Little Fish: The OId Ron Brown

0:13Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of Little Fish. This is the show where we put down our favourite facts from the last seven days and we go through the podcast at qi.com inbox we pick out the best facts that you have all found and we're going to read them out now I'm sitting here with James Harkin, Andrew Hunter Murray, guys let's do it who's got a fact? I've got one, this is a great one, it's from James Patterson and it's that, the author no, how do you know it's spelled slightly differently I've got an answer for everything James Patterson or James Patterson Using an incredibly unimaginative Nom de plume The fact is It's that during the Cold War A KGB agent had several meetings With Edinburgh Leith MP And communist sympathiser Ron Brown However, they were unsure If he was spying for them or not Because they couldn't understand His thick Scottish accent And had no idea What he was telling them That's incredible Did you do some reading on that?

1:17Is that true? A little bit It's from this Ben McIntyre book about Oleg Gordievsky, who was, I think, a double agent on various sides. And the quote was, Brown may have been leaking top grade secrets, but equally, he might have been talking about football. And they just couldn't tell. They just could not tell. That's amazing. Can I just say, my wife is Russian, as has been mentioned a few times on this show. And she actually finds the Scottish accent the easiest to understand. That's so interesting. I don't know why. When you learn another language, it's kind of, you can understand it usually. But when people talk over each other, that's when it's tricky.

1:47I bet she can do it with some I wonder what it's the cadence I mean there are Because there are Scottish accents And Scottish accents There are You can get You can get some really Really hard to decide Because actually Edinburgh Is a relatively soft accent Yeah It is It is absolutely Glasgow's often said to be The harder of the two To get Yeah I don't know where Ron Brown was from He was the MP for there But he was apparently A colourful character He was a Labour MP Who damaged the parliamentary mace In a row over the poll tax And ended up in court For stealing his mistress's underwear Wow Yeah That's very cool.

2:19I have another political one. Should we jump to that very quickly? So this is sent in to us by Brady Steeper, and it's to do with Canada's longest serving prime minister, who's called William King. So he says it's important to know before hearing this fact that he guided the country through the Great Depression, the Second World War, established Canadian citizenship, and successfully challenged the power of the crown. And the guy who he was challenging it against was called Lord Bing, in a delightfully named constitutional crisis called the King Bing Affair or the King Bing Wing Ding. Yes. Yeah.

2:51I presume they were just waiting. They at some point had to have a wing ding. Yeah. Because they were called King Bing. Honestly, I've never heard the phrase wing ding used outside of fonts. Oh, yeah. I didn't know it was a thing. A wing ding was a thing. Lovely. No, I don't think I did either. No. I think you say, oh, we had a wing ding. I've heard that. No, I've heard we had a ding dong. That was when it was the Prime Minister of China, Mr. Dink, and the Vietnamese currency, the dong. The ding dong, ding dong. Anyway, the fact that Brady wanted to send to us is that on his death, King donated his estate to the Canadian government, and that included all of his diaries, 172 volumes.

3:36And when they were read, they revealed that he made huge use of seances during his term as Prime Minister. So while he was Prime Minister, he was consulting with his dead mother, he was consulting with a former dead Prime Minister, Sir Wilfred Laurier, and his dog, Pat. He would talk to his dog, Pat. I think, he stands up in Parliament, I think we need more biscuits.

4:04And one other thing to say Woof Yeah, but I mean, apparently he spoke to Pat About the importance of the involvement that Canada had in the Second World War Conscription into the army Blimey I seem to remember reading about this And I think that the story has been changed a bit over the years I think he was using it as a way to air his own thoughts and he would use either his dead mother or a former prime minister as a sort of soundboard. Can you choose who you get through to in a seance? I don't really know much about that. You can try and request. I think that's largely, people go and they hope that someone that's on their mind will show up.

4:44No, but if you've got a particular previous prime minister, can you say, I'd rather have someone from the other party, actually? Or can you say, like, is Genghis Khan available? We're in the middle of a total war. I'm sure you could. Yeah, it depends how pliable your medium is, I guess. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Did you read that in the news about the Canadian Prime Minister? Was he in Davos? Carney? Yeah, he stole some sandwiches. It was the Mark Carney Sarnibani. Oh my God. I was wondering why you hadn't said anything for the last minute. I can't believe you let me go through a whole seance chat.

5:17Sorry, I wasn't listening to any of that. You're going to be shocked when you hear what happened while you were gone into your pun temple. okay here is a fact from Sasha M and Sasha says um well Sasha sends us and what they call an almost perfect sentence with no further context now this is from Harper's magazine and the sentence goes South African taphonomists found that pigs decompose more slowly when they are wearing winter garments and more quickly when they are eaten by the cape gray mongoose yes I sort of would have expected that last bit i guess um it's a brilliant sentence i love it yeah absolutely fantastic garments as well yeah well what they do is they use pigs decomposing to analogize to humans like yes if you want to do an experiment see how humans are going to decompose you can't get a human and do it right so but you can get a pig there might be one left over from an abattoir or something and so that's why they do it so they put them in garments to see how the pig decomposes in case someone has been let's say you find a body in the top of a mountain and it's at a certain level of decomposition, you compare it with the pig.

6:33I'm just imagining the process of getting the winter garments, like having to drag a dead pig into a branch of North Face Yes We need something a little bit bigger in the waist I'm afraid Wow That's a great sentence yeah lovely i also read um a brilliant study uh this was from quite a few years ago now about 20 or 30 years ago but they put three tons of dead pigs in the middle of a forest in america and again they wanted to see how what would happen when it decomposed and this one was slightly different they wanted to see if there was a big die-off of any animal how it would affect the ecosystem interesting um so they put these dead pigs in the middle of the forest uh They looked at first the vultures came and then the maggots and then the flies and all that kind of stuff.

7:21And basically what they found is it gets really nasty really quite quickly. And not only did it get really nasty and there was dead pig everywhere and it was all rotten, actually the area never really recovered and it still hasn't really recovered. And they're still studying it today because it's not back to how it was when they did the study. Gosh. So, yeah. That's wild. That is wild. Again, it's just scientists, you know, you need to know this stuff. Absolutely. You don't know when it's going to be useful in the future. Absolutely. Yeah. Andy, you. Let's get a fact. This is you. This is a fact from Nicholas Wilkinson, who begins, I'm promising, it's maybe not exactly a fact, but, you know the pangolin?

8:06Yeah. Okay. It's a strange scaly creature, isn't it? It's quite hard-shelled. Hard-shelled, much used in traditional... Looks a bit like an armadillo. It looks a bit like an armadillo Lovely long claws Traditional Chinese medicine Gets through a fair few I think they've just been removed From the official I think they're the most trafficked animal in the world Well I'm glad you say that Well I'm not glad you say that I'm incredibly sad you say that Because they're lovely Sorry So You know the thing of more sharks Many many more sharks are killed by people Than people are killed by sharks Yeah So Nicholas writes This is similar Because of the trade in pangolin products About a million pangolins are very sadly killed by humans each year.

8:48Obviously horrendous. The total of humans killed by pangolins is one. Oh, wow. So they have no teeth. They're slow moving. They have poor eyesight and they're about the size of a cat. Okay. So it's an amazing story. It's from the book Mammals of Thailand, right? When threatened, the pangolin will wrap its tail completely around itself, turning itself into a ball, basically. So it's almost impossible to unfold Like an armadillo or a hedgehog, whatever But this is related by a naturalist called W.W.A. Phillips A villager clubbered a pangolin one day In the jungle and started back for his village The pangolin slung over his neck The tail hanging down on one side, the head on the other But the pangolin Was merely stunned When found later, the man was dead on the trail Strangled, because the pangolin Had suddenly come to And then thought, right, coil up, defensive A pangolin strangling Oh my god If only there was a head of state That rhymed with that If you can think of a head of state Who rhymes with pangolin or strangling Podcast at qi.com Yeah, and it was still curled around his neck When the guy was found Proving he'd been the victim Of a scaly mugging There you go Yeah, really good Amazing What a story What a story Well, while we're in the world of animals Jelk Ludelfilge Apologies for the pronunciation there No notes.

10:13Ludolf Fulch. It's very rare to hear you nail it the first time, but... Jelke. J-E-L-K-E? Jelke, probably. But that was exactly how you speak when you're doing an impression of the Nobel Committee. Sorry, Jelke or Jelke. But it's a great fact you've sent in, which is when biologists catch lizards during field work, they use a loop of dental floss with which they lasso the lizard. This makes sure that the lizard remains unharmed and can be later released again without injury. The lasso is, of course, known as a lizu. So a little dental floss lasso for lizards. That's really quite sweet. It is quite sweet.

10:58Yeah, I love it. Okay, here is a fact from Sam Walker, which Sam describes as a little fun fact. But let's see what you think. Sam says that the average ejaculate contains approximately 220 ,000 terabytes of data. Terabytes? Terabytes. That's massive, isn't it? Like, one terabyte is very big. It's more than I've got on my computer. Oh, dear. Oh, dear. You can get special cloths. Buy one of the lights, and that'll show you where you need to devote most intensive attention to. Oh, dear. You know when you walk straight into your own trap?

11:40You could almost physically hear the funk as your head hit. Oh. It was a proper sideshow, Bob, and the rakes, wasn't it? Yeah. Wow. So, yeah, this is because each sperm contains around 37.5 megabytes of DNA data, which is basically your genome is in every sperm. And there's a lot of sperms in an ejaculate. Right. But I think if you were to put it in a zip file, if you were to compress it, because actually all the data is kind of very similar. If it's gone into your zip, something's gone wrong. What I'm saying, like there's a fact that says that the amount of data is the same as the entirety of English Wikipedia, approximately 40 ,000 times.

12:31Wow. That amount of data. But the truth is that all that data is almost the same. So if you were to put it into your computer, you can compress it. And actually, I think it would be much, much smaller than that. Because it's like, the thing is about data is you can have like, Mary has a little lamb written down, but you could do the same thing 200 million times. But is there really any more data there? Or is it the same amount of data just replicated? So it's a lot of... Just see a receptionist at the sperm. Thank you, Mr. Harkin. But actually, we just need you to fill the sample. Thank you. But I will pass that on I'm writing it down Zip file And you're going to need to give that away

13:19This is a very brisk one From Kenneth Booman Hopefully this is suitable for Little Fish I work for a competitor of Chevrolet So this one stings a bit The Chevrolet Suburban Is the longest produced automobile model or nameplate still in production today. It was introduced in 1934. Wow. They've been making Chevrolet Suburban since 1934. Gosh. Isn't that weird? I can't picture anything, but I can't imagine what a Chevy is like. It's a really quite big American car. Is it? I'm sure they get much bigger, but it is on its 12th generation. Like if you look at the first generation one, it does look different to the modern.

13:56Really? Yeah. Of course. Yeah, yeah. Like Doctor Who. It's just... Exactly. Exactly. Also on roughly the 12th generation I can't remember actually A rare chink in the armour for you Dan Are we counting the audiobooks? That's amazing Is there any other ones that are kind of similar? I can't imagine Like a Ford Fiesta Ford Fiesta, that's the one that was in my That's interesting isn't it, it's like when you say thing of a car And people say Ace of Spades, if you ask a British person to name a car They'll probably say Ford Fiesta I think so. But wasn't like some of the early Volkswagens, didn't they date back to World War II?

14:35I don't know. Yes, they probably had a bit of a clear out of the Volkswagens, didn't they? After the mid-40s? I think they... Tended by association? I don't know. Maybe. This is a problem with doing this show with no Google. Absolutely. Yeah. I'll do one more here, which was sent in by Chloe Martin. She says, A good Hong Kong fact for you. Redneck Seller Terrace in the Hong Kong mid-levels is so named because the original sign writer wrote alexander terrace right to left as in the chinese way redneck cellar is alexander backwards it's alexander backwards now we've mentioned this on the show we have and we've mentioned it because um my mom and dad lived on that road yes yeah it's a friend of the podcast redneck cellar last one yeah okay this is from graham wallace and graham says you've covered animal regeneration previously but this seems to be an extreme example There are two sea slugs from the species Sacoglosson That can amputate their entire body And then come back to life Wait, what's What's left if you've amputated your entire body?

15:36Your head Head and body Separate your head from your body No more shoulders, knees and toes though It's a quick game Head

15:49You've got your eyes and your ears And your mouth and your nose

15:55So here's the thing How do you get the energy to regrow your body If you're only a head and you don't have a digestive system? I guess you can't travel around to eat Because you were using your body for that Even if you could eat Was the food can't digest You don't have a digestive system I would say small Like micro digestive system just in your mouth Kind of But there's something more Do you park the bottom of the hole in your neck on the anus of another slug and taken the nutrients of what's passed through their body wow dan i mean that i could imagine that working nature is wild yeah yeah yeah but sea slugs especially they are wacky yeah what seems to happen is that they eat some algae and the algae photosynthesizes creates energy and that gives them the energy to then create the wow that's insane i know that is nature that is yeah that's as weird as you said then is it yeah i was gonna say is that any weirder than attaching your head onto someone's anus to get the it's like it's weirdly like like mary shelley's frankenstein monster where it's like electricity was turning like it's it's creating this kind of zap sense of actually i don't think she ever says the galvanizing force is electricity in the book No, but in the preface She does talk about Galvani's experiments Yes, but that's just an example And actually it's very unclear what chemical mechanism Is used to bring the creature to life Yeah, but I would I'm just forestalling you I would have said Frankenstein In that case, but I said Mary Shelley's Frankenstein Which is the name of the Kenneth Branagh film In which Electricity is used I'm going to cut off my top knot right now Very nice Very nice Okay well this is brilliant We love these facts coming in Thank you so much everyone And before we wrap up with this episode We've got one more important thing to do Which is hand out some past headline facts To members of the highest tier Friend of the podcast of Clubfish So who wants to go first?

18:01I will This one goes out to Radu Flueras Fantastic name Radu This is the fact that In medical jargon, LOL used to mean little old lady And that meant that other doctor's acronyms included LOLINAD Little old lady in no apparent distress Or LOLFIDIGABUR Little old lady fall down go boom This is great, this is episode 27 And we had as guest on the show Helen Zaltzman It's such a weird one, this kind of medical jargon stuff Because the idea is that doctors write it on your notes and then I saw a really really believable debunk saying you're allowed to get your notes now there's absolutely no way that any doctor would do this and a load of doctors saying yeah it was a thing that happened in the past but we don't do it anymore but then I've heard actual doctors say yeah we do do that we do this all the time so I don't know what to believe yeah in between carving our initials on your liver during sensitive operations uh yeah I think probably it definitely used to happen a fair bit before you could get your notes quite so easily uh yeah and helen is of course a complete podcasting don yes she's of answer me this and and the illusionist and all sorts of other shows and uh i don't think it's too much to say that we were partly inspired to make this show from helen yeah they showed kind of the potential of what a podcast could be to everyone who was making it at the time so that was very cool we love helen um okay here is one for alice jackson and alice your facts i'm sorry it's another dan schreiber one only joking no it's a great fact it is that according to researchers at glasgow caledonian university listening to billy connolly can substantially increase your tolerance to pain and this is the way that they do this is you put your hand in ice for as long as possible and you take it out when you can't manage it any longer and they've done a few experiments like this the famous one is the one about um swearing which is you could keep your hand in the ice for longer if you're just going yeah effing and jeffing yeah oh i thought you were just doing a thick scottish accent i can understand what you were saying the old ron brown uh well congrats to you alice uh that's your fact um and now kate haimes we have one for you Is it not Hames?

20:29No, I'm just laughing because do you remember You called me Hames for quite a long time Hames But I think one reason was Did I not get mentioned in someone's book? Yeah, you received an acknowledgement In Steve Colgan's book Which was Hames Harkin And you became Hames for a very long time Yeah, so Kate Hames This is your fact The first woman to cycle the world learned to ride a bike The day before she set off Is this friend of the podcast? Annie Londonderry Annie Londonderry Yes Who was an amazing World travelling Cycling lady And she was I think she was about 23 when she did it She was so young I think she might even Have had a Husband and children Who she might have Written out of the story She did Which she was selling To the press Because she wanted to be Like young single Cool lady Right Gets press attention You know what There is That's a lot of the story But there is so much More to it And you can read All about it In the excellent book Everything to play for the qi book of sport by james harkin and anna tushinsky she has a whole chapter about her yeah or you can just go on wikipedia i mean it's all that or you can listen back to episode 27 as well i think we found some stuff that isn't in wikipedia for that we went to the old newspaper archives because she was in the newspapers quite a lot and they gave like lots of really amazing stories of when she fell off her bike and all this kind of stuff nice yeah and do you think Did she cheat for any bits?

21:55Obviously she went on boats over the ocean bits Yeah, we think that a lot of her stories Should be taken with a bit of a pinch of salt Yeah, but she was very cool Yeah, oh yeah, super cool Very early friend of the podcast One of the first ever friends of the podcast actually Yeah, but she did make it too We did recently, if you're part of the top tier of Club Fish There is the friend of the podcast tier If you remember that, after three months you get sent a t-shirt And we have made a friends of the podcast t-shirt Which lists all of the greatest friends of the podcast And she makes it on there Annie Londonderry appears Andy, let's go to you This is a fact that goes to Mark Norman Mark, your fact is that when Californian ground squirrels are attacked by snakes They increase their blood pressure So their tail gives off more infrared radiation Making them look bigger You might be thinking Well, my blood pressure would increase if I was being threatened by a rattlesnake But the really cool thing is they do this with rattlesnakes Which they know can see in infrared even though the squirrel itself can't see an infrared it knows that the snake can it's fascinating and it doesn't do it with other snakes so we know it's a deliberate thing because it knows yeah i guess it just knows it works maybe it doesn't know about the infrared spectrum yeah it just does something yeah and this works against that snake and they're like guys we should do that again exactly here is a fact uh this one goes to jdg jdg i don't know what your what they stand for but i think the j might be joshua looking at your email address but anyway jdg this is your fact now and that is that every day over a hundred people used to watch king louis the 14th get up and get dressed magnificent yeah uh that was uh one of your facts andy and it was a brilliant fact about um yeah about how his life was just on display yeah it was called the revive Wasn't it?

23:48And people just woke up And well they woke up early and then went to watch Him wake up and then they watched him have His first wee of the day and then they watched Him get dressed and then they watched him have his Breakfast. Yes we're actually thinking Of launching a higher tier where you can Get this kind of access too If anyone registers their interest Yeah very cool I'm going to read out the next one here and by the way That last fact was from episode 28 so here's the second One from that episode which is now Under the custodianship of Gemma Donald and it is that there is an original Picasso that we will never see because it was eaten by the dog really nice I know he was very prolific Picasso wasn't he he was the one who also did a supposedly did the drawing on a napkin to pay for his croissant yes that's right and they said Mr.

24:37Picasso can you sign it please and he said no I want to pay for my coffee not the entire cafe always a way to endear yourself to the staff Do you guys ever do this in cafes or restaurants? I do it all the time. Yeah. A bit of tedious humour. And, you know, yeah, get 10 % off. Get 10 % off? Five? Yeah. Okay, we'll just take a service chart. Thank you very much. They've actually added 10 % to the bill. Time wasting. Here's another one. Yep. It goes out to JF. This is the fact. It's that during the Second World War, the US Navy diving manual contained detailed instructions over what to do if eaten by a giant clam.

25:19Wow. Yes. That was one of mine. I can't remember the details about it now, but it was just in this. I remember seeing the images. Yeah, I remember it. And then we looked into it, and actually a giant clam isn't strong enough to... It takes an hour to close. Yeah. And all of this. And even if it did close, it has little gaps in it, and you'd be able to get your foot out anyway. Yeah, it's just a clam. Grow up. I don't want to be responsible as a podcast for anyone being eaten by a giant clam and them saying, oh, I'm just going to keep my foot in here for an hour because no such thing as a fish said that I'll be able to easily wiggle it out.

25:55They call no such thing as a fish. They know what they're talking about in the underwater realm. Fine. I sort of think it would be cool if we were responsible for that. Well, we're trying to get publicity this year, aren't we? It's the year of, you know, putting ourselves out there. You're right. So I think getting listeners eaten by giant clams is one way of doing it. Is that or the one show? I think the problem with that is if we try and get our listenership up by doing away with our listeners, we have to get two new listeners for the one that we've lost. Do you know what? That's a really good point.

26:28That's a really good point. Okay, well, there we go. Our latest custodians. Congratulations to JF, to Gemma, to JDG, to Mark, Kate, Alice, and Radu. You are now the custodians of all these facts If you yourself would like to get ownership Of one of our facts All you need to do is join the top tier of Clubfish Go to patreon.com Slash no such thing as a fish And not only will you be given a shout out On the show but we will also send you A digital certificate And do with that What you like Anyway we're going to be back again next week Do keep sending us your facts We absolutely love reading them out here on Little Fish Otherwise come join us again on Friday for another regular episode of No Such Thing as a Fish.

27:12We will see you then. Goodbye.