No Such Thing As A Fish - NSTAAF International Factball: Uruguay v Costa Rica

Episode Date: June 14, 2014

Uruguay v Costa Rica: The QI Elves in association with www.visitengland.com bring you the third 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 Uruguay against Costa Rica to find out which is the most Quite Interesting country.

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish presents the World Cup of Facts. This is the only World Cup podcast out there that makes absolutely no mention of football whatsoever. Brought to you by the QI Elves in association with visitinglun.com. My name is Dan Schreiber and I am joined by James Harkin, Anna Czazinski and Andy Murray and today's match is Uruguay vs Costa Rica. Let's begin with Uruguay. I've got a fact, it's actually the only fact I've got about football for any country I've researched. Wait a minute, this is supposed to be a non-football football contest. Okay, I hope you just heard the intro. I'll dress it up as a newspaper fact.

The first time that Uruguay won the World Cup in 1930, the fact was not even reported in the times. That is how little esteemed sports news was then. So they're just really aloof. They might be fantastic at football. They are actually pretty good, aren't they? Well, actually, they are very good at football because they've managed to win the World Cup twice, despite having a tiny population. What was it, Andy? You were saying? It's three and a half million, which is about the same as the West Midlands. It's very small. We're not doing very well at this being a non-football football podcast, are we? Red cards all around, no football chat. Uruguay was besieged by the Argentine dictator Juan Manuel

de Rosas in the 1840s and they'd run out of proper ammunition and they held their own in battle and won by raiding the galleys of their ships, finding that they had quite a lot of Dutch cheese, loaded up their cannons with what they now think, well, it was reported as Edam cheese, but Mythbusters looked into it, concluded it had to have been Garotska cheese and they won and they shot Garotska cheese out of their cannons, penetrated the sails of the army ships and they won the battle. And then there'd be like little shrapnel of mini baby bells. Yeah, I mean, through it in the middle.

Where we get baby bells. Uruguay, we should say it means either river of birds or river of shellfish. We don't know which one it means. I mean, that's quite a big, this like a bird or a fish is a shellfish. A shellfish. A shellfish even. Yeah. What's for dinner tonight?

Good news. It is. But I'm allergic to shit. I'm sorry. I can't tell you. Yeah, I literally do not know. Uruguay has three times as many cows as it has people. Well, it's where Frey Bentos comes from, isn't it?

There's actually a town called Frey Bentos, which is where the stuff comes from, like the pies and the corned beef and all that. I think they've shot down, they've stopped making them, haven't they? Have they? Yeah, in the 70s. But we still obviously call it Frey Bentos. Well, it was so important during the war, they called Frey Bentos a town, the kitchen of the world.

And soldiers would say Frey Bentos instead of OK. So how are you feeling today? Frey Bentos. That's great. I like that. It's almost on a match pick. Just on the food kind of areas. Like a nice drink, national drink to go with it.

And they have their national tree. When the leaves are turned into a tea, it's a laxative tea. That's their national tree. It's called the ombu. The national drink is a laxative. If you said I would like to drink from your national tree, you know, as you do when you go to countries and you say that, you would have a laxative. They obviously eat a lot of meat.

And so that can block you up. But if they have laxatives as their national drink, then it would all balance out. Perfect. It's like dock leaves and nettles, isn't it? Some of their meat is glow in the dark or their sheep glow in the dark anyway. Because it was a Uruguayan scientist who injected jellyfish genes into sheep. And that makes them glow in the dark. And it has a whole bunch of medical uses, they think now and they've done it with other

things. They think glow in the dark cats with jellyfish genes might be used to cure AIDS maybe in future. But that was in Uruguay anyway. You get glow in the dark sheep. Wow. Wow. That's great.

Their president's a good guy, isn't he? Do you all know about him? No. Jose Mujica. He was a guerrilla fighter. He was a socialist and he became president. And he gives 90% of his income to charity. He lives in a farm.

He never wears a tie. And he lives with his three-legged dog who lost a leg in a tractor accident. Oh, he became quite famous in the news recently. Yeah, he's famous. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He spent 13 years in prison. But two of those years were in a well. In the bottom of a well.

What? That was during the dictatorship. That was the previous government before he came to power. A bit of a shock, though, if you were lifting out the family's water supplies for the week. Oh, my God. We seem to have an exception. He's the future president, my God. And his three-legged dog.

All officials in Uruguay have to make a personal wealth declaration every year. And in 2010, his entire declaration was £1,100, which is the value of his 1987 Volkswagen Beetle. I mean, that's pretty modest living. Wow. Yeah. Okay, here's another awesome Uruguayan. Yeah. He's called Emilio Arenas.

Okay. And he has the largest collection of key rings in the world. He has 56,630 non-duplicated key chains, which he's been collecting since 1955. Wow. Does he just own a lot of properties? Well, I think he's just a collector because he was also in the Guinness Book of Records for having the world's largest collection of pencils. Good man.

That's great. I'd like to imagine that he can never find his actual key. Yeah. He's just going around and around this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or he can never find a pen in his house. Pencils everywhere. I just need a pen.

There's a cemetery in Uruguay which has, it's a Jewish cemetery and there are QR codes. So you scan them in and you get all the information about the person and lots of details. Or you can look at the cemetery remotely if you type in the right code for the QR code. Oh, so that's like a, it's like having an iPad gravestone. Exactly. Yeah. I think that's the way ahead. Go for it.

Okay. I'll have your Wikipedia page on there when you go in there. Yeah. You'll take it up or with me it'll go on and just say, this body is a stub. You can help me. Yeah, expand. With Anna it'll just be a Nokia 5510. Yeah.

It'll send you a text. Yeah. Okay. That's the halftime whistle there. Which means it's time for our halftime show which comes in the form of a QI quiz brought to you by VisitEngland.com. So we've got three questions for this one and we're going to start with James. Question number one.

Okay. My question is why during World War One did someone come up with the idea to build an enormous fake mountain in Kent? Andy. So George is the patron saint of England now, but who was the patron saint of England before he was? Question number three. Chazinski.

Yeah. My question is what is Big Ben? Good question. Good question. Okay. Well, those are good questions. If anyone wants to find out the answer to these questions, you better stay tuned to our show because they're coming right at the end.

But until then we've got a match to sort out. So it's time for the second half and we're heading over to Costa Rica. I love this fact. Costa Rica doesn't do proper addresses. They don't have really street names or house numbers. And the way you post a letter or the way you direct someone somewhere is just by landmarks. So the postman have the worst life ever. Every single letter is just like, turn left at the post office by the edge of the street

that's a bit dark-colored and then there's a big oak tree to the east of you. And they do say it's hellish. So they would have like a really massive envelope if you lived a long way away. It's like turn left here and then right there and then I would have written you a letter, but there was no space after your address. One of them said, they give me strange directions sometimes. So for instance, I'll be told to walk 300 meters north and then walk back 250 meters. I mean, it just sounds like hell.

That's great. It sounds like they're just trying to punish their postman, doesn't it? Yeah. I think they're not the only... I think Dubai and Abu Dhabi have a similar... Do they? My sister, I used to live in Dubai, trying to send letters to her was exactly that. And she said, if you got a taxi home at night, you had to direct them home like literally.

It wasn't like, bring me here, it was like, I'll show you the way. Taxi drivers all just have the ignorance. Yeah. Let's go back to Costa Rica anyway. Costa Rica's first female president was called Laura Chinchilla. Amazing. She's quite a nice name. And one of the founders of the Communist Party was called Carlos Fallos.

Nice. And their currency is the Kohlund. Oh yeah, it is. Probably named after Christopher Columbus or his son, maybe. Or his anus. I really like the fact that in 1852, Costa Rica didn't have a national anthem, but they were being visited by UK and US diplomats. And so they basically in Costa Rica went, I guess we need to get a national anthem.

They commissioned a national anthem just for the visit. And then it stuck. Wow. Yeah. And then they didn't add words to it until the 1900s. So they didn't have time for lyrics. Yeah. They were like, we need to focus on one element of this right now.

We might get away with it. Everyone just murmur our language. They don't speak it anyway. It's all fine. Well, they don't have an army, Costa Rica. They don't have any. No, they disbanded it years ago. They got rid of it in 1949.

They had a civil war. And then one of the leaders, Jose Fugueres Ferrer, seized power to defeat an electoral fraud and then dissolved his own army. But they still have a defense budget. I think they just spent it on a military-trained police force, which sounds a little bit like an army. But yeah. It's semantics.

It's crucially not quite that much. Yeah. It's worked for them, though, not having an army, because I think it was in 2009 of a 143 nations. They're the happiest in the world. The happiest nation and the greenest nations in the most eco-friendly in the world. They have a lot of animals there, don't they? I read a fact that they have 0.03% of the planet's surface, but they are home to 500,000 unique

species. Wow. That's 4% of all known species on Earth. That's amazing. And they have seven volcanoes in this tiny, tiny country. Seven active volcanoes and 120 volcano formations. Yeah. Amazing butterflies.

10% of all the world's butterflies. I think it may be an even higher proportion of moths. I think my all-time favorite Costa Rica fact is going to be that when an American fruit company went over there and started clearing land to grow bananas, they found these massive stone balls. No one knows what the balls were for. No one knows why they're there. They were the things that inspired the big ball that chases Indiana Jones at the start

of Raiders of the Lost Art. Very cool. Wow. They don't know why they're there. No one knows. No one knows when there's a mystery. Okay. That's the final whistle there.

But before we find out who has won today's match, Uruguay or Costa Rica, we're going to get the answers to that VisitEngland.com quiz that we had at our halftime show. So the answers are starting with James. Okay. The idea of building an enormous, fake mountain in Kent was to make it tall enough to get the high ground against German bombers. That would have been a big mountain. Yeah.

Okay. Question number two was from Andy. The original patron saint of England before St George was King Edward the Confessor, who was patron saint after he was king until 1066. So Big Ben is not a clock. Big Ben is the name for the bell within the clock. Is it true that it was named after a big guy called Ben, who was an MP? Is that true?

I don't think so. It might be. Okay. Well, those are the answers. If you want to win any QI goodie prizes, sort of like books and so on, there's an additional quiz that's going on on VisitEngland.com. So if you head over there, you get a chance to win some of the books. All the elves are going to sign the copies of the books and there's probably more going

on there as well. So now it's time to decide who's won this match. I'm going to decide it today and I'm going to go for Costa Rica because I'm a massive Indiana Jones fan and I love the idea that those bulls are out there and they exist and they inspired it. Okay, so that's it for this match, but join us again tomorrow where there's going to be another great battle between two nations and they are James. They are France and Honduras.

France and Honduras. Okay, great. In the meantime, if you want to ask us anything about the things we were talking about in this particular podcast, you can get us all on our Twitter handles. I'm on at triberlandandie. At Andrew Hunter M. James. At Eggshapes.

And Anna. You can try to at Quikipedia or you can also email in to elves at qi.com. Okay, so we'll see you tomorrow for another match of the World Cup of Facts. Goodbye.