Little Fish: No Orifice Boy

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0:41Approved. Oh, agents, where would we be without you? Somewhere with a lot more tabs open. Create your first Monday agent in minutes at monday.com. Hi, guys. Anna here. Just before we start this show, I wanted to remind you that we're about to perform our very first ever live episode of Drop Us A Line. That of course is the super secret show that we mention a lot publicly. That is part of our Club Fish offering. If you want to check out some of the previous Drop Us A Line episodes, please go to patreon.com slash clubfish. Join up and you can hear all previous Drop Us A Lines. And we're so excited that we're going to be doing a live one on the 12th of September, King's Place in London as part of the London Podcast Festival.

1:27It'll be at 4.30 in the afternoon. Please come us along and please send in your emails with whatever mad, weird questions, insults, comments, compliments we accept, all sorts. Send them in to podcastatqi.com. And if you buy tickets to that show, please mention in your email that you've got tickets and we'll be able to pluck you out of the audience and force you to read aloud your email. Do buy tickets at nosuchingasafish.com slash live if you fancy joining in the absolute chaos of our first attempt to record that. We can't wait. It's going to be really fun. We always love doing it in the office if only to see Andy make a complete tit of himself hosting it.

2:05And looking forward to doing that in the flesh. OK, that's all for now. Onward show.

2:27Hello, welcome to another episode of Little Fish LF, the weekly podcast where we, the No Such Thing As A Fish team, go through the inbox, specifically Andy goes through the inbox, and he takes all of the greatest facts that you've sent us this week and we read them out back to you. And they're fantastic, always, without fail. My name is Anna Tushinsky. I'm here with James Harkin and Andrew Hunter-Murray. Who's going to start? I'll start. In 2020, all three of Scottish football team Ross County's goalkeepers were named Ross. Ross Doon, Ross Laidlaw and Ross Munro. They also had a midfielder called Ross Draper and a striker named Ross Stewart.

3:10So confusing. Yeah. Luckily, it's the surnames that go on the back of the shirts.

3:16Anna Ptaszynski:But in the middle of a match, you'll panic and shout Ross, won't you? and then suddenly the goalkeepers run over to you and says, what's going on? You know what? In football, there's a rule where you're not allowed to shout my ball if you're going to go to head it. Oh, we were always taught this at school. I'm not sure whether they would punish you. But basically, if you shout that, no one knows who you're talking about. And so you might be putting the opposition off and that's ungentlemanly conduct. What do you mean no one knows who you are at that time? Yeah, you're going to say my ball and then the defenders go, oh, I'm going to leave it to my mate.

3:46because you can imagine like a really good impressionist going playing a football game and doing an impression of the opposition players yeah uh and then you know they leave the ball and then you jump through and score so you're not really supposed to say my ball you're supposed to say your name but i wonder if everyone's called ross whether you just wouldn't be able to say

4:06Anna Ptaszynski:ross's ball either yeah that's fair enough i think that's a much better version of football where everyone on the pitch is an impressionist and it's trickster football and you're blindfolded so you have to judge whether the impressionist is the guy or not the guy are the impressionists also lookalikes it's very hard to get the team together but once you've done it god it's funny anyway thank you very much for that fact ross in sydney hey good stuff wonderful here's one from freya bento who signs off yes like the pie like the town in uruguay yeah yeah but that's Named after the pies Or are the pies Named after the town Pies named after the town Freya Bento What an amazing name Unbelievable That your parents Called you Freya In a cool way Love it In a cool way Yeah What cool parents I wonder if they were Huge Freya Bento fans In the 19th century Glasgow's Britannia Panopticon The UK's oldest Wooden music hall That's relevant The wooden bit Went on fire Destroying the Attic's wax museum And killing possibly All of the animals In the basement zoo This is not the funny bit The upper gallery was saved, however Due to the amount of people Who pissed on the wood over the years Whilst watching shows Making it so soggy It never caught fire No Wow Yes, there you go Good fact That's a good reason to urinate publicly You never know when there's going to be a fire This day and age Quite often Do you know that I think it's the Yazidi people Are not allowed to urinate onto fire Because fire is sacred and it's like a taboo.

5:42I remember they had lots of strange taboos. So that's one of them. So like for the Y series of QI, I was thinking like Alan, who wouldn't piss on you if you were on fire? That would be quite a good question. Might not get through, but...

5:57Anna Ptaszynski:But there are so many answers to that question. That's quite cool that there was a fire in a wax museum. So it's like an upside down candle. If you just flipped it the other way around, you've just got a giant candle. Didn't you say there was wax on the top floor? Did I make that up? That was in the attic. Yeah, the wax museum was in the attic. Yeah, exactly. So normally the fire is on top of the candle. I see. There you go. No, that's a really cool point. Otherwise they set fire to your table. Instead of pissing it out, a load of people whose birthday it was could come over and blow it out. A lot of good ideas here.

6:34And here's another good fact. Wood related, again. Ali Mackey says, one of the oldest recorded ice cream flavours is wood. What? Yeah, times were tough back in the day. Wood. And Ali specifies that China's Tang dynasty, so the 7th of the 9th centuries, Okay.

6:51Anna Ptaszynski:So before rum raisin. Rum raisin was the second, actually. Yeah, yeah. Had a recorded recipe for a frozen dairy dessert that involved camphor wood. Oh, yeah. Which actually does have a scent, scented, doesn't it? So I'm not sure if they left the wood in once they've added the scent. I don't think that would be very nice, camphor. It's very perfumey and I think of it sort of as the thing you'd use to scent a room or a car. Yeah, I think of it as being a scent for a room, which means it would taste okay, wouldn't it? I know you wouldn't eat a scented candle or a scent stick. What are you talking about?

7:23Anna Ptaszynski:My incense twiglets are delicious every night. Yum, yum, yum. I wonder if when you got your ice cream, you'd stick a piece of camphor in like a 99 flake. Oh yeah. Ice lolly. You could have the ice lolly stick. The stick is the lolly. The lolly is the stick. Yeah, you wouldn't know when to stop eating, would you? Okay, here's another one from Noah Gettle. And Noah says, sorry to keep bothering you with sponge facts. So I assume there's been a number of emails before this. Noah is a frequent flyer in the fish inbox. And welcome back, Noah. Finally, Noah, you're on the show. I don't know if Noah has been before.

8:00Maybe once. But Noah mentioned that most sponges are viviparous, as in they give birth live like mammals. But the way they fertilize their eggs is they eat sperm out of the water column and it gets shunted on a different track from the food. So like it goes down a different hole, basically. How are you doing that? That's amazing. Can it go down the wrong way? Sometimes your food goes down the wrong way. I feel like it does happen, yeah. Must do. Sorry, some sperm went down the wrong way. And Noah, to get off that subject a little bit, says there are deep sea glass sponges that are apparently more than 11 ,000 years old.

8:46Come off it. Older than farming. Oh, about the same as farming. Yeah. Yeah, about the same as the oldest cultivation of lentils. And the first pottery was invented around this time as well. And are we thinking that they were responsible in some way? That's the only logical conclusion, isn't it? I think so.

9:04Anna Ptaszynski:There must be a bit of an uncertainty range on these things. 11 ,000 plus or minus 3 ,000 years. Oh, okay. But even at the very youngest, that's 80 ,000 years. That's pretty good. So Noah sent us the link and I read through it. And basically they took some spicules, part of a sponge, and they looked at the isotopes of oxygen and various different isotopes. And you can tell how old things are by using science that I don't really understand. So cool. Great. I've got another underwater one now. This is from Stephen Elsheschen Sorry Stephen Sorry I properly screwed up your surname there But it's a really cool name The only vowel in it is E But there are three of them That's not his fact amazingly Stephen's fact is that Until 2012 Half the functioning Canadian submarines Were in a shopping mall In landlocked Edmonton, Alberta This is so good basically there was a place the West Edmonton Mall so this was a thing in the shopping mall called Deep Sea Adventure Lake and they were real submarines that offered you a 20 minute submarine ride of the underwater artificial lake, you went down 5 metres this is at the time when it must have been huge this mall it is a big mall, they were small subs the Canadian military at the time had 3 submarines and the West Edmonton shopping mall had 4 submarines were they designed for the mall or were they designed for the military and then they realised...

10:32Anna Ptaszynski:No, they were designed for the... They were never military. They were the first ever recreational submarines. There was a disaster in 1985 when one of them sank, but it was fine because it was a submarine. It's what they're meant to do, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, they can... Like, submarines can get stuck at the bottom, can't they? That's a very good point. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Although this was only five metres down, so it was less... I don't think anyone ever died in the West Edmonton Mall in a submarine. Everyone's got the bend. Can I tell you about the coolest thing that I've ever been in in a mall?

10:59Yeah. This is pretty cool, actually. So it was in China in the world's biggest mall. I've forgotten what it's called. I think I've mentioned it here before. It's like the global mall or something. Anyway, I was in like a giant robot that was probably, I would say, three times my height. And I would sit on a chair in the robot and I could drive the robot around the mall. No. So you were up at the top of it. I was like in the middle, like in its tummy kind of thing. Wow.

11:29Anna Ptaszynski:That's the closest any of us has been to living in the film Pacific Rim Yeah Where they're getting big robots It was exactly like that Did you have to fight any kaiju? No, I chased my daughter around who was in a little ice cream van Wow Camphor Or Trying to get a camphor flake Yeah, yeah Wow Yeah, isn't that cool? They had one of those Was it maneuverable? Like, was it quite good at moving around? Well, it was a little bit cumbersome But I managed to get it around How fast could it go? Oh, slow Yeah, yeah Well, that's sensible I think of everything these days I couldn't crush any skyscrapers with it It's health and safety gone mad But yeah, it was like Because we walked past it And I just went to my wife God, that's pretty cool, isn't it?

12:12She went, you should go on I was like, oh no This is probably for kids You should go Before she could say it the second time I was already there I've got a fact here from Mikael Andersson Whose fact is about Swedish footballer Gustav Lagerbjölk. Gustav Lagerbjölk is a baron and the top dude of the noble house of Lagerbjölk. I don't know if top dude is an official peerage term in Sweden. He says, I've not looked into it deeper, but it can't be too common to hold a baronial title and be a football defender at a World Cup. Wow. No, at the World Cup. Apparently so. Do we know if any of our defenders were in the House of Lords?

12:50Are there any earls? We all have had the MBE, like David Beckham. But hereditary, come on.

12:56Anna Ptaszynski:But you're not allowed to have a gong that you got through doing football. Do you know what I mean? Or through doing charity work after football that's really about the football. I believe not. I can't think of anyone of the landed gentry who's ever played even professional football. The first person I could think of was Jan vanegor of Hesselink, which I think like the off part of his name meant that he was of some kind of gentry. Oh, wow. But he was, I think he was Dutch maybe. Nice. Cool. So I was wondering if in some places it's more common to be a member of the landed nobility, only because I found out recently, reading up on the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, as you do, that there was a time in their history when one million people were nobles, like nobles, not just gentry, nobility.

13:42It was because they had quite a mad system of distributing titles.

13:45Anna Ptaszynski:It's because they were trying to avoid giving people a pay rise. They're going to say, look, we can't do it in the budget this year. But I'll tell you what we can do. We're going to put you in the nobility.

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14:44Anna Ptaszynski:I've got one more yeah go on this is from Elaine Elaine says you may already subscribe to Clive Tompkins Link Fest which I don't I don't no It sounds great because I think it's lots of interesting links There is a site That has water recipes That match The waters in various different places And sources So for example if you want to make a coffee like you're in London It provides you with a recipe of You need 55 % Perrier 37 % Harrogate Spring And 8 % Aquapanna And that provides the right hardness And the right calcium, the bicarbonate That's pretty clever If you want to feed James' cat It's just 100 % Evian 100 % of you.

15:23But I'm interested because the water in London is rank, I think. Very hard. Yeah, coming from the north of England where we get all our water from the Lake District, it's like, you know, the water in London, I don't like it at all. So I'm surprised you can make such a horrible thing from three quite nice... Okay, it's a matter of... I'm going to stand up

15:41Anna Ptaszynski:for London water here. Yeah? It's hard. I like it. I like London water. It takes off the soap really fast. When you go up north and you're washing your hands and then you put them under... It takes about 30 seconds to get all the soap off. there's no time for that down south it's busy it's productive you can't get bubbles in your bubble bath oh yeah yeah yeah every three days i have to take out an enormous block of calcium out of my kettle i like that at no extra cost at no extra cost you don't need to take it out it adds to the flavor over time yeah yeah it matures the teeth you can sprinkle it on your uh food if you run out of salt just a bit of crunchy calcium it's lovely anyway any more for any more yes i've got one from laurenz yan van stines no idea whether that is a person from the gentry from whatever country probably laurenz yan is from uh but laurenz yan says i don't think this has been mentioned yet and you're absolutely right but dominico tedesco just replaced vincenzo italiano as head coach of italian first division football team bologna oh maybe you did mention this andy or maybe we were just chatting about it a lot but i don't i've never talked about it no really the interesting thing about this as if what i already said wasn't interesting enough is that tedesco means german in italian and italiano means italian in italian in it well yeah in many different languages um so and more interestingly is the fact that Domenico Tedesco was born in Italy and Vincenzo Italiano was born in Germany.

17:17Okay. I'm sorry. So the Italian Mr. German has been replaced by the German Mr. Italian. Yeah.

17:22Anna Ptaszynski:So that is kind of... Amazing. That is fun. Amazing. It's a good fact. We get a lot of facts about football and football names. I certainly get a lot sent to me from Andy. I think who's going to handle this well? Yeah. James and Anna. Yeah, I think we do get a lot... Because there's been a World Cup on, I'd say the recent supply has dried up a little bit. in the inbox, but we're dealing with a bit of a time lag because we get the fact several weeks in advance just to have a bit of a buffer. I see. Our fans are just kind of topical. Yeah, it can happen. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was kind of interested that the Italian word for German is Tedesco.

17:56Tedesco. Yeah. Have you heard that before? No, where's that coming from? Well, what's the German for German? Deutschland, right? And what's the French for German? Alemania. Alemania. What's the Russian for German? Don't know. Nimitz. What's the English for German? German. Isn't it weird that all of those different countries have different words for German? It is actually. Isn't that so weird? And then where's his Tedesco? Yeah. So Tedesco actually comes from a similar background as Deutschland. It's just those two words. One has morphed into the other. But the reason is that Germany was such like a huge conglomeration of lots of different people that all these countries dealt with a different part of Germany at different parts of their time.

18:41and sometimes it was like the Germans or it might be the Allemans or it might be the... In Russian, they called them nimiet because it means someone who can't speak because they spoke a different language to them. In Finnish, it's Saxa, which comes from Saxons. So basically, everyone dealt with Germans for the main part of their history at different times. And so they all had different names. That is really interesting. Why can I just do one more? Because I thought this was just amazing. and this is from someone called a Lambros and it's that deer antlers have memory and the explanation is that if a deer gets injured at a certain point in that antler one year so it will make a big gash or a cut or something there'll be a small callus which will then heal and then those antlers will shed as they normally do every year and when the antlers grow back the next year in the same spot there'll be a line like an ectopic line which is a remnant of that injury.

19:41Anna Ptaszynski:What the hell? What's going on there? Because that was just air until you re-grew your antlers. The spot where that was was just in mid-air and how does it know that that spot of air should become an injury again? Well, I don't think that's the solution. Whatever the answer is, it's so clearly not that. I don't think, like, when you get a 3D printer, it doesn't go air, air, air, air, air, something, something, air, air, air, something, something. Oh, I'm running low on air. Oh, for God's sake. I've got to buy a new air canister for a 3D printer. This is so typical, so expensive. I've mis-explained that.

20:13Anna Ptaszynski:But the thing is, it's amazing. It is amazing. That is really incredible. That is crazy. And there's a little bonus fact actually from Lambros, which is that in Greek, when a man is being cheated on by his partner, we say he has antlers. So like if we'd say he'd been cuckolded. Cuckolded, yeah. Same in like quite a few countries, it's like the bull's horn thing. Yeah, but why is that? Because cuckold is about cuckoos, isn't it? and then is the it's about cookies cuckoos oh cuckoos sorry it might be about cookies but it depends on the marriage doesn't it that was never a factor for us mine actually would break down over that I can imagine well it's the old Shane Wan like thing isn't it why are you so fat Shane because every time I have sex with your wife she gives me a cookie yeah there we go we should probably wrap up shouldn't we and move on to the next bit of this show and so we are now about to bestow some of our former headline facts on lucky recipients.

21:09Who wants to go first?

21:11Anna Ptaszynski:I'll go first. Here is one that goes out to Jane. Jane, congratulations. Your fact is now that, according to a recent theory, Stonehenge was built as part of a team building exercise. Wow. It was tough for then, wasn't it? Now you go and, what, do axe throwing or something or a round of golf? I drove past Tony the other day. Did you? Yeah. Was there a big old traffic jam next to Stonehenge? Of course there was. Of course there was. That's traditional. Lovely. And it was very nice, but I think it's nice because you then get to have a little gulp without feeling bad, despite the fact that you...

21:42I deliberately don't look at it because I'm like, the reason this traffic jam is here is because people are looking at Stonehenge. There's no reason for there to be a traffic jam. It's because people are slowing down to look at Stonehenge. So I'm not going to look at it. Wait, what possible better reason could there be than looking at our greatest monument? I'm just saying that there's no reason to have a traffic jam when all I want to do is get to Slough.

22:04Anna Ptaszynski:What you need to do, clearly, is make the road a six-lane superhighway at that exact moment. Just for that 200 metres. That goes over the top of Stonehenge? Goes over the top of Stonehenge, yeah. You just need one extra lane. You need the Henge lane, which is signposted for the next three miles, if you want the Henge lane. For Gawpers. For Gawpers. Yeah, that's lovely. That's quite a good idea. I don't know why they haven't done that. Alright, shall I give a fact to somebody? Sure. How about this one? and this is for someone whose name apparently is the fervor of a new convert. No further questions.

22:39No further questions. Hey. This is amazing because this person with the extraordinary name gets the best fact I've ever said, which is that while digging New York subway tunnel in 1916, worker Marshall Maybe got sucked through a pocket of air blasted up through 12 feet of riverbed through the river and then thrown 20 feet into the air. Yes.