No Such Thing As A Fish - NSTAAF International Factball: Colombia v Ivory Coast

Episode Date: June 19, 2014

Colombia v Ivory Coast: The QI Elves in association with www.visitengland.com bring you the eighth episode of this No Such Thing As A Fish Factball special - the only football podcast that has absolutely nothing to do with football. Today Dan Schreiber (@schreiberland), James Harkin (@eggshaped), Andrew Hunter Murray (@andrewhunterm) and Anna Ptaszynski (@qikipedia) pit Colombia against the Ivory Coast to find out which is the most Quite Interesting country.

Hello, and welcome to another edition of No Such Thing as a Fish presents International Fatball. The only football podcast out there that makes absolutely no mention of football whatsoever, brought to you by VisitEngland.com. We are the QI Elves, my name is Dan, I'm sitting here with James, Andy and Anna. The match today is Columbia versus Cote d'Ivoire, and we're about to find out who the most interesting of those two are. So, let's begin. Columbia. Okay, a fact about Columbia? Yeah. Okay, Columbia's traditionally drank armadillo blood to treat asthma. Wow. Does it work? I believe not. Yeah, and also, you get asthma quite a lot. It's not like you just take a course of it and it's gone for the rest of you. You'd

need basically a live armadillo with a flesh wound. Yeah, and treat it like an inhaler. Yeah, exactly. So, people carry them around, presumably, like in a handbag. You have an asthma sufferer and she starts when you're like, did you remember your armadillo? Yeah, sorry, can I borrow your armadillo? I'm just feeling a bit. One traditional snack in the Santander region of Columbia, which I did not know was a region, is hormigas culones, which translates to ants with a big bum, because they are the kind of ants that people like eating as a snack, and they're very rare and very valuable because they only come out of their nesting ground one or two days a year. Sorry, do you mean rare as in undercooked or...? It has some great festivals,

Columbia. It's home to some of the various biggest festivals in the world. It's home to the biggest theatre festival, as in like the highest number of people attend, the biggest salsa festival, biggest flower parade, and the biggest outdoor horse parade. Oh, wow, that's very good. What's the biggest indoor horse parade? I know of only one famous Colombian. Okay, who's that? Gabrielle Garcia Marquez, the fantastic, incredible author who passed away, sadly, this year. And there's an interesting fact here, which I did not know, is not on the blurb of his book. His grandmother was a secret witch doctor, and his grandfather once killed a man in a duel. Wow. Yeah, pistols at dawn. That's amazing. Bring your armadillos. He was brilliant, wasn't he, Marcus? He was married

to his wife, Mercedes, for 55 years, and every day throughout those years, she put a yellow rose on his desk in the morning. For a reason? To say, hi, do you need a reason to present your wife with a flower? Yeah, I do. Just romantic, though. I need a wife. I need a wife first. I don't know if Mercedes meant Mercedes, the plural of Mercedes. Oh, really? Mercedes, yeah. No, I didn't know that either. You must have heard of another Colombian down there, Pablo Escobar. Yeah. The famous drug bar, and he was Colombian. Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay. He had a great big house where he kept loads of animals and stuff like that. And apparently a lot of his hippos keep escaping from the house and terrorizing local towns. Wasn't that, didn't that help the police find him? Because hippos

are not native to Colombia. You will ask questions, won't you, if it was out and about? Yeah, definitely. In the 1990s, Escobar owned one of the best football teams in Colombia, Atletico Nacional, and their rivals, Milionarios, belonged to a rival drug trafficker. Wow. Which is amazing. He apparently used to have big parties. Who? Escobar. Yeah, yeah. And at those parties, he would drown his enemies in the pool. Is it kind of like two birds, one stone kind of thing? Whereas I don't want to just like do the dull stuff. Let's party and then we can have this happen in the back. So as one of his enemies, if you receive, well, there are people going, I'm so surprised I've been invited to Escobar's party. He's never liked me, but I mean, I guess we should go, right? When he's going to say no to a pool party.

He said it's a pool party, but he said I don't need to bring trunks. I don't understand. Madeleine's an interesting town. They have a no-pants day as a protest against the government. I have a no-pants day several times a week, not as a protest, just as a way of life. Well, there are many reasons we've changed the locks on this office, Andy. How did you get in today? You mean no pants? You mean no trousers? Yes, American style pants. Okay. Well, I'm still having a no-pants day today. Yeah, it's against freedom of expression. And so they walk around the town with no trousers on. I mean, sort of on the subject of this, there's a remote outpost in Columbia called it's pronounced Los Penus. Nothing funny about that? No, you're right. Absolutely,

not. It's just a way of expressing yourself. And the guys who live there, it's separated from the nearest town by a ravine. And the Colombian government's decided that it's too expensive and there aren't enough people living there to build a bridge over the ravine. And so the nearest school, for instance, is in the nearest town, and all the kids have to get there by zip-wiring across the ravine. And as you can imagine, they're not the safety conscious zip-wires that tourists dry when they pop over to New Zealand. You don't want to get your Los Penus stuck in that zip wire, do you? Bogota also has a laziness museum. It's a museum in Bogota, which aims to make people think about the social issues implied in taking a nap, in being jobless, or in feeling that maybe

we are wasting our time. Do you want to go to the laziness museum? Nah. Imagine the staff behind the desk. Yeah, just go in. Yeah. Why are there no cards here telling us what all these exhibits are? And actually, why are there no exhibits? Okay, now it's time for the Halftime Show, which is three QI questions brought to you by Visitingland.com. And the three questions with the answers being revealed at the end of this podcast are James. Okay, my question is how many lakes are there in the Lake District? Question number two, Andy. Where is the southern most point of the mainland in England? Okay. And question number three from Anna. Which world first was built outside the Houses of Commons in 1868? Okay, it's time for Match to Resume Play

and making their way onto the pitch. It's Côte d'Ivoire. So Côte d'Ivoire, who wants to go first? Okay, are we going to keep calling it Côte d'Ivoire or Ivory Coast? Why, let's go for both. Côte d'Ivoire is what most places in the world call it, but usually places in the UK call it Ivory Coast, but both are acceptable. I prefer to call it Ivory Coat, because it reminds me of my favorite item of clothing. You've really got to hand that to a museum. They've had a lot of problems in Ivory Coast over the last several years. They've had a civil war and they've had a lot of domestic unrest. So partly as a result of that, everyone's very young. The average age is about 19 across the whole country. And also wages are very low. So someone earning as little as

$100 per month is pacified as being middle class officially. It is a troubled place. We were saying it's quite hard to come up with more fun facts in the Ivory Coast because there are a lot of less fun facts. As you say, Andy, it has been embroiled in civil war basically since 1999 with a couple of respites. One of the major respites in the civil war was in 2006 during the World Cup. And I know we're not supposed to mention football, but the Ivory Coast football team was credited with causing a truce because as soon as the Ivory Coast qualified for the World Cup, the football team brought the warring parties together and made them sign a truce. And because both sides were supporting the Ivory Coast in the World Cup, it brought them together

for a time. I know an interesting fact about their Independence Day. Go on. Go on. Their Independence Day is the 7th of August. Good one, Dan. Doesn't really sound like much of a fact. They celebrate it on December 7th. Oh, that is good. Why? Yeah, I think it's because all the by the time the harvests have been collected and sold, that's when they get paid. And so their Independence Day was set up on that, but they didn't actually have enough money to have a proper celebration. So it's just a better time of year to do it. Better time of year. So they celebrate August the 7th Independence Day on December 7th. We should celebrate Christmas in the summer when it's nice and sunny and not cold and horrible. One thing you will like, Dan, is that there is a

group of people in the Ivory Coast who are called the Dan. Really? Yep. And they specialize in doing stilt dances, i.e. dancing while on stilts. And their main town is called Man. So you could be Dan of Man. Dan of Man. Yeah, I like it. That's very cool. There's another group of people, and I really like this. They're called the Bowel people, and they believe in another parallel world called Blolo. And that means elsewhere. So a man can have a Blolo blah, which is another wife from the beyond. And the female version of that is a Blolo beyond, which is obviously a man for the wife. But they tend to have a negative effect on this life, the other, the normal life, not Blolo life marriage. I've got a dance in Ivory Coast called the Fuka Fuka. Oh, yeah. Do you know

of that? No. It's the dance that Didier Drobout used to do when he scored a goal. I know we're going back to football again. Sorry about that. Yeah. Oh, okay, right. But it's called the Fuka Fuka. That's quite a hip swivel. I see. Well, the original twerking comes from the Ivory Coast as well. Really? There's a dance called the Mapuka dance, which is a traditional dance from the Ivory Coast. It's mostly performed by women. And another name for it is la danse du festier, which means the dance of the behind. In 1998, the government of the Ivory Coast prohibited its performance in public. Wow. And here's one more dance craze from the Ivory Coast. Flap your arms and look like a dying chicken. And this was a bird flu dance that they did. It was invented by a 21

year old disc jockey, DJ Lewis, who invented a dance making light of bird flu by imitating a chicken and its death throws during a cull. Wow. If they would bring that into British clubs, then I would definitely start going out on the town again. That's true. Well, maybe we should go out tonight and try it. Let's start the trend. There is an absolutely amazing building in Cote d'Ivoire, which is it's a basilica at, I'm going to say this wrong, Yamoussoukro. And it's the tallest basilica in the world, as in it's taller than St. Peter's in Rome. They built it slightly smaller than St. Peter's in Rome at the request of the Pope. And then they put a massive gold cross on it to make it taller at the top. So they sort of cheated.

But a classic cheat for tall buildings around the world. Always a large spike at the top. Like the Empire State Building. Yeah. They didn't need that. Yeah. It's so big that a third of all the Catholics in Ivory Coast could worship there. Wow. And also I read that it's got the largest air conditioned space in the world. That sounds nice. That church does. Yeah. Let's go there because I am bloody hot in this office today. It is hot. Okay, that's it. That's full time. That's the end of our match. Before we find out who has won, we are going to quickly get the answers to our visitingland.com quiz. That was our halftime show. Starting with the questions. James, what was the first? Okay, the first question was how many lakes are there in the Lake District?

It was a bit of a trick question. Most of them are meers or waters. The only one that's actually called a lake is Bassenthwait Lake. So the answer is one. One lake. Yes. I did not know that that was right. Andrew Hunter Murray gets a point. Nice, Andy. My question was what's the southernmost point on the English mainland? And if you were thinking it's Land's End, it's not. It's actually Lizard Point, which is not quite as far west, but it is a bit further south. Okay. And Anna, question number three. Yeah. So my question, which world first was erected outside the House of Commons in 1868? The answer is the world's first traffic lights. Traffic lights. British first. That is correct. Although it had to be taken down pretty soon after it was built because it

exploded in the face of a policeman. I thought you were going to say it was so successful they gave it the green light. Okay. That's the end of the match. And to decide who was the winner between Columbia and Cote d'Ivoire, we are going to go to James for the decision. Oh, it's a tough one. Let's go for the Cote d'Ivoire. Yeah. I love all those dance moves. So let's go for that. Yeah. Great number of dance moves. Yeah, I agree. Okay. Well, that's it for this match. If you want to chat to us about any of the things that we've said, you can get us all on Twitter. I'm on at Shriverland, James. At Eggshapes. Andy. At Andrew Hunter M. And Anna. If you write at Crickipedia, the QI Twitter feed, I might go back to you. Yes, but we can't promise

because Anna hates Twitter. Okay, that's it for the show. Join us again tomorrow. There's another matchup in our World Cup of Facts. And that is James. That is the all Europe encounter between Switzerland and Italy. Exciting. Very cool. Okay. Well, we'll be back with that match tomorrow. Until then, goodbye.