely think I would only go to the small. Yeah, yeah, no, exactly. If you need a pint of milk, you're not going to go to the world's largest supermarket. Unless you want to get your 10,000 steps up, bread is another 14 miles away.

I always wonder about those, because you hear that places use tactics, like almost like casinos used, you know, where casinos, won't show you daylight, they won't ever allow clocks, they will confuse you about what direction you're facing. They'll do all these clever psychological tricks to keep you gambling. Give you a load of booze. Give you a lot of booze. That's it. And I just wonder what supermarkets do. Well, I know, for instance, some of them will pipe out the smell of fresh bread. Yes. Aren't they? Because it'll make you hungry and make you want to buy things. There's also stuff about they know which direction people turn when you go into a supermarket. Quite often, in a

supermarket they'll put the bread as far away as you can so you have to walk because everyone is going to buy bread so you have to walk all the way over to get the bread past all the other good stuff yeah and they have vegetables right as you go in because that makes you think I'm in a healthy place and it's got the sound that they do they often play slow music to make your pace slow down and if you play french music around by baguettes and garlic they buy French wine give me a break yeah they'd say the more likely to buy French wine if you play German music they're more likely to buy German products, like maybe a beer.

Does it have to be classically French music like accordions and classically German like, umpah? Yeah, exactly. Superstores out of town were quite controversial when they started, because the idea was that... Yeah, they still are. Yeah, the idea was that they were destroying in-town supermarkets, which were smaller, all traditional grocery shops. And then, of course, all the little grocery shops have gone out of business, and now the superstores have moved back into town doing, you know,

go Metro or whatever. Right. So they've done that. But the first one was in Nottinghamshire in 1964, and it was called the windowless store. That's how it advertised itself. Because they didn't need to do shop displays to get you in, because you're already in the shop.

I see. Windowless in that way. It's still not good marketing. I think for me, a windowless store is going to be very off-putting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're right, you're right, you're right. Also, if you want to buy some windows. Yeah.

No, sorry, we're a windowless store. I never go to Tesco for my window, so to be fair. But the shopping centres, like Andy said, they got people out of the town centres. And that's why if you go to any town centre in the north of England, there's just babe shops and betting shops. Also because of the internet, sadly. Also because of internet. But also, can I say because of feminism?

Oh, well, we have a lot to answer for. Okay. Floor is yours, Andy. Please. This is really interesting. So it is slightly to do with increasing employment for women, especially after the second World War, right? Which is when you're starting to get the rise of the supermarkets. So more women are going out to work. And that means that families no longer rely on one person in the household

being at home and therefore being able to go out and shop every day for that evening's meal. Suddenly, people are at work and they're needing to do a weekly shop. And that means bigger shops. So there's more of an appeal there. And the other thing is that people are getting fridges due to labor-saving devices due to feminism. And that means that you can store more of your food, of course. And so you're much more tempted to say, right, I'll just go to the Mega Mart, you know, of a weekend and do my shop there. Yeah. I'm sorry, we're to blame for the fridge and so much more.

What can I say? I found a similar supermarket to this one, but that I think is my favourite called Jungle Gyms International Market. Do you guys know this? So this has a claim to be the largest supermarket in the world. It's in Fairfield, Ohio And it's a really good American dream story Because it was set up by a guy called Jim Bonomino In 1971,

who literally borrowed someone's truck for the weekend To have a fruit and veg stall in a parking lot. Worked 21-hour days and showered under a hose pipe That was in the car park. And now it's this gigantic, you know, maybe the biggest supermarket in the world. Over six acres has America's biggest wine selection. It's got live seafood tanks in it.

but he's so great. I've read an interview with him by the Wall Street Journal and he came down dressed as a wizard and the interviewer said did you wear that because he knew you were being interviewed and he said,

no, I calmed it down a bit for you usually I'd wear something much weirder and he was just mad like at one point that interviewer said perhaps the most important question maybe the hardest question of all and he said hold on we're onto the hardest question let me get out my crystal ball

and got an actual crystal ball out from under the table and he just think he needs to brand better Because that's not what someone who lives in a jungle would do. I feel like he should have come to the interview swinging down on a vine with like tidy, their skin trunks on. Maybe he does that for the New York Times. But they sell incredible stuff. They've got a whole aisle of adult-oriented hot sauces.

Goats' heads and pig's heads they sell. And just in full packaging, full pig's head, just staring up at you. An eight-foot-long gummy snake in the sweet section. Could you eat that? For sure. I love gummies. Eight-foot long. could eat? Well, what's the girth?

It's a millimetre. You're fine. You actually get less gummy than in a normal one. That is big. That is big. It's a big gummy snake. I think James could do it. I've seen him on tour. It would be like an actual snake eating, because you'd have to just open your mouth and stuff it in and then sit there for

a month waiting for it to die. You're the gummy deer who's eating the gummy snake. It's a nice reversy-percy. Lovely. When was the first self-checkout opened? What year? Quiz time? 1956. The first...

4,000 BC. It's a palpable disappointment on Andy's face. 2010. Oh, Adam. You idiot. It's 1986. I was surprised than an electronic self-checkout, which I only really became aware of in about 2010.

Where was it? Georgia. Georgia. Oh, I don't know. The supermarket. The ex-Sylviet country. by the sound of your accent. That's right, Stalin's Homeland.

No, sorry, Georgia in America. That is surprising. Yeah. But the reason they're not good, self-checkouts, is that if you're involved in a transaction, it seems to you to go faster. And this is a psychological thing called weight warping. Yeah.

You know, if I'm having to hand over the stuff, then... Yeah, if I'm putting through my pot pies and I'm trying to make it beep and it doesn't beep and I do it five times and it's still not beeping. I get a little bit annoyed but if someone else is doing that I'm like come on with it. Yes, you're right and in fact it's a reason why it's good

to use a self-checkout because it goes faster for you. Yes, yes, yes, sorry. Very cool. But we don't actually have them because it seems faster for us. We have them so that the supermarkets don't have to employ any humans. That's amazing. That's very cynical. I'm dreadfully sorry.

I would say there's another contender for first self-checkout which we've actually never talked about before, but we've talked about the inventor. 1956? You're really close. It's 1937. And it's found by Clarence Saunders. And if you guys remember him,

invented Piggly Wiggly, which is a supermarket that we talked about. He invented Piggly Wiggly Wiggly in 1916. So Piggly Wiggly was like the first store where you went in with a trolley and put stuff in your trolley, right? Yeah, or a basket. The first self-service. So usually you'd have, you'd meet the member of staff

and then you'd say what you wanted and the staff would go and get it for you. And Piggly Wiggly Wiggly was like, you know what, the people could pick their items themselves. It was an amazing idea. Incredible idea. And everyone hasted because it felt to them like they were shoplifting. Oh, I thought that's why people might like it. It's a bit of a treat.

I think at the start, people rebelled against it a little bit and thought this is ridiculous. They did keep forgetting to pay. But do you know what inspired him to create Piggly Wiggly? What? He was looking out of a train one day and he saw some pigs rushing towards a trough. And he thought, wow, what a metaphor. Maybe those pigs could be the people in my shop. I think is the idea.

And then this guy went on a few years later and... Yes, and he made Caduzal, which some people think stands for or meant key does it all, which makes sense because it was fully automated in that you went into the grocery shop and everything was under these sort of like glass domes. And you had your own key and when you got to an item you wanted, you inserted a key in a slot and the key had a ticker tape on it. And you go around inserting your key into lots of different slots saying, I want this object, I want this object.

And then you took it to the till and you gave it to a person who inserted your ticker tape into a machine, which then could see all the things you'd said you wanted. And then the machine automatically went and picked up your groceries and slid it down a conveyor belt towards you. It was fantastic. Did he get this idea from seeing a load of pigs using a vending machine? He did, yeah. And much like the pigs using a vending machine, it didn't work very well. He's an amazing innovator. He was just missing one person, really.

in his life and that's someone who could think of a decent name. That's clearly... Do you think that was the problem? Pigly Wiggly. What's the other? Kundozoosal? Koodooz. I think the problem was that everyone got the wrong stuff all the time because he didn't

quite perfect it, which is annoying, but in a shop. So, coat hangers. Oh. Who invented them? Someone you've heard of. George Coat hanger. Ben Franklin. Someone famous.

Ben Franklin is about as close as you're going to get. Thomas Jefferson. Correct. No. According to the Paris Museum of Fashion, he invented them. Although, according to the Monticello website, which was his home, there's no evidence that he invented them at all. But for sure, we invented coat hangers sometime in the 18th century, but they didn't catch on. And it wasn't until the 1850s that they became popular thanks to Friend of the Podcast, the burgeoning middle class.

We've got to get them on the next Friend of the Podcast TV. and the disappearance of domestic servants. So it meant that people were buying more clothes and they had to put them somewhere and they didn't have someone to iron them. Then the wire coat hanger was invented by someone called Albert J. Parkhouse in 1903 and he was working in a wire company.

They made like novelty wires, it said. But the company didn't have enough coat hooks for people to put their coats on. And so he took a discarded piece of wire from the machinery and turned it into the shape with someone's shoulders and said we could do this. But according to his granddaughter, who's called Barbara Muscle, he didn't make any money from it because the company took the patent,

sold a gazillion wirecoat hand with us, and he never made a penny. Right. He was muscled out. Yeah, as the name of his granddaughter's husband, presumably, came at that wedding. He must have heard the name of that guy and thought, oh my God, this puts my whole life into perspective. Do you miss the muscle?

He's busy potting the altar. I think though some inventions are so good that you shouldn't be able to patent them. As in if we had to pay a quarter of a penny to the guy who invented the coat hanger every time we bought one. I mean technically you do. That's how capitalism works.

Well, I don't pay anything for my co-hanger, so I get the free from the dry cleaner. Stop stealing them. I get mine free from hotels, but it's really annoying because they don't have the hook bet on the time. You've got to take the whole wardrobe with you. It's complete pain in the ass.

Okay, it's time for fact number two, and that is Anna. My fact this week is that the latest winner of the Nobel Prize in literature wrote a novel in 2024 that was one sentence long. Is that a shot? Yeah, that's all you need to do to get it. Just write a sentence. No, it was actually a really long sentence. It was 400 pages long, more than 400 pages.

Yeah. This is a guy called Lashelow, Crack. I'm Ashina Hawkeye. He's Hungarian. I haven't read anything of him. My brother's read a couple says he is a challenge. I've read a few pages of one of his books this week. Oh yeah. And it's dense. It's hard going. Even just looking at it, it's like blocks of text. Yeah. And the one that I read, which is called Satan Tango, does have quite a lot of sentences in it, but they are all very long. That's actually the one I think my brother likes. Yeah. It's objectively good. The idea seemed good. I picked one up this morning and there's one

called Hirscht 07769. And it opens with him the character writing a letter to the Chancellor, Angela Merkel, because he's convinced the Big Bang is going to be reversed. So this is the one that's the one long sentence. And apparently the opening, if that was what you read, it starts, hope is a mistake. And I think this might be his...

That's a sentence. I believe it then goes on. I don't think there's a full stop at the end. I think it's hope is a mistake and blah blah blah. He just uses the word and a lot. Also, semicolons cover a multitude of sins. They do, although I don't. I don't know how many semicolonies he's using, and he says it's because he wants to mimic human speech.

Which I think is a very good and interesting point. People don't speak in short declarative sentences. Usually they pause, they deliberate, their words flow. You see, I'm doing it now. And he composes it all in his head, and then he only writes it down when he's ready, which I think is crazy. What? That must be so hard. I don't think the whole novel.

But, yeah, right. The feeling of it. He has something in common with the man who invented. Piggily Wiggly. Okay. Okay. He was inspired for his first novel by a load of pigs in a field. Yes.

No. Yes. Really? Wow. Oh, my God. So he had a load of jobs. He grew up in Hungary, Cold War Hungary. And he had a load of different jobs.

He was a minor for a while. We were all a minor for a while. What I would walk into these stupid jokes? Stupid jokes. No, that's a spirit. And he thanks to the encouragement. He, and then he was a night watchman for a herd of cows briefly. And then he got...

What? I mean, that's not a job. No farmers asked him to do that. Farmer comes in, yeah, they'd be better sleep all night. Okay, look at it. It's no podcaster, but it was with the work that was going in Soviet Hungary. Better enough. And then he got a job working on a farm, holding piglets in place to be castrated.

Oh. And he just said this was a horrible job. They would have been wiggly pigglies. They would have been wiggly pigglies. And he realized he sympathized very deeply with these piglets, these poor piglets, which are being, you know, losing their knackers. And he said he wanted to write about the world in a deep way as a result of that job. Wow.

Yeah. We get to read him because of his translators, right? And he's had a few. But the most recent one is this lady called Otile Mulsett. But she seems to be just his general translator because Anna, the article that you sent to us, which was a New Yorker article that had to. his story. All of his answers were translated by her. So even his interviews are translated by Otterley. And she says sometimes it can take up to three years to translate because you're

translating a single sentence. You need to make it work. And it's really dense and it's really hard. But not surely not an interview for the New Yorker where they've got to go to press at the end of the week actually. Honestly, I honestly give me three years. Honestly, the interview is like as long as one of his books and as intense. One of the opening questions, the interviewer talks about his Nobel Prize speech. And he says, you thanked your brother, your older brother, for lifting you on his shoulders when you were children because he taught you that there could be another way of looking at the world. What did you see up there? And he said, at first, nothing. My older brother got angry at me because up there, on his shoulders, something frequently happened in my little trousers.

It was not so pleasant for my brother. He would shake me in his anger and then I couldn't see too much of the world. Now that we're both very old, I asked how awful it was for him. He says, I still feel it. The urine trickling down his neck. I think we're talking about a hardened state. Oh, are we?

Because I thought urine at first. Oh, are you sure it's not urine? Wow. I've got to see my shrink. I'll just book that. You guys keep talking. I'll just sort of... Wittany's dog?

Hey, uh. This happened again. Don't worry we edit the show. It's fine. I'm sure James will help. me out tomorrow is good. My mum's fine, yeah. No, she's great.

Looking hot as Amher. Okay. See, bye ya. Sorry, guys. When you said he thanked his brother for lifting him up on his shoulders so he could see the world, I assumed, of course, that was a metaphor. But then if you say, and I pissed on his shoulders, all worse while I was up there. No, it actually is lifting me up on his shoulder so I could.

Because, you know, what, I've been standing on the shoulders of giants. I assumed for years that that was a metaphor. No, it's not. No. No. No. No. No.

News and literally got piggybacks from everyone in the scientific establishment. Anyway, long sentences. Yeah, long sentences. What I quite like is all the record holders for long sentences aren't like silly gimmicky people. They're great writers like Faulkner held the record for a long time. He got the Guinness World Record in 1983. James Joyce did a lot of long sentences. He did, but not as long as Faulk was in Absalom, Absalom.

I'll tell you what. He nearly got a long sentence after the, you know, sanity trial and so on under which Heweses was banned in the early 20s. Good one. Good one. Tough to Google long sentences, isn't it, when you're doing research? Because you get a lot of penal stuff. Not that kind of. That's a lot of. Anyway, in Fogner, 128 words, that was the longest sentence in literature in Absalom, Absalom, which I haven't actually read. But just thinking of postmodern literary techniques,

one of my favorite books is his Sound and the Fury, where he wanted it to be printed in lots of different colors. Have you guys ever read it? No. It's incredible, but it's quite unclear who's narrating it sometimes. There's like a tangle of narrations. And he wanted... He should write, said, George. If only he thought of that.

I don't want to give too many tips to the greats, but sometimes... No, I wish you were still alive to hear... To hear your suggestion, he wanted all the different people to have the font in different colours. And finally, they couldn't afford the publishing cost at the time, but they released a special edition a few years ago, which I now own of William Faulkner. sound and the fury and all the different colors of the rainbow. And does it assist the reading experience?

I guess it makes it clearer. Yes, it does. Wow. Sentences are getting shorter. Are they? Yeah. Just in that little conversation or more generally. So this is in New York Times bestsellers.

There was a great piece in The Economist, analysing sentence length between 100 years ago and now. And sentences have lost one third of their weight, their heft. They've gone from about 22 words on average. to 15. And Victorian sentences were thumpingly long. You read a Victorian novel. The sentences are just longer. There's more being

expressed in each individual. It's Hemingway, isn't it? What did it? Yes. And Orwell. Bloody Hemingway. But wasn't it true? Like, have we said this before that Hemingway supposedly lost one of his transcripts, but needed to deliver it like two weeks later?

And so I had to rewrite the thing. And then thought, oh my God, I'm not going to be able to write it the way it was. I'm just going to write really short sentences because it's easier. I can't remember any of the adjectives or adverbs are used, so I'm just going to strip all of those out. It's just the man hunted the fish.

I'll do those later. He sent that off to his publishers and like, I'm going to send the adjectives in a second package in case they get lost. I feel like that's at least a story that's told about him. I have heard that. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But yes, they have. Although I wonder about other languages because all these studies are always done about the English language. And it's very hard to research other languages. All I could find is, speculation that French actually the sentences haven't really got shorter and actually in literature

they're getting longer. Some people were saying but it's hard to work it out. Yeah. The Nobel Prize for literature, there's a fantastic list obviously on Wikipedia where you can see every winner and there's a photo with every winner as well and that is so worth looking at because the first like six or seven people all of them somehow look like a dog that's been shampooed and blow dried. Their hair is just, it's Marvelous. Yeah, highly recommend going to look at it. Were you not looking at the winner of Crofts? I did have that tab open at the same time. I'll go back in look. The early days, Sully Prudholm is the first winner. I personally have never heard of Sully. I only know them as the first winner of the Nobel Prize literature. And there's a lot of, there was a lot of controversy, as far as I can tell.

There was a lot of newspapers saying, where's Tolstoy, you know, at the time? And why did this guy get it? And I think the prizes have always had that. But then we do have big names that you would recognize. There's Samuel Beckett, of course. Waiting for Godot was his big play, but he wrote novels as well. And one of them was called How It Is. It has no punctuation.

And the entire story is a guy just trawling through mud, trying to just get somewhere and remembering his old life. Sounds awesome. Sounds fantastic. I do think sometimes would it kill them to give it to a mystery or a thriller writer? You know, just to someone who's done a really good crime reveal. Stephen King.

Where's his, yeah. Like, where's the Nobel, you know, for... It's Nobel. Where's the Agatha Christie Nobel for literature? Like, that was a cracking plot where actually it was his brother all along. Yeah. But he thought he was lost at sea, but actually he was found in a mine, you know. They can win other prizes.

But this is for high literature, right? 2017, I reckon you're like, Andy. It was Ishiguru. Kazuwa Ishiguru. And he wrote, what was his book? The Remains of the Day. Yeah. Amazing of the day.

Incredible book, right? Wonderful books. So he did win it. Do you know what he did before he got into books? Ishigaro. Yeah. Pig karma. I don't remember.

In coat, doesn't tangle in coat hangers. He was a grouse beater for the queen mother at Pal Moral. That's disgusting. Now, four American listeners, we should say. No, great. Grouse hurt. Well, actually, lots of grouse get hurt really badly, but not through the beating. Well, that's the start of it. So you're, you're scaring them to fly up in the air and then they get shot. And then they get shot. And then they get shot. But you're beating the, the, whatever it is. The bush.

Beating the bush. You're beating about the bush. You're beating the undergrowth that they're in to scare them up. To scare them up. Sorry, Casuala Ishigura was a grouse beater. For the queen mother. Yeah, that makes me re-evaluate Casver Ishigua. I have to say. Why? I don't know. I didn't know who's from that kind of stock. I don't think Is the grouse beat are usually one of the

Royal family? It's usually the Earl of our guile or something who they said in it but it's not no not remotely do you not think

you'd be quite posh to be beating the Queen Mother's Grouse I can't we get right now so layered

and innuendo but what are we really talking about speaking of of like the history of some Nobel

Prize winners Gabriel Gassia Marquez who wrote 100 years of solitude as well as many other things

but that's the main one do you know what his favourite song was Mambo number five is correct what? No but not that version 100% yeah

oh yes Anna's right the Lou Bega or the original it was the original the Paris brand of but wait that's only because Marquez probably didn't live to hear

the Lou Bega version which is infinitely superior oh no the Bob the Builder version that's the the height Well, did you know, where it goes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 it actually goes all the way up to 100

and then years of solitude. No. So when he, in his memoir, he wrote about when he was a young man, he lived in a brothel in Baranquia and that's when he learned to write and he would dance the night away and he keeps saying that his favourite song

is Man Bob No. 5. Stunning. Play Perez Prado. Really good. Stunning. If you lived in a brothel, you probably would have a little. A little bit of moniker in your life, a little bit of Jessica by your side.

Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that zebras don't get ulcers, but zebrafish might. Mouth ulcers or stomach? We're talking stomach ulcers. But I'm going to roll back on this all quite quickly. Okay. Okay, so this is about a paper that I read from the journal Brain Behaviors. Evolution by Bianca Fusani and Rui F. Oliviera.

And their title refers to a book called Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers by Robert Sapolsky. And he says that animals don't get chronic stress because if you're a deer being attacked by cheetah, you get really, really stressed for a few seconds. But then afterwards you kind of forget about it. Right. And then you might get stressed again and then you forget about it. But you don't worry. You know, the Nassi was lying awake at night thinking, I'm really hoping.

Exactly. Whereas humans, when we make a very, very minor faux par, we lie in bed at night thinking, oh my God, what did I do? Or when we know we've got something coming up, we worry about it. And that's a chronic stress, which people used to think caused ulcers. And now we know it doesn't cause ulcers, but does exacerbate them. And so the paper was actually about zebrafish, and whether zebrafish do get chronic stress. and they are arguing that they do

and they use this whole zebras don't get ulcers because it's a famous book they use that as the title of their And is it like a self-help book? Is it saying, well look, zebras don't get stressed? Exactly. There's no reason for you to. Be more zebra.

Zebra. Zebra fish are amazing, by the way. Sure are. They are known as the mice of water because basically scientists are able to do so much testing on them because they've got 70% genetic similarity to humans.

So we have used them in so many different ways in order to learn about ourselves in the way that we use mice. That's pretty amazing. You know when people say that, we know that we've got 60% genetic similarity to bananas, right? Yeah. So when people are like, oh, they're 70%... But they're known as the mice of the fruit bowl. That's true. That's true.

But no, they're kind of, not just genetically, their kind of body is built quite similar to us. So the heart is quite similar. Their brains are quite similar. Inside. From the outside, they don't look that similar. No. But on the inside. smaller.

And also they're really useful because they lay transparent eggs and they have transparent larvae, right? Which seems to be quite a key thing. So it means that researchers don't need to get x-ray vision to watch what's happening inside them when they test them. So they'll give them an infection and you can just use a telescope. A telescope or a microscope? That's where the eggs are.

They always send them to the moon actually to do the studies. Well you say it's just in the larvae, but this is one of the extraordinary things about the zebrafish. We have genetically modified the fish to create a new fish, which is a new fish. called the Casper fish. The Casper fish, I guess like the friendly ghost, it's seethru. So they've basically mutated two different genes so that as they get into adulthood, they stay transparent. And so you can see their heartworking presumably. That's amazing. Is it a camouflage thing for the eggs to be transparent? I think I read that,

that it's useful so that other fish can't see your eggs as easily and eat them. Makes sense. Yeah. You're invisible, aren't you? Yeah. Oh, God, that makes it even worse then. that we've created out of zebrafish, another new type of fish, the glowfish. Have you seen the glowfish? No. Okay, so basically scientists were taking green phosphorus and protein out of things like jellyfish, and they were putting it into zebrafish. And what it meant was, if you turn out the lights, they glow, right?

And this has changed everything, if any of them go back into the wild, for the fact that they can't hide anymore because they're literally a beacon of light in the ocean. I can't believe they put them back in the water. That seems mad. You shouldn't do that. I think they wouldn't, but they do put them in fish tanks because they sell them commercially. So if you happen to have another fish that was a bit predatorial, even in the fish tank, it's got no chance of hiding. I can't even hide in the little castle or the skull.

I also think if you have two fish and one of them is a predator of the other, probably keep them in two bowls. Yeah? Yeah. If you've got a lionfish and you've got a zebra fish, it will end very poorly. It's all good. But a lot of people don't do their research. It's mad that this exists, I think. think it harms the fish itself, but you can get them in starfish red, moonrise pink, sunburst

orange. There's a whole, yeah, it's a frankensteiny, isn't it? It's very, yeah, it's very odd. I definitely know people who've had aquarium fish where they get a bunch of aquarium fish and one fish eats all the others. I think that it might be quite a common mistake that fish buyers get. So yes, do your research. It's a common mistake that fish sellers sound like they're making. Yes, you're right. It's not a mistake for them. They get to sell five more fish when the other ones get eaten. It's a racket. So zebrafish, whether they get stressed or not, when they're attacked and they get stressed for that reason, they will swim into a nice warm area of water. And this is really interesting. It's basically they call it an emotional fever. So your body can metabolize things better when you're warmer.

And that's why when you are sick, you get a fever because your body heats up and a lot of the mechanisms that will help you get better, work better. But what they do, because they can't increase their own temperature, they'll swim. into a warm a bit of water, which heats up their entire body and then can speed up like the tissues being repaired and stuff like that. Wow. Isn't that cool? So they make their own fever when they're stressed. Wow.

That's why you should we in the bath if you're ill. Yes. You'll get better faster. Or if your child is feeling sick, just sit another child on top of their head and allow them to wee on them. They test antidepressants on them. So they do get depressed. And this is because zebrafish.

zebrafish get depressed, yes. And you can tell if a fish is depressed because it swims lower down in its tank. And that's literally the way. So you can tell if antidepressant is working that you've tried on it because it suddenly starts swimming high up in the tank. And do you know how they get them depressed in the first place?

Is it reading the works of Lazlo-Kraslo-Korkeye? It is, yeah. It's more basic than that. They get them drunk and then they let them have a hangover. They feed them alcohol for a few weeks and then they cut off their supply. Wow. And then they get really depressed. That's amazing.

You know they've been flying the space since the 70s? On their own? Mm-hmm. Nope. With astronauts. The mice of space. The mice of space. They kind of are.

They kind of are, Andy. Yeah. Yeah. Because in 2024, four zebrafish were up in space. That was one of the most, there might have been one mission since, but this is the most notable one recently because they survived 43 days. The longest any fish has ever survived in space. They went through a huge selection process.

So these four were whittled down from 200 candidates and managed to get up there. Wow. They don't live long. So for them, 43 days is about four years in space. Oh, wow. So that's how we see the change in what's going on with them. So they're very useful. But then, this is a bit shocking, they don't bring them back.

They just pop him in a sort of... Not out of the airlock. Or they put them in some kind of container and they just let it burn up on entry back into Earth. Oh, me. Yeah, at the very least, stick them in a saucepan, which you hang out of the spaceship. What, so that they float away? No, so you'll have a delicious fish supper by the time you get, you land. Oh, nice.

Sorry. Right. And these things are about three centimetres in land. They're not in the case. Yeah. But the better than mice in space in theory, because they don't have solid poos that go rolling around everywhere or floating around everywhere, and they don't have gas that escapes the fish bowl. So apparently they're just a better. They must have some kind of poo, though.

Yeah. Yeah. Why would mice... Sorry, are you saying mice farts are problems in space? Big problem if you've not read all the news recently. What's happening? The ISS is floating further and further away.

Even if they did have solid poos, they're living in water, right? The poos are going to be in the water. They're not going to disappear around the space station. Yeah, yeah. And you figured the mice would be in a container as well that would mean it wouldn't escape. So what's going on, NASA?

A lot of questions. A lot of questions I actually had an insanely stressful moment Just before coming into the office today I was getting on the tube And there was a 70 year old man on a wheelchair And he was He was his birthday

He had a balloon He had a badge And He got off the tube The door's closed But the balloon was stuck inside And he just Blue

Down the It was worse for me than him. I'll go to tell you. I can't do with that. No, he was in a wheelchair. He looked roughly 70 years old, and we came up to the escalator, and I went down. I thought, oh, there's a lift over there, but he thinks it might be here. And then I was watching him, and he turned around.

Oh, crubs. And he went backwards down the escalate. It was amazing. Yeah, he put two hands on each of the other side. Oh, wow. Yeah, I seen that. Yeah. And I was watching the big wheel, and it looked like it was teetering over the edge.

And the stress was. Actually, less, are you going to hurt yourself? Because I assume he knew what he was doing. But if he did fall, I was in his path. You'd be like Indiana Jones. Is that a scene in Indiana Jones? With the giant ball coming chasing him, but it would be an exactly 70-year-old man.

No, real, Jen. Oh, it was horrible. I mean, stress is a fascinating feeling because you get over it. By the time I was off the escalator, it was gone. I can't believe this. I can't believe you of Crowbar, that anecdote. It just happened to me. It's so relevant.

A life experience just before we talk about stress. I'm not going to bring it up. Can't believe you were stressed by that. And also your takeaways, stress just disappears, isn't it? Straight away. I think I was saying it doesn't. Well, that was Dan's equivalent of being chased by a lion. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. No, you've treated stress like we're supposed to rather than holding onto it. I've got a question. Did you, when you got that sort of stress hormone in your body? Yeah. Did you do the fight or the flight? Because that's what happens. Right? You know, that's the idea.

Did you punch him in the face? That's the idea invented by a guy called Walter Cannon. Sounds so much like water cannon. Just with an extra L. But now these days, we've gone from the 2Fs to the 6Fs. So you can have fight, flight, freeze, fawn, fine or faint. It sounds like you had fine. Fine.

As in it was fine. It was fine. It was fine. It was fine. Fawn as in bowing and scraping and apologising. Yeah, so, yeah, exactly. It's like when you're in a stressful situation, rather than running or fighting,

you try and almost calm things down and threaten the person. That's my method. And then Fane is like you pretend you're okay, presumably. But what's fine? Faint, it was. Oh, faint. With an A or an A?

With an A. So it's like you just collapse as if almost good. Is that a useful response? Well, people do do that if you're in very stressful situation. you might just go completely catatonic and not respond to it kind of thing. But these feel like really not useful. Like fight or flight is a useful thing

if you've got a lion attacking you, but is it useful to collapse or to say I'm fine? Yeah. You're playing dead, I suppose. Yeah. And fine is just ignoring the problem, which there are definitely adaptive reasons for that. Yeah.

Yeah. We have the most amazing way of measuring stress levels now. So, as we've said, raised cortisol is stress. I could find out from, James, how stressed you've been at different times of the year over the past year? Okay, how? Can you do it on me now?

I need some equipment and I need to be a scientist. I'm not bending over for that. Come on. Is it a part of James that it's been left in? Yes. And you can actually tell much better on me. You could tell a much longer period of time on me. Oh, is it my breast milk?

You're not producing much these days, are you? I'm very stressed. So I suppose I'll kill this guessing game quickly. Yes, please. I have longer hair than you guys. Cortisol goes into our hair. The way now that scientists study stress levels and what causes human stress is they look at their hair and the cortisol levels. And you can see it's a bit like ice cores are used to tell Kline it over time.

And you can see about a period of 12 months. And so, you know, they've studied, for instance, the fact that people's stress levels peak in winter, we know. And if they take hair from people who live in nice equatorial countries, there's not nearly as much cortisol in the winter segment of their hair, which was growing in winter, compared to in Norway, for instance, where there's much more stress. And that's like how lots of tropical trees don't actually have very strong rings in the middle. It's just like that.

Because they've got the same climate all year round. These people are the tropical trees of the human world. That is crazy. Isn't that so cool? So, yeah, I could just pluck a hair from your head and tell you that three months ago, you were really stressed about something. It was probably my hair transplant. But that's a good point.

This isn't working out of here. So I'm thinking I keep plugging my hairs out. It doesn't go into all your hairs. No, just one. No, but if they... It takes ages to find it. I'm just thinking about other parts of the body. I'm thinking because I don't know,

I don't know if they used your ass hair for the thing. Well, have a look. What do you think? It's very luxurious. And now have a look at this. You did bend over. Okay, it's time for our final fact of the show, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that the world record holder of most bug tattoos is terrified of bugs.

That's so silly. Yeah, why's he done that? She's just trying to increase the stress levels. Yeah, exactly. I mean, he's got 864 insects tattoos. on his body. Not all bugs, by the way. So when they were doing the Guinness World Records count, they had to discount a bunch because they were... Arachnids. There were millipedes on there. They don't count. So it's a... Come on. That's what it is. I think a bug has to have like

sucking mechanism or something. Like there's quite a lot of things that you would think are bugs and not bugs. Like if you asked Erica McAllister, for instance. Yeah, right. Right. So he could have creepy crawlies as a... Or mini-beasts. Mini beasts. This is a cute phrase they is. Okay, so he's got even more of those, but he's got 864. 864 insect tattoos on his bodies. Name's Michael Amoya. And he's quite a famous guy, actually.

He peers on a lot of, he's big on YouTube and so on. It is a bit of a trend, isn't it, getting the most tattoo X variety on you? So there's a guy who's got the most Marvel comic book hero tattoos. Oh, yeah. And it starts with one, and then it just snowballs from there. Yes. So this guy's got 63 superheroes all over him. He's called Tom Radford, lives in Hull.

And he says, I've endured pain in places. Very few will understand for tattoos no one will ever see all for the sake of this record. Oh. Yeah. But his head and neck and hands are completely uncovered. Can you guess why? Head and neck and hands. It doesn't have any.

He doesn't have a head or neck or hand. That was going to be my guess. He didn't have the head And he thought well I'll end there's no point Having a neck Does he work in a place Where he can cover up the rest of his body quite easily

But can't cover his hands and neck What kind of place would that be? Strip Club No strip club is the one place it wouldn't be Because strip clubs You literally are showing the rest of your body He's a bouncer Does he do like

You know like sign language For children's TV shows? That's brilliant. And it doesn't want to be confusing. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's that he's promised his mother.

He wouldn't. Oh. Okay, well, we were never going to guess that. Why weren't you going to guess that? Two more guesses I would have got there either. Yeah. Sweet.

Yeah, that's cool. The most tattooed woman in Britain, or she certainly was a few years ago, Becky Holt. I just find it really interesting that her first tattoo was her boyfriend's name and it was on her crotch. I just think that's such an interesting place to get your first tattoo. Usually your first tattoo would be

Arm, you know, belly. On my fanny, it's just like this girl's going on to bigger things tattoo-wise, isn't it? What if her boyfriend was called Fanny, which is short for Francis, like Fanny Lee? So she could write Fanny down there, and then future boyfriends wouldn't know it was the next boyfriend. They'd be like, oh, you're just labelling your bun pass. That's what it was. Yeah. That's actually a really funny record.

to break is the most parts of your body clearly labeled with what they are in tattoo form. Head, shoulders, knees, toes you start with. They're fanny. Yeah. Because that's the second verse of the song. Yeah. I started looking at excuses for tattoos. Okay.

Mainly Nazi tattoos. Because there are a lot of times where people... You've become obsessed, man. You get tattoos. That they... You know, and then they... they go on to a position of prominence. Like podcaster.

Like podcaster. Okay, here's one. Yeah, go on. I thought it was a Hindu symbol of peace. Ding, ding, ding. This year, the Barnsley counsellor for Reform UK, who was accused of having a swastika tattoo. His wife explained it was due to a brief interest in Buddhism as a young man.

That makes, okay. Tick. All right. Here's another one. I'll give you the tattoo. Okay, okay, okay. Swastikas on Japanese maps means a temple. So someone tattooed an entire Japanese map like an Ordnance Survey map on.

I then said, my body is a temple. Specifically this bit with a swastika. Someone's tattooed an early Rudyard Kipling book cover onto them because he had swastikas all over them. Youngest person ever to win the Nobel Prize for Literature as well, by the way. Lovely thing. Couldn't leave that on the table. Yeah. Is it that?

I wanted to tattoo the words, my struggle on my forehead, but my tattoo artist was German. and wrote Mienkamp instead. I'm going to give you the tattoo and you have to give me a great excuse for it. Okay. There's a German Big Brother contestant some years ago who was done for having an SS symbol tattooed on his arm.

What was his excuse? Bearing mind, that's also illegal in Germany, of course. And you mean, so it's the font, really, with the SS. Everyone used to call him a silly sausage. Which is what SS actually meant, didn't it? Hitler's silly sausages The elite silly sausages It was the sound that his favourite snake made

It's as bad an excuse as this Think of the font What else is written in that font? Kiss Kiss, the band He claimed that he was a fan of the band But had only got the second half of the band name tattooed on him He could only afford two letters

And he went for that That's so good He needs to get a best friend Who's got the KI quickly, get your best friend to get the K-I-on. Yes. I'll just give you the last one. There was a Le Mac-Mack-fronted Sky History

Reality series about woodwork called The Chop. Oh, I remember that. It was a very sure-lived series. One of the reasons for which was that one of the contestants turned out to have a tattoo on his face saying 88. And that is a number often used by neo-Nazis

because H is the eighth letter of the alphabet. H.H. H. H. H. H. H. H. H. H. H. H. H. H. H. H. H. is the thing. He explained, that this tattoo was simply because his father had died in 1988, at which point it turned out his father was alive and well, I told the Daily Mail, I'm here, aren't I? Wow. There's an interesting new tattoo that people are getting.

So every bit of content that goes up on Spotify gives a little barcode, and it's meant to be for just, you know, the actual code. Share the playlist and stuff. Yeah, exactly. So you could get your favorite episode of no such thing as a fish. Find the barcode, have that tattooed on you. And then if you do it, it's just a... an option is all I'm saying. But this is happening. Listen to this. This is amazing because

people are talking about having done it. Mary Haley has the perfect party trick, a barcode-like tattoo of nearly two dozen fine lines that when scanned with a Spotify music app, prompts a phone to play Mambo number five by Lou Baker. Yeah. That was one. Stunning. Spotify have said, listen, great idea, very cool. But if the song gets taken down and re-uploaded, the code is changed, and that's a defunct barcode. And a lot of people are also saying that when you get a bit older, after a couple of years and the tattoo slightly loses a bit of its edge, someone's stanzet, just ends up buying a tin of beans or something.

The US Navy in the early 1900s, when certain people were coming and trying to join, they were required to get more tattoos before they joined. It's a little riddle, but I'll just give the answer straight away. No, no, no, no, no. We have to guess. Okay. So what use would be a tattoo for someone in the Navy?

Because they did have, they were a good deal. An anchor? Get an anchor tattoo. Yeah, but that's not useful. You wouldn't need that unless it was, maybe it could show who's on your side. Yeah, that's it. Mm-hmm. Was it identifying Mark the view are washed up?

That's a good one. That's a good one. And it's possible that maybe there was areas where they did ask you to do that. This very specific case was you were fixing things. Oh, ooh, ooh, ooh. Oh, sailors in the Navy have to learn how to do a lot of knots. And you learn how to do them by diagrams, don't you? This is how to do a triple chank, calf, hitch, whatever.

So they're getting drawings of the knots tattooed on them, right? Yeah. To learn. Not right. Right. What do you get in the sea? Zebrafish. So they were tattooing zebrafish onto their arms.

But if you scan them, it's a code for their favorite Spotify. That's the place member number five. And that's the international distress call. That's what you know. If you hear it, you know that someone's in serious trouble. The answer is that, and these are all great answers, by the way. But the one in this case is that a lot of sailors who were joining in the early 1900s had tattoos that were seen as indecent.

They had naked women all over them. And so they would either be dismissed and not allowed, or you had to go back and have clothes tattooed onto the women. Yes, because I read it. interview with a tattoo artist from the 1920s. And it's interesting how things go in and out of fashion. It was in the New Yorker and it was saying how fashionable and classy tattoos suddenly were. And this amazing tattoo artist was saying,

I have to put a lot of clothes on mermaids for sailors who are about to go into the Navy and aren't allowed to them anymore. I went on to Guinnessworldrecords.com and searched for ironic because this world record holder for most bug tattoos is terrified of bugs. So the world record for sticking matchdips up your nose is held by Scott Consal, who worked in I.A. That was his job before beating the record. And he says, over time, your nostril stretch so you can insert more matches into each side if you wait a few minutes.

I want to personally say, I don't think you shove anything up your nose. Absolutely. The first album by Westlife produced five number one hits in the UK official singles chart, which is a record. ironically the album peaked at number two wow wow that's a pretty ironic richly ironic why didn't that get in the song the Grand Midway Hotel in Wimber Pennsylvania has the world's largest Ouija board

it's now located on the third floor of the hotel which is ironic because the inventor of the original Ouija board William Fold died after falling from a third story building I'm going to send in these lyrics to Alana Smorecette for the rewrite. 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 all be found online. I'm on at Schreiberland on Instagram, James. My Instagram is no such thing as James Harkin. Andy. Mine is at Andrewhunter M. Yep. And if you want to get to us as a group, Anna. You can email podcast.

AtuI.com or on Instagram, go to at No such thing. That's right. Podcast at QI.com. That is the main place to go. Send us your mail because if you send us your favorite facts every Monday, we put down our facts and we read out the best of yours. And if you also want to give us general feedback, Andy Cherrypicks the best and brings those

emails to drop us a line. The bonus behind the scenes show that we make, which is part of Clubfish, which is a really cool club that we've set up. It's on Patreon. Patreon.com slash Clubfish. If you want to check it out, there's multiple different things, multiple tiers. So give it a go, check it out. Otherwise, do come back next week.

We're going to be back with another episode. Thank you as ever to Leighing Lee, Ethan Ruperalia, as well as the larger Fish Buster team for all their work. And we will see you again next week. Goodbye.