Little Fish: The Cat Is Banging On The Door

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1:13James Harkin:Hello and welcome to another episode of Little Fish. This is the bonus Monday episode where we put down our favorite facts from the last seven days and we go through the facts that you have sent us via podcast at qi.com. Thank you everyone who has done so. We've had an amazing collection of facts sent in this week. Let's get to it. Who wants to get going? I've got one. Andy. Bring that energy, Andy. Bring that energy. This is from Stephen Turner and it's a very good email. It combines a good fact and then a bit of abuse and then a bit of praise. Right. Do you want to miss out the middle bit? No, I think you need it.

1:55It's a piece of me though, so don't worry.

1:56James Harkin:Maybe miss the fact, I'm happy with just pure abuse Okay, Stephen writes Good Stevening Brackets, my name is Stephen And although this is my standard chat-up line It barely works in real life As it is predicated on knowing my name beforehand I think that's fair And only meeting people at night Honestly, I thought he meant I want to give you a good Stevening And I thought, that's a bit too forward I think for me But at least applicable to daytime time as well as night. I think we can all agree it's not one for the ages, chat-up-wise. Stop using it, Stephen. Anyway, he says, I've just learned an interesting fact and thought I'd share it with you guys as it can be reworded in that famous, slightly irritating QI and fish way.

2:43Alright. And then he says, the A303 was not built close to Stonehenge. Stonehenge was built close to the A303. Now, okay. I'm happy to put up with the abuse and the slightly dodgy chat-up lines, because that is a great fact. That is fantastic. He says, it turns out the A3S3 follows an ancient trade route and has been in use for thousands of years. I recall a few years ago, Andy buffoonishly repeated a fake fact about the motorway in Cornwall following the migration routes of Ice Age mammoths or something, so I thought I'd double-check. I have checked it as well, Stephen, and I think it's about 50-50, because there is this ancient route.

3:26it was used several thousand years ago stonehenge was built about 5 000 years ago and it's quite hard to tell when a trade route was first used because initially you'd just be following like a chalk path at the top of a ridge or something yeah yeah i mean who knows they could have been built around the same time like which was built first the m6 or t-base services i think naturally if you build the trade route you want to something to look at along the way basically stonehenge might be that kind of service station yes one of those giant prawn statues they have in australia for something to look at or like you know those big billboards that ask you a quiz question exactly yeah if we look five miles down the road there might be a sign like an ancient sign saying how many stones do you think there are stonehenge well we've come we've covered stonehenge and the

4:19James Harkin:theories of what it might be multiple times on this show like one one great one was that it was a giant glockenspiel uh the other one is that it had nothing to do with ritualistic stuff but that was built as a sort of a team exercise on a business outing uh you know what dan i reckon that our theory that it's a giant motorway service station is as applicable as any of those other theories that you've just said absolutely yeah probably as much science behind it as well um it's but that's great i'm kind of in love with steven's email and tone and i think we've i think i don't think we've done justice to his pickup line i think he could probably sell it no we've all been given a good stevening haven't we okay here is another fact this one is from kezia farbing and kezia tells us about swindon wildcats so swindon wildcats are a hockey team a nice hockey team and this year not one but two father and son duos played on the same roster two father and son duos absolutely so it's completely unique has never happened before there's an example of one father son uh gaudy howe and his sons played in 1979 but like for this to happen twice in the same team has never really heard before now james you know a lot about sports is it the case that a sporting team which has a father and son duo on it is it the case that the sport in question is not enormously oversubscribed with people wanting to play it because normally sports have a very specific age range of players that they're going for i see what you mean need to be 19 but there are some like football players who play like cristiano ronaldo still playing football and he's he might be like 41 or something now like he's around 40 for sure uh and absolutely footballers tend to be a little bit promiscuous when they're younger men so it's not impossible that he could have a child who was playing football at this age yeah are you suggesting there's a footballer out there who could have his own squad yes or at least a five-a-side team there is a footballer whose progeny are on the same team.

6:25And that is Hazana Parnell and her daughter, Ramaya Osborne, who played in the same team in this year's FA Cup. They played for Hensford in the FA Cup second round qualifying match against Bromsgrove Sporting. And not only were this mother and daughter on the same team, but the mother provided an assist for the daughters to score. So the mother crossed it in and the daughter scored it. And the daughter Amaya said, we're both so connected. I see her visions and she can see mine. Wow. Which feels like cheating to me, actually. Yeah, that is cheating. You're not allowed to use telepathy on the pitch from my limited knowledge of the game.

7:11But there you go. And that is not an undersubscribed sport football.

7:15James Harkin:No, exactly. You know, we recently had Melanie Bracewell on the podcast. Yeah. If you had her Wikipedia page, it's just absolutely riddled with New Zealand cricketers. Her whole family, her relatives, notable relatives, including two uncles who both played test match cricket for New Zealand, or at least one of them did and played like 40 matches. Two of her cousins are current cricketers in New Zealand. That should have been her world. And she does play netball and volleyball and things like that. Imagine the disappointment in the family when they found out that she was going to be coming on QI and stuff instead of playing in the World Cup.

7:55James Harkin:Hey, why don't I move us on to another fact. We've got a fantastic one here from Tanya Thamkrufat. It's a surname that I've definitely butchered, Tanya. Canadians have special crisps to eat during storms. This is so good. Yeah, okay, so she sent the fact which says, I learned that in Canada there's a tradition of eating storm crisps. And it's such a popular tradition that there are chips made specifically to eat while hunkering down at home during these storms. So I looked into it. This is true. This originates back in 2014 when there was a radio broadcaster called Stephanie Domit who was on the radio talking about an incoming storm.

8:39James Harkin:and she said she had an intention to purchase certain chips and dips to prepare for the storm and they started talking about this as storm chips and this has become an actual thing i don't think that's a proper tradition i'm sorry to cut across you dan i just think no no no it's a growing it's a growing thing are they especially strong crisps the tradition is the tradition is that you would buy crisps but there is now a company that has trademarked storm chips and produces storm chip bags that you can buy in the shop so it's very specifically for it now i asked a canadian friend of mine whether or not he had done it or heard of it he said no but he looked into it and he can see it's very predominant in a different bit of canada okay guys guys what's everyone's storm crisp this is like my version of desert island discs oh yeah you're going to be trapped in a never-ending storm in your home and it's never ever going to end and you can only have one kind of crisp um okay shall i tell you mine yes please um hula hoops original uh salted barbecue oh the um flavor doesn't really matter okay uh and that's because um if you have like a tube it has a very special sort of aerodynamic signature which will you know like one of the best paper aeropages you can make is like just a circle of paper and when the air rushes through it it keeps it up in the air and so i think that i could like make these hula hoops sort of hover in front of my mouth and then eat them like a pac-man right that's impeccable reasoning that's incredible it's such good reasoning that i cannot think you have not thought about this before i i all the aerodynamic properties can i just say storm outside your house andy we've been doing this show for like over 10 years yeah all this says is that you have no trust in my sense of whimsy that you think I can't just make this up on the spot.

10:27Did you cheat and look at the notes for this before James? I just feel like there's no way that whimsy's coming up on the spur of the moment. I feel like, who's under your desk? Is there a writer under your desk handing you out bits of whimsy? Have you got Michael McIntyre down there?

10:44James Harkin:I just like sensations. Thai sweet chilli. I just want to eat it. I'm not trying to make it float. I would use those pickled onion monster munch and gear together the teeth or the claws on each one and build a rudimentary clock that's what i'd do yes very good yeah thank you you saw the padding he did james earlier trying to work out how you were writing he was writing that in his head while he was doing all that i've got jasper carrot here and he's been here is a fact from siddhartha basu uh who gives us a little bit more grist for andy's book of things that sound like they're named after the thing they are but actually are named after a person or the other way around very nice i'm still working on the title uh but this this is a a bit of news from the last few weeks because marco rubio the american politician tweeted today another transformer explosion at the german dam in bolivar state caused another massive blackout and he was complaining about what he thought was a problem in venezuela due to the government to which he got a reply saying senator marco rubio an important transformer exploded in Bolivar.

12:01If that you're correct. However, it was not in a dam and it was not German. My name is German Dam. I am one of the journalists who published the information. Wow. What he had done was seen the name German, I suppose you pronounce it, German Dam, and thought that it was an actual dam, but actually it was just the name of this reporter. Beautiful. so it doesn't quite fit in your book but maybe as part of the intro or like a an appendix i think we can have a chapter for for that like unusual cases i i don't know if you guys i don't think i've told you this i've actually made a document on my desktop now have you yeah and it's got is now thanks to your contribution there james got six entries in it

12:47James Harkin:wow gosh have we heard all five other ones on the show over the years yeah you have french's mustard german chocolate cake oh german chocolate cake and german damn that they can go together uh the children's python the outer bridge bridge which is named after someone called outer bridge uh and valentine's meat juice you know um how you have pitched about 200 000 different sitcoms on this show and none of them has yet to be made yeah um do you have a document open for each one of those uh and if so what is your memory storage plan i've not written them down because i assume maybe this is naive but i assume that someone's going to get in touch i know that we get big shots listening to us i can tell that from the state of the inbox and i just assume that one day a spielberg or maybe a nolan will get in touch maybe christopher nolan having done the odyssey will say actually i think we should do clown priest the series and make that the next big thing i reckon what happened is edgar wright was writing that email to you and he heard the episode when you said he wasn't cool and he just went nah i'm gonna i'm gonna get mcintyre instead you're absolutely right what was the one because he would be perfect for that one what was it was something cop do you remember that they were all something cop they're all cop they're a type tiberius cop was one that's it there was the tetris cop or something like that yes there is like yeah dimly i just know that these are good ideas that's the terrible thing i don't know why they're not being made i think maybe it's because we're not in the era of the cop drama right now like many of your ideas are like balloon cop or candle cop or whatever right but there's not many of those shows being made right now it's more like like line of duty is procedural yeah and this is very much more, what if there was a cop who was also the Emperor Tiberius and there's no procedure there.

14:47You're right. I think that's what people like. People like a crime and it's solved but we see all the workings going on in the background. It's not so much about the cop having a wacky personality trait these days.

15:00James Harkin:I want to see a series about a struggling author who's been trying to sell multiple cop TV shows. Whoa. Struggling is loaded language Dan. Loaded like the gun of struggle car.

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16:19Save big money at Menards.

16:25James Harkin:This is from Stav Berman, who writes, and this, give it a chance, let it breathe. On October 21st, 1988, a falling poodle caused the death of three people in Buenos Aires. The poodle, who ironically was called catchy, fell 13 stories, landing on and instantly killing a 75-year-old. Oh, no. In the ensuing commotion, a 46-year-old on locker got hit by a bus that they didn't see coming. And then an unidentified man who witnessed all of this suffered a heart attack from the stress and died on the way to hospital. So it was a poodle led to three very different deaths. This is like Final Destination or something.

17:10James Harkin:It really feels like it. And I tried to look it up. I tried to debunk it. You know, I looked into Snopes. Because this does smell of it, right? Yeah. And nowhere, as far as I can see, has debunked it. But it has appeared in multiple places. Reuters and the Canberra Times newspaper. That big newspaper. I'm sure it's massive in Canberra. Do we know why it was falling? They don't know. We don't know anything more. No. No, no, no. They say we have absolutely no idea. It fell off a 13th floor balcony. So maybe it was something to do with superstition and bad luck. That can often make you fall off a building on a 13th floor.

17:52James Harkin:That's why buildings often don't have a 13th floor, to avoid this kind of situation. I mean, that's quite sad. Can I give you a more whimsical animal one? Oh, yeah. This one came from Stephen Corcoran. And it's just a sentence that in 2024, a Portuguese plane was grounded for four days after 130 hamsters escaped on board. As far as I can see, there were no deaths involved in this one. Basically, they were in the cargo hold and they managed to escape and they ran riot. And it took them days to get them all out because they had to find 132 hamsters inside this airplane. And the airplane holds are pretty big.

18:31and eventually they managed to get them on the fourth day. It's bloody hard to get a hamster out from a tight place.

18:40James Harkin:Okay. Okay. All right, Richard Gere.

18:46James Harkin:What are they? Which tight place have you experienced a hamster in? I just mean they like narrow dark. There's nothing I can say now. there's nothing I can say that makes it sound like I haven't been indulging in unnatural practices I simply mean they like narrow constricted spaces, they crawl into tunnels and holes and I used to have hamsters when I was little and they would get if they got loose around the house and they got under the dishwasher or behind a bookcase or something or up your arse yeah right okay, it was just very hard to get them out you had to lure them out and of course they were labelled 1 to 70 and then 72 to 133.

19:29So everybody thought there was one hamster left.

19:34James Harkin:That would be genius. Cool. We should wrap up here on this side. That is it for your facts. Sorry, one second, guys. The cat is banging on the door. It might need a shit.

19:47Sorry. I could hear it banging. Yeah, yeah. She's just trying to get in the room because I closed the door. I thought there was a chance it could be proper emergency, but she just went for her food and now she's looking at me like I'm a dick. The cat is banging on the door is quite a good way of saying that you need a poo.

20:09Yes. The flap cannot hold the cat for long.

20:15James Harkin:Okay. Can you? Yeah, I'm just, there's a gardener outside chopping and can you guys hear it? Do you need a poo as well? the gardener is chopping the log is about to tumble to the ground oh dear I'm so sorry guys there's a huge chocolate bar that's being forced into the room excuse me alright here we go Okay, that is all of your facts for this episode. However, before we wrap up, we need to hand out some facts. That's right. If you are a member of Clubfish, the highest tier, which is friend of the podcast, you will become owner of one of the facts from our archive. That's 12 years of headline facts, and you will be the custodian of one of them.

21:11James Harkin:As well as that, you're going to be sent a digital certificate. So check it out. But for now, let's hand some out. So who wants to go first? I'll go first. this fact now belongs to Elliot and Elliot your fact this week is that male turkeys blush when they see female turkeys aww Christmassy one yep romantic so Valentine's Day as well Thanksgiving because of turkeys as well it's quite an all rounder this fact isn't it but I think what it is is like turkeys they have their wattle which is like the reddish bit of skin that's below their chin. And they also have a red sort of, what's it called? The comb.

21:56Ah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But these things, they get darker in colour when the blood rushes to them. And for turkeys, that happens when a male sees a female. Very cool. I've got one that goes out to Andrew. And it's that. the composer of Jingle Bells also wrote the song We Conquer or Die. I think this was a guy called James Lord Pierpont and I believe fought in the US Civil War for the South and wrote various punchy battle hymns and that was his sort of light relief, I suppose, was Jingle Bells. Unless there's like an underlying meaning behind jingle bells that we don't know about. Jingle bells, jingle bells, the South has been betrayed.

22:48That kind of stuff. Yeah, yeah. The original lyrics.

22:54James Harkin:I go on here for Tim Oxenford. And this is the fact that Franz Kafka once convinced his whole family that Einstein's theory of relativity would cure his tuberculosis. Wow. Yeah. I love Kafka. He's one of my favourite authors. And he just worked in a bureaucratic office, didn't he? Which he really hated. And then he would just go home and write these incredible stories. And then didn't really become famous from them, I think, in life? No, I don't think he... Or didn't publish a huge amount? When he asked for his papers to be burned after his death, but the person who was given that task went, no, I'm going to publish them.

23:31James Harkin:So we actually found out a lot about his writing against his wishes. I especially loved reading them when I was working in offices. like I reckon for anyone who works in like an office job reading Kafka is just it really sort of makes you think well maybe this is not so bad that's very high end James I gotta say other people would recommend watching The Office maybe the American version of The Office if you want a bit of cultural diversity but for you straight in no no read Kafka that's great I actually think Ricky Gervais is like a modern day Franz Kafka as yet unafflicted with tuberculosis and we pray that continues okay here's another fact this one now belongs to sean belton sean your fact is that dead geckos still stick to walls for at least half an hour that's a nice and you can print out the certificate we send you sean you can stick this to your wall with a gecko yeah exactly yeah but i remember that i remember this fact it was so exciting at the time it was a really exciting new scientific finding uh here's another one this goes out to cara chrysostomo and the fact is in 2013 a group of people tried to crowdfund london's first ufo museum their target was one million dollars they only managed to raise however three hundred and seventy dollars it's it's that's not good it's a big gap uh in the fundraising yeah when did we do this fact that would this have been probably 2015 maybe i just about it was just i think it was just about then yeah but we wouldn't have known then what we know now which is that aliens do exist and trump is about to oh yeah release all of the information gotta do anything to distract from the epstein files won't he sorry imagine if he releases all of the ufo data and it turns out that the aliens have just been sending each other emails about epstein's island I don't remember too much about this other than it was a big attempt and they just had to pull out of it I don't think London has a UFO museum since this happened No, I think we would know about it if there was one No, there was a big thing where Blackpool was almost turned into an Eric Von Daniken Chariots of the Gods theme park basically The whole of Blackpool, Dan?

25:50James Harkin:Such a huge section of Blackpool's workforce were going to be working for this theme park and it got pulled at the end because they thought this is nuts what are we doing not at the end right near the beginning i bet it got pulled it wasn't like they'd nearly turned all the blackpool into an eric von daniken chariot to be fair if you pull something and stop doing it then that is the end right that's true it's like whenever you have lost an object you always find it in the last place you look because then you stop looking yep yep when was it then that they did this it was only a few years ago um okay because i used to go to blackpool as a kid all the time and i would have dreamed of seeing that kind of theme park there oh my yeah i mean as a kid that's it's a perfect what's that andy this is 2021 chariots of the gods ditched at blackpool central the developers behind the 300 million pound visitor attraction have decided not to name the showcase indoor theme park after the 1968 pseudoscience book oh sorry dan that's devastating for you i i know it's pseudoscience okay okay sorry listener he just winked when he said that.

26:59So, it sounds like they did make it, but they just didn't name it after him? Yes, and listen to this. The contents of the venue and its attractions, which include a flying theatre, will still be based on Von Daniken's book.

27:13James Harkin:Is there an apology coming my way from you, Andy? Or are we just going to ignore the takedown you gave me before, verifying I was right? I think we'll just press on. Okay! This fact is now in the custodianship of Finn. Finn, your fact is that cows have friends and they get sad if you separate them. Oh, Alex Bell, fact from when he was on the show. Do you remember on tour, we got to meet the scientist who discovered that cows with names give more milk than cows without names? Oh, yes. That was a very exciting moment. It feels like this is in the same territory as study. yeah i think it was here's one more and this goes out to web jedi what a great name um and the fact is it's illegal to take a selfie with a tiger in new york city wow a bit surprised about that yeah but we must have found the actual ordinance because um online you do get a lot of these things where it's like it's illegal to do this in this town or whatever and often they're made up personal tiger ownership is quite big in the states right yeah like i think mike tyson had one new york city does feel like an odd place particularly manhattan to have a tiger yeah obviously between this show going out and this moment we've had the whole tiger king and yes um yeah interesting don't take selfies with tigers i assume it's still against the rules so if you're listening in new york city don't do it guys put that tiger down here's one that It goes out to Christopher.