No Such Thing As A Fish - NSTAAF International Factball: Italy v Switzerland

Episode Date: June 20, 2014

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

Hello and welcome to another episode of no such thing as a fish presents international fact ball Brought to you by the QALs in association with visit England calm My name's Andy and I'm here with three of the QALs They are in no particular order Anna James and Anne and today's match is a humdinger It's going to be Italy versus Switzerland. So There's the whistle interesting facts about Italy take it away I love the fact that in Italy they have a word for the at symbol Which we kind of don't want it's commonly used and their word is chiocchiola

Which means snail because obviously it looks like a snail. Oh, that is very good. It's nice Yeah, and paparazzi the word paparazzi. You guys know what that means in Italian. Is it buzzing insect? Yeah, it's buzzing mosquitoes. Yeah, it's from La Dolce Vita. Yeah, it's named after the paparazzo character Term is Sue means pick me up. Yes Boosie lunch that gets you through the afternoon if you want to pick me up. Yeah I read that confetti obviously it's an Italian sounding word But it was also invented in Italy, but it was originally candied spices and Italian families would throw it from their balconies to the crowds Below. Isn't that cool? That's good at 10% of all food stolen in Italy is Parmesan cheese

Wow, it's pretty pricey when McDonald's first opened in Italy They opened in Rome in 1986 and everyone was furious and the designer Valentino tried to close it down It was too noisy and there was an unbearable smell of fried food fouling the air That doesn't sound like McDonald's. I know I Read the the grand opening of that McDonald's people stood outside handing out pasta. There's a traditional Italian food And they said this is what you should be eating none of these burgers even now They don't want foreign food coming into Italy. There was a politician called. I don't know His first name was I think is mr. Zaya and he was trying to stop all foreign foods from coming in and someone asked him

Have you ever eaten a kebab and he said no and I defy anyone to prove the contrary I prefer the dishes of my native veneto and I even refused to eat a pineapple Wow That is great. Yeah pineapple pizza Oh, yeah, and the other thing tomatoes out native to Italy are they well pasta isn't a traditional Italian dish at all It was brought over by the Arabs in the 13th century wasn't it and they adopted it as their own But it used to be eaten with honey and sugar before the 17th 18th century pasta wasn't eaten with tomato sauce It was dipped in honey and sugar. I don't want to try that. Um, Mussolini

Wanted all Italians to eat rice Not pasta and uh, he had a national day for rice and there was the national rice board which You know brought free bags of rice to people and it really wanted to encourage them so that they could be self-sufficient Do they also have a national cheese bar? Ah Very good My favorite kind of Italian pasta is straws of preti, which are these little things which I think they look like cord And the literal translation for straws of preti is priest stranglers

Not cool. Didn't ciabatta mean slipper? Yes, it does and it was invented really recently. Yeah, yeah 1982 yeah My favorite Italian food fact is actually also a football fact. Maybe it's not allowed. No, we can I love it We average about one football fact per podcast This week there was a football match. It was Scotland versus Italy and the Scotland fans chanted. We're going to deep fry your pizzas Just speaking about um football chance. There was a match. It was napple against Verona And the Verona fans were singing. We hope that Vesuvius goes off And the napple fans were singing Juliet is a whore

Wow Wow Okay, I have a question for you name something that happened in Italy between the 5th and the 14th of october 1542 Uh new pope. No Was Leonardo da Vinci died? No, nothing. They have a calendar jump and they switched their days Exactly nothing happened Nothing happened between the 5th and the 14th of october in that year Pope Gregory ordered that those days should not happen so that they could make up for previously inaccurate calendars and get with the program

Yeah, do you know where the easiest place to get cocaine in Italy is? Uh, yes, but I cannot tell you on this podcast because the next time I go it'll be swamped No, the easiest place is the air Researchers have tested the air in Rome and found that there are traces of cocaine Also cannabis nicotine and caffeine. Please walk around with your mouth open like a bear trying to catch them The cane just jumps in um the mouth here is still very dominant, isn't it in italy? I think 80 of small businesses in the capital of Sicily pay uh, pizza protection money 80% 80% it's a lot, isn't it across the whole of southern italy the mafia makes more than 20 billion a year for extortion

And Corleone, so Corleone the town in Sicily has got a petition to change its name because of the negative connotations Something nicer. Yeah speaking of the mafia. Did you hear the terrible thing that they did last year? They kidnapped the world's smallest pony Oh, and I'll put it in someone's bed. That is too far They put it in a very small bed It was a 63 centimetre tall animal named charlie and he was taken from his stall in citadel castello Did they get him back? I'm not sure actually. I couldn't find if anyone knows what happened to charlie. You can call this number Charlie if you're out there, we're not angry. Okay, just come back. We're just disappointed

Yeah Okay, that means that at halftime it's time for our mid-match quiz brought to you by visit england.com We've got three questions relating in some way or another to england. So who would like to go first? I have one. Yeah, and I had a brilliant time a few weekends ago I went to Cadbury world in Birmingham and they had lots of great information and they had a bit about how the Mayans Use cocoa beans as currency. They didn't have coins. So it cost two cocoa beans for a pumpkin. But how many for a rabbit? Okay, answers on a postcard. James. Okay. Um, my question is in old Cheshire

What did they mean when they said sparrow farts? Okay Do they mean the farts of sparrows? Maybe you'll have to tune in to find out. I'm gonna be here. Oh, yeah Anna So during world war two for what did mi6 use human semen? Oh, I thought it was most of the navy who used semen Very good Okay, so that's the halftime quiz over So we will give away the answers at the end and now it's time for the second half of the match, which is switzerland Every year they have an annual Santa Claus world championship called Clowwell. Is this our Santa Claus is selected? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah

Is it? Yeah, there's gonna be a channel five reality show coming soon Switzerland is the only country to have enough nuclear shelters for its entire population. Wow. Yeah You can't name your child pineapple or banana or fairytale or whatever it is that everyone who's famous these days names their children If you're in switzerland because you have to choose from an approved list of baby names But the country has been neutral since about the mid 14th century They used to be quite an aggressive territorial expansionist power and then they had one really unpleasant Battle or a few battles in the 14th century and they said right actually we're not doing this anymore And they just formed the boundaries almost completely of modern switzerland soon after that and they just have not got involved since then

They have had the odd little battle in between themselves the cantons. Oh, yeah There was a battle between Zurich and zugg rather nicely in 1529 War was declared but before any fighting could take place The two teams or the two groups of soldiers sat down Settle the differences and called off the war and the soldiers from both sides sat on the border and shared a cauldron of milk soup Wow One thing I really like is that senior soldiers in the swiss army. They have flowers instead of stars A major general who would have two stars on his epaulettes in

Other nato countries would have two edelweiss on his epaulettes in switzerland. Oh, that's kind of cute It's awesome Speaking of keeping yourself to yourself. I read about a block of flats near Zurich This is for people who claim to suffer from hypersensitivity to chemicals and electromagnetic radiation And there are apartments there that have been designed specifically So there's no smoking no perfume no mobile phones And it's supposed to be for people who find that they're allergic to modern life I might use allergic to modern life as my excuse for not being on twitter hence

One thing I love about switzerland is that the riking back falls where Sherlock Holmes fell to his death are in switzerland So the Sherlock Holmes society go on a pilgrimage to the riking back falls where they reenact the fall But with dummies not with real people and one thing I learned from reading about it was that apparently in 1910 Sherlock Holmes books were banned from station booksellers because they're having a bad effect on the swiss youth What apparently jumping off the falls possibly they weren't all just smoking pipes and wearing this funny hat And solving crimes in a slightly annoying way Yeah So switzerland was where Conan Doyle Arthur Conan Doyle popularized skiing

I think he discovered it on holiday in Norway and then he was in switzerland and he looked around and thought look mountains snow I know what i'm going to do here and he found two other people in switzerland that ski But they could only ski by night because they were mocked so mercilessly by the swiss masses for doing such a weird thing But then Conan Doyle was a big popular guy and he started doing it in a cool town Yeah skiing by night doesn't sound particularly safe does it? No, I guess that's why people mock them That's where they're very broadly collared ski web again. Yeah Okay, so one really fun thing

This is a lot of my facts are from a book called swiss watching I read last year, which is really good So if you're into switzerland, I recommend you read it in switzerland People tend to rent their graves for about 20 or 25 years rather than buying them and then the space is used again And all the old headstones are broken up to make gravel But the idea is there's so little space because switzerland is so mountainous There's almost no flat space and when you know, there's a limited amount of space for people to die in And since euthanasia is legal, they're dropping like flies So they should do like they do in in Tibet

Just put their bodies up at the top of the mountains and let the birds eat them That's going to traumatize the skiers What a swiss celebrity is a six-legged calf called lily who I would urge everyone to look up because she's Wow lily the calf. Yeah, so weird. It's two extra legs hanging off her back And she's a celebrity you say. Yeah, they don't have a lot going for them in the celebrity world Which program does she I think she hosts the 10 o'clock news Either they don't have many celebrities or they've got so many that literally even a six-legged cow can achieve fame All right, and he just I'm a celebrity get these legs on

And you know for the animal welfare This is brilliant fact that you aren't allowed to keep a solitary guinea pig in switzerland You have to give it a friend if you're a guinea pig dies you would too one You can rent one to be mates with your one We're coming out to full-time now. So any extra facts that you want to get them in get them in now In 1474 a rooster in switzerland was prosecuted by law in the city of basal for laying an egg Because obviously roosters can't lay eggs now and what an interpretation might say it was actually a chicken that had been passing for a rooster But the animal was sentenced in a solemn judicial proceeding and condemned to be burned alive for the heinous and unnatural crime of laying an egg

The execution took place according to eyewitness accounts with as great Celebrity as it would have been observed in consigning a heretic to the flames And was witnessed by an immense crowd of townsmen and peasants It was witnessed by a great number of peasants who were cooking vegetables Preparing a white wine sauce That's the final whistle So now it's time for the answers to our mid-match quiz brought to you by visit england.com and your question was first So my question was the Mayans used cocoa beans as currency

So they didn't have coins and it took two two cocoa beans for a pumpkin. How many for a rabbit? It'll be 10 cocoa beans to buy a rabbit although legally in the mayan culture I think you had to buy two rabbits by law Wow, great fact from a cabri's world cabri world excellent place My question was in old cheshire. What did the word sparrow farts mean? And it meant very early in the morning. Oh, yeah, you would be up with the sparrow farts. Nice Anna My question was in world war two. What did mi6 use human semen for? And they used it. Well, I guess one of the functions it had was to be used as invisible ink for transmitting letters

Yes, it is so God even Fleming didn't write that up in the chase on bookstiny Bond dipped his quill into the ink well Okay, there are your answers and if you'd like to win a load of qi goodies We've got lots of things which we are giving away via the visit england.com website So check that out and you can see what there is for you to win there So at the end of the match, I'm going to give the arbitrary job of picking a winner to Anna Anna who wins I am going to go with Switzerland because don't want my bank account being shut down. Excellent

Okay, that's everything from today. We hope you've enjoyed listening If you'd like to get hold of any of us you can do so on twitter. Ann is on miller underscore an James is at egg shaped. I'm at andrew hunter m Anna still not on twitter But if you want if you want you can Tweet at quick pedia and I'll reply to you there. Okay. We have another match coming up tomorrow Which is James that will be Nigeria versus Bosnia and hurts a governor. Yeah. Well one against two. All right Uh, I hope you've enjoyed listening. Thanks very much and tune in for another one of these tomorrow. Goodbye