Little Fish: Juan Trippe

0:12Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of Little Fish. This is the show where we step back from our own four favorite facts from the last seven days, and we read out your favorite facts. If you'd like to submit some of your favorite facts, podcast at qi.com, send them there. Andy goes through all the mail, and he picks out the best choice cuts for us to read out on this show. So we've all had our facts distributed. Who wants to open up with one? I'll do one. Let's do it. All right. This is from Gleb, who writes, Hi, love the show. Long-suffering listener, first-time writer, yadda yadda. So we know you do listen.

0:47Thanks for sticking with it, Gleb It's not easy It's hard enough doing it Imagine having to be a listener on this Well, Gleb's fact is this In the 1930s, Pan Am Pan America, airline Were looking for a plane that could safely cross the Atlantic With cargo in one trip for their mail service The guy who commissioned the design process was called Juan Trip Is that true? It's actually true It's stunning I went down a real trip wormhole on this He was a big deal in the world of aviation Yeah? Yeah, he was born in 1899 And he started founding aviation firms He founded Pan Am And he pushed a lot of development of long-range planes Because before, you know Before that, did you have to stop on the way Like in the Azars or something?

1:36Or did they just not do it? I think there was a sort of northern route Where you had a little hop over to Greenland? Or northern Canada? Something like that But basically it was really hard to do. And in fact, in those days, I read a thing that in the old days, it took eight days to get from Miami to Buenos Aires. Oh, wow. So it was just a very, very slow process. And he set up all these air bases around the world and he conceived this idea of shortening journeys. Very cool. He was a very big deal. And his nickname was Mummy because he was so secretive. I actually don't think he needed a nickname.

2:13No, Juan Tripp is absolutely right. I think when you have such a solid name, you should probably rail against any nicknames. You're right. You're absolutely right. Why does mummy work for being secretive? He kept mum. He kept mum. That's right. Okay. He wasn't just wrapped up in cloth. No. No. In those little lemon scented refreshing towelettes that you get on a plane. He lived inside those. You lift off the plate and there's one trip staring back at you. Yeah. He was named Juan. He wasn't Spanish at all. No? No. Not Hispanic or anything? Nope, his family were from Maryland And he was from North Europe In his ancestry, you know He was named either after his mother's stepfather Juan, or his great uncle's Venezuelan wife Juanita Or his mother's half-sister Juanita Sources vary quite widely He was named after someone called Juan or Juanita It doesn't matter You've never heard of this guy until a minute ago It's not important But I did the research and I had to hear it It is interesting that all those people are quite distantly related from him aren't they yeah you're right actually it's not like named after his father no it's always like his great uncle's venezuelan wife almost like they put something in that you wouldn't possibly be able to check using the normal records yeah there you go one trip that's very good okay here is a fact from bjorn hauger bjorn writes hi i love your show since you've been continuously delighting me with interesting facts i thought i'd send you an interesting fact myself that's why we're here bjorn bjorn read a book that said a quarter of the iron in the top 20 meters of the ocean is locked up in krill oh it's from a book called the curious life of krill sounds like they would know uh but you know i didn't think there was that much iron in the ocean anyway no so i was kind of unsure how important that is and i also thought is krill magnetic if it's got so much iron in it maybe it is are you thinking fishing fishing rod i would say it'd be a really easy way to fish wouldn't it just shove a magnet in the water anyway it turns out yeah there was a recent study that looked how much iron is in krill in a place called prids bay in antarctica uh which i think is named after the dj eric prids who made the sun call on me in the 2000s no it wasn't i was fooled i think about you dan i did not even question it as you were saying it uh they found that there's 19 milligrams per kilogram of iron in a krill which would be um extremely weak or negligible for practical purposes when it comes to magnetism but here is one interesting thing that i did work out a blue whale eats four tons of krill a day so that means if you could take all the iron out of all the krill that blue whale eats you could get a single table knife worth of iron out of that blue whale every day wow a beautiful fact so would a blue whale go off in the airport at security no again the amount of iron is extremely negligible compared to the weight of the stuff that's eating it depends on what the whale does with the iron it eats if the if the iron is all concentrated in a special special sort of iron gizzard or something which i don't think science has proved or disproved yet i'm fairly sure that it poos it out.

5:31Okay, so it's not like there's a cutlery drawer inside a well that steadily gets larger over its life. Starts developing butter shovels or whatever. Asparagus tongs. No, okay. James, you've taken an already great fact. Yeah. And you've improved on it. Yeah, well, it was a great fact beyond. Thank you very much for writing it. Very good fact. I've got a fact that's been sent in here. It's a bit of a sexy one. Oh, dear. You ready for a sexy one? I have a feeling that the way you read it is going to become less sexy. Let's see. Let's see how many people disagree. He's doing a sexy voice. I'm doing my sexy dance as well.

6:09Yeah. Here we go. So this is from Conan from Singapore. Just like we think that champagne glasses were modeled after the shape of Marie Antoinette, which they are not. Not true. He puts in brackets. I'm not the whole shape of her. it was supposed to be the coop which is like they're very shallow rounded was supposed to be based on her breast yeah there you go right okay so but it's not it's not no and what uh conan or conan is saying is that in hong kong what is true is that they sell a dumpling that is named after the breasts of an actress in hong kong called amy yip uh and these are uh dumplings that can weigh up to 350 grams and they even have half full boiled eggs inside of them like like women's breasts do right if my biology knowledge is anything to go by i think that is how it works yeah i actually remember amy yip now that i've looked it up because she starred in quite a few chinese movies that were slightly erotic and i remember as a kid in the late 90s seeing a movie come on tv called erotic ghost story and watching that and she was suddenly we see where it all comes from originally it was really steamy like it was i like i was way too young to be watching this movie what's interesting is because she was known for um largely for how voluptuous she was she never did full nude scenes in movies what they did was they used to do clever camera angles that would show side breasts and so on that gave you the impression that you think you had and this was known in the industry because she's called Amy Yip as a Yip tease and it would be the not full exposure of Amy Yip in movies well well well and she's really cool she's an amazing actress I'll be honest Dan I sent it to you because there was a Hong Kong connection and I didn't realise I was giving you this Proustian moment catapulting you back to your first interest in the paranormal I'm sort of sorry but I'm actually not sorry I'm interested that that happened yeah like Proust nibbled on a Madeleine and I've nibbled on a breast-shaped dumpling.

8:18It's a big moment for me. Thank you, Andy. There's a new company in the UK that's just announced they've launched five actual breast-shaped champagne glasses. Have they? I think they've taken real women's breasts and they've modelled their glasses on that as a kind of riposte to the French saying these glasses actually are based on breasts. Very nice. Okay, let's get another fact to you, Andy. All right, here's one. This is from Sandeep Jandu, Who's a biology PhD student Studying mosquitoes So has sent a fact about ants There is an ant Which produces offspring Of a different species To the ant Okay The original ant It's insane Like a surrogate?

9:01Kind of You know what I read this story quite recently And good luck explaining it Okay I'll give it a go Basically Lots of ant queens They produce workers And a lot of them produce hybrid workers Taking sperm from another species This is called sperm parasitism That's a thing that happens in several species But these ants, they're called Meso ibericus They're incredibly weird They do need sperm from another species And the female queen stores sperm from another species of ant And then she uses that to fertilise her eggs But when she lays the eggs She removes I don't know if we know how this is done She removes her own DNA Or her own species DNA from these eggs So she has basically made a clone Of the other ant species Whose sperm she used to make the workers Right?

9:54That's so weird And basically She's created a completely separate species to herself But here's the really weird thing That other species Doesn't exist where they live Right So where did she get the sperm from? Wow And what we think happened is probably they did overlap with that other species like many moons ago. But she's been able to continually sort of clone it and clone it and clone it. So it doesn't matter that the other species don't live there anymore. Wow, that is nuts. The authors of this study have coined this word xenoparity, which is like a two species organism. It's mad. The explanation I found by one of the scientists behind it, I think, is that it's the equivalent of a human having a chimpanzee, like giving birth to a chimpanzee but we then use that chimpanzee to sire a race of human chimp hybrids to do all our housework for us Are they suggesting we do that?

10:47They're not suggesting we don't do that So thank you Sandeep Insane That's incredible I read something which is relevant This will become relevant in a second Have you guys heard of Devil's Gardens? No So this is in the Amazon basin and what will happen is people will be walking through and suddenly they'll come to a clearing Like it looks like someone's just cleared the area, but there'll just be a few trees that are still up. So for a long time, locals attributed this to a shape-shifting demon who they thought liked to cause misfortune and so on. And you'd walk there and you would get bad things that would happen to you.

11:22Turns out when scientists looked into it, it's a type of ant. It's an ant, which is called the lemon ant. And it produces a natural formic acid, which injects into a lot of the plants in the area and kills them off. except for certain plants that they want to keep, which have hollow roots in them or hollow stems that the ants then nest in. So it's their whole nesting area. And some of these areas have been lasting for 800 years or so. And yeah, and so for ages, it was a superstition of the area, but it just turns out the lemon ants have been creating these houses in these trees. Amazon's suffering enough.

11:54Knock it off, ants. It's hardly fair to blame the ants. No, I'm not. What we're doing. Completely, completely, completely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Hey, why don't we get more facts? James? Yeah, here's one from Harrison Lee. Harrison Lee writes that I am currently vacationing in Salzburg, Austria, the birthplace of Mozart, and learned that Mozart chocolate has nothing to do with Mozart. The chocolate was invented 100 years after his death. Further, the most commonly sold Mozart chocolate is made by a German company, Reba. Wait, are they suggesting that as well as composing amazing tunes, Mozart started a line of chocolate?

12:32I'll be honest, I wasn't massively surprised, Harrison, by this. I didn't think Mozart made these. He appears on... I've been there, Salzburg. He's on the chocolate itself. Exactly. They're called Mozart balls. Yeah. But do you know who invented them first? Who invented the Mozart balls? First. Beethoven. No, no. I keep telling you, Paul first invented them.

12:59He was a guy... But he was from Salzburg, in fairness. But yeah, they're now made by this German company. Right. Peter Second must have been absolutely gutted. Have you guys ever flown out of Salzburg on an airplane? I haven't. As someone who's a nervous flyer, it's one of the most terrifying runways because the runway at the end of it is just a giant cliff face. So if you haven't got the right height, you're just going bang into the cliff face. As they go along the runway, do the planes go, da-da-da. Da. Yeah, yeah, yeah. it's a it's a joke about beethoven swift but this is mozart please edit that bit out beethoven was from vienna

13:43carry on um the that reminds me of in uh similarly in bhutan yeah timpu airport you come out of the airport off the runway right in front of you is a cliff so you bank left to get out of the cliff and when you bank left there's another cliff oh my god bank right to get out of it so you have to do a zigzag to get out geez that's why i could arrive in bhutan but never leave if i went that is not that and you also would probably marry a yeti yes oh yeah yes exactly i i was sat on that plane by the way when we were taking off next to a pilot who was hitching a ride and i said to him he wasn't hitching he wasn't just stood on the runway yeah he was we pulled over i opened the emergency door he was he's i said to him this is crazy you've got a cliff at the end of the runway what happens if you if you go too low and he just went don't go too low yeah like the cockiness of these guys but you gotta have it right so there's a cliff at the end of the so it's not a cliff edge no it's a cliff face face right right yeah so the dirt joke doesn't work for that reason either well i don't think we need to spend any more time on that joke good to know it stayed in what joke you mean

15:05why didn't you do another fact yeah yeah why don't you all right yeah yeah so this is from kerry in queensland and she says uh i love antibody and trivia on the podcast and here's one that i found in 1873 bush ranger harry redford was unanimously acquitted of cattle theft only because the jury was so impressed by how he managed the feat that's good yeah so this is it's a pretty amazing story this guy uh this guy harry redford he's there's there's reedford redford there's different spellings of his name oh well australian listeners don't mind if we mispronounce something we are terrible queensland queensland i've so nervous about how I said that.

15:48But so basically, he stole, the numbers vary from 300 to 1000 cattle, and he knew that he couldn't sell them locally. So he had to get to another bit of Australia. He decided to cross 1500 kilometers worth of Australian desert. Was it the Nalaba Plain? It was. Don't do it! Don't do it! This is only 10 years earlier, Burke and Wills, who were two explorers who tried to do the same feat, died in this process. Also, they didn't bring a thousand cows to eat, did they? The fools? Big mistake. Always bring a thousand. No, so he managed this. And so at the trial, the very fact that he'd managed this amazing feat kind of acquitted him because they just thought that's too impressive.

16:33And then it sounds like... It doesn't really feel like that's how it should work. No. I don't know. I think if I mugged someone and then I ran away to the North Pole. and I was the first person who'd ever done it with their wallet. You know what I mean? I think that sort of does take precedence. Yeah, I think the judge, because it was up to the jury to decide, he said, you're lucky it wasn't me deciding, because the jury were the ones. And then there's a weird detail that we've been sent by Kerry, which says that his trial was delayed for more than a year because of how long it took to gather the witnesses, one of whom was a bull.

17:03Oh, come on. I'd like to call 999 more bulls.

17:14Yeah, so that's the story of Harry Redford. Andy. Yeah, I've actually got another Aussie one. This is from Ari Toon Sammonson, and it's that the annual Henley on Todd regatta in Australia boat race was cancelled in 1993 because the river Todd was wet. Ooh, what? There's a river which is normally dry. Yeah. And there's a place, Henley on Dobrogatta happens, it's in Alice Springs. Oh yeah? Yeah. Made famous, of course, by Neville Shute's brilliant novel, A Town Like Alice. Which is not actually set in Alice Springs, it's just about a town that's like Alice Springs. Anyway. Is it? Yeah. Living Next Door to Alice, that song by Roy Chubby Brown.

18:00That was about someone who lived in the next town. Yeah, and international listeners, if you don't know who Roy Chubby Brown is, don't look him up.

18:12what a sauce to bring in with a gun to my head i would not have guessed you're the next name you named will be roy chubby brown real name royston vasey which is where the league of gentlemen uh fake town is set yeah huh it was based in royston vasey roy chubby brown's real name is royston vasey yeah yeah good trivia great trivia we can always pull it back aren't we absolutely anyway um but this river this is the world's only dry river boating event people make boats and then they run along with them like the flintstones uh in the dry riverbed that's been going on for i think about 60 years now but in 1993 there was flooding and it had to be cancelled because the river was wet great okay um here's the last one from me by dave rule dave rule writes long time listener first time caller i thought you might appreciate this list of things unexpectedly named after people.

19:06I had heard most of these, but definitely not all of them. So Google's PageRank, which is a tool for ranking web pages, is named after Larry Page. Okay. Main Street San Francisco is named after Charles Main. Come on. I've never heard that. Snowflake Arizona is named after two people, Mr. Snow and Mr. Flake. And Taco Bell is named after a guy called Glenn Bell. Wow. That's good, isn't it? really good snowflake is amazing so i looked into my files for some more sort of weirdly named things um the insult dum-dum like if you call someone a dum-dum that's named after a town in india oh is it right yeah because you think it's because someone's dumb but actually it's like a pun on that because dum-dums were a type of bullet and these bullets were first made in the town called dum-dum near Kolkata.

20:00German chocolate cake is named after someone called Samuel German.

20:08And that was, it was invented in the US. And the Indonesian football team called Seaman Padang is named after a local cement company called Seaman Cement. Oh, wow. Wow. I was going to say David Seaman, the goalie. Yes, that would have been good. semen cement yeah that's great you can make your own jokes up for that one absolutely well brilliant thank you everyone for sending in your facts we're going to be doing this every Monday but before we wrap up today we have a very important job to do which is that members of the highest level of club fish known as friends of the podcast all as a reward for joining us at that highest bit get given custodianship over one of the facts that we have done over the past 11 years of fish episodes and so we are now going to dish out some more facts to some of those people so andy let's start with you yeah i got one this goes out to stew rottenbury congratulations stew your fact is one of my old facts it's that the words tory and prime minister both started out as insults and uh you you could say um they still are actually oh wow yeah yeah oh yeah well the king of satire over there yeah i think a tory is a kind of irish raider yeah that's right it was a kind of bandit who operated in ireland and i think prime minister was the idea that you were taking the piss that this person thinks they're in charge when actually they're ahead of a larger group of people is that right great that's it it's exactly that yeah yeah okay well here is one this was originally by anna and it's now under the custodianship of another anna anna darlene and Anna says that in a 2005 questionnaire about substance abuse, one in five admitted to taking a drug which doesn't exist.

22:04Can anyone remember the name of the drug? I think it was called Derbisol. Dev, it's good memory, Andy. That's right. This is episode 11. Yeah, I can't remember anything from episode 12 to 600, but yeah. Derbisol, that's right. So it was just basically they put in a load of drugs, have you taken them and they put in this one that didn't exist uh just to catch people out who are lying lovely brilliant okay well let's do another one uh this one goes to a group of people team charnedy team charnedy what do you think what's that pronunciation charnedy it could be that this person's first name is team that's very true or it could be team charlotte and eddie charnedy yes Oh, like maybe it's Charles and Eddie The singers from the 1990s Or Prince Charles Would I lie to you baby Would I lie to you Oh my goodness James, just throwing in a lot of references That have even got rid of me As an understander It could be Prince Charles and Prince Edward Of course Either way, it's suddenly a celeb pack show This is very exciting Your Highnesses And excellent musicians Thank you for listening And you now Are The custodians Of a fact that I said In episode 11 Which is that Sea otters Have a secret pocket That they like to keep Their stones in Very good It's a special Secret pocket It's a secret pocket Much like the royal family Have their own jewels Yes Oh brilliant Which they keep in a secret tower In the middle of London Exactly Nice Yes And their own secrets Which we don't need to get into We don't Not while they're listening anyway But yeah, so thank you very much To team Okay, why don't we get one from you Andy Alright, this fact goes out to Dries Belinks And it's that Nobs have been made illegal in Vancouver I'm referring of course To door knobs, this was the James fact It's absolutely straight on brand For me isn't it Make it sound a bit more rude than it actually is I think this was an early day classic.

24:15And I've said this a few times about the early day classics of No Such Thing as a Fish. But the reason I say it is for this one is, do you remember in the very early days of Fish, we produced some business cards? So when we started out, we handed out business cards to people saying, we've got this new podcast. And on the back of it, it had a fact from each one of us. And that was your fact, James, for your business card. I didn't recall that at all. Very few podcasts, I think, now have business cards. And I think that's a shame. Well, yeah, because look what it did for us. you know here we are 11 years later i know absolutely but the off menu boys i don't think are carrying around a stack of uh cards with a fact about food on them and that's why who couldn't agree more yeah all right well uh okay next fact i just want to say that i really like off menu and those guys if they want to come on our podcast it would be more than welcome that's a good point uh okay let's get to another fact here so we have episode 12 we're now going into james why don't you give us this one okay i can tell you mine from episode 12 it was the first fact in that episode and it was that if the new godzilla which is very much now the old godzilla if the new godzilla existed it would produce 12.9 million gallons of urine a day and that fact is now under the custodianship of douglas owens so congratulations to you douglas very very nice brilliant fact so I guess there must have been a new Godzilla film out, right?

25:36I think it was made by Gareth Edwards, who you and I had on Museum of Curiosity. So we knew Gareth. We had a few nights out with him. I saw it in the cinema. Yeah. There's a very exciting bit. Spoiler alert. Sorry, yeah. What's the exciting bit? It's just a bit where some people are trying to parachute down, I believe, onto Godzilla. It's an exciting moment. It's been a while since I've seen the film, because this was 11 years ago. Yeah. Yeah, 12.9 million gallons of urine, eh? Makes you think. how many gallons are there in, say, an Olympic swimming pool? 660 ,000 gallons. So that's... No, so that's 20 Olympic swimming pools of urine a day.

26:15And that's gonna ruin those Olympics, isn't it? Alright, let's get a few more. Andy, do you want to read the next one? This is a fact that goes out to Stephen Armstrong Worthington. Congratulations to you, Stephen. It's a great fact. It's that... I love this fact. The real Long John Silver from Treasure Island was father to the real Wendy from Peter Pan. What? I know. I know. Do we really know who the real Long John Silver was? Well, he was inspired by William Henley, who was a writer and an editor. And also started that regatta in Australia. Yeah. Yeah. Amazing guy. He wrote this poem Invictus Which is all about being unconquered And it's all about being a You know, knowing Being captain of your soul It's quite stirring stuff And so he clearly And he had a daughter Who was called Margaret Henley And that inspired J.M.

27:13Barry To choose the name Wendy For Peter Penn Ah, okay Yeah Because she was his Wendy Wendy That's it Very nice Yeah So anyway Love that fact There you go Congratulations Stephen Okay, let's get another one this was my fact from episode 12 and this is going to Sean Donaway the fact is that tinfoil hats worn by conspiracy theorists would actually amplify the signal very good brilliant so the idea if you don't know it is that people believe that if you wear a tinfoil hat it's going to stop the government from getting into your brain from getting signals out of there so it's an anti-stealing ideas device and then some scientists did a test on it and they worked out that if anything it would amplify a signal rather than decrease it.

27:59And that's why you wear the anti-5T bracelet, isn't it, Dan? Because that's been proven to work under lab conditions. I only work with proof. Yeah. There you go, Sean Donaway. It's a great story, great study. Shall we do one more? Let's do one more. The fact that now belongs to Shona McLean. Yep. That geese sometimes fly upside down to lose height quickly when coming into land, but their head and neck stay the right way up and this is called Wiffling It's got Murray all over it, that fact I love this fact He loves a wiffle This is probably the fact, if someone asks me for a fact it's one of the top two or three that occur to me to say to someone Is it?

28:39Yeah, there's one inappropriate one which I can't remember Oh, it's about kangaroos and their intimate parts and then this fact is the one I say when I've got rid of that fact from my head Geese fly upside down and if you've never seen a photo of a goose wiffling it's amazing, you've got to Google it Very cool Because they look so silly Yeah, it is incredible. Well, there we go. We've dished out eight new custodians facts for this episode. Congratulations to you all. Hope you're happy with the facts that you got. If you would like to get one of your own facts, well, all you need to do is go to patreon.com slash no such thing as a fish.

29:11And if you join the friend of the podcast here, you automatically will be issued one. And then we will read it out at some point on one of these episodes. Otherwise, if you want to send a fact in for little fish, podcast at qi.com. Andy goes through it all as I said at the top and he'll pick some more for next week's episode so get hunting and send them in alright everyone we'll see you again next week and we'll also see you on Friday for the main no such thing as a fish episode and until then goodbye