Little Fish: This Is A Song

0:00In the next Rare Well Done, the Thrive team helps two people with CIDP tackle the tricky issue of friendship. Hello! They say the quiet part out loud. In the event my CIDP worsens, my friends might decide it's too much. Get nudged outside their comfort zone. I don't know if I want to. To forge stronger connections. The best thing that's ever happened to me, our friendship. To Rory. Watch Rory and Michelle take on the friendship factor on the next episode of Rare Well Done. Hey, it's Ryan Seacrest for Jewel Osco. Fall is coming, which means cough and cold season is almost here. Get ahead by stocking up on all your favorite cough and cold essentials now through September 29th.

0:40Shop in-store and online to save on products like Allegra tablets, Hulls Drops, Mucinex Kickstart, Zyrtec Allergy Relief Tablets, Tylenol Liquid Gels, One-A-Day Men's Health, and Vicks Dayquil and Nyquil Combo Packs. Offer ends September 29th. Restrictions apply. Offers may vary. Visit JuleOsco.com for more details.

1:28our inbox and we repeat them and get the credit for them. My name is Anna Tashinsky and I'm sitting here with James Harkin. Hi, James. Hi, Anna. I'm going to credit the people who send them in, but fine. Oh, is that how we do it? Okay, I need to stop claiming these as my own. Hi, Andrew Hunter-Murray. I'm also sitting here with you. Hello. Hi. Hi. And you're the one who's been compiling all of these facts and sending them through to us. It's a team effort, but yes.

1:57Thanks for that. You're the quarterback, and then we're just all the other irrelevant ones in the team. Isn't that how American football works? The quarterback is just the whole team, and then everyone else stands there cheering them on? A simplification, but I see where you're coming from. I've got to say, I've heard some dodgy intros in my time, most of them by me. This one is coming very close to the heights. Thank you. Well, I learn from the best, Andy. You're very much the water boy. You have no such thing as a fish, aren't you? That's like the worst person in the team Who can't even get on the team and has to bring the water to the other team Oh Ouch Who are you on the team James?

2:34I am the running back Okay Yeah I put in the legwork And who's Dan? Dan is the little kid who comes on at the start of the match To sing God Save America Yeah Is that what it's called? Yeah God Save America God Save America I don't know why people came up with their own national anthems where you could literally just put your own country name. God save the Central African Republic. It works. It absolutely works. It works. There you go. All right, should we do some facts? Oh, yeah. No, I think we're out of time, I'm afraid. Can I do a quiz? Oh, yeah. You know what? My quizzes on this are usually a little bit oblique and difficult to get, so we'll go for a simple one.

3:16What is the capital of Egypt? Cairo. Incorrect, Anna. Is it Aswan? Good knowledge of another place in Egypt, but no, it isn't. I only know one more. It's the new capital. What? The new capital. Okay. What's which is called? It's just called the new capital. Sorry? So Egypt has got itself a new capital and it's called it the new capital. What is going on? Basically, they decided to move the government out of Cairo because Cairo was getting so big compared to the rest of the country. They thought if we move a lot of the stuff to another place, a new special city, like lots of countries have done that.

3:55Yes. And we will for now just call it the new capital. And over the years, they've tried to come up with new names, but they've just been unable to. No way. They keep having like competitions where someone can name the city and then no good answers come. So they just they think that maybe they might call it Memphis after the old capital of. Oh, nice. I think New Memphis will be absolutely fine or something, like New York or even lots of places you can do that with. Well, New York, of course, wasn't named after Old York, no. What? New York was named after the Duke of York, not Prince Andrew. As you remember from Windsor, as he is now.

4:31Not him. I did not know that. Are you serious? And then they kept the new because it was called New Amsterdam. Oh, wow. It wasn't named after Old York. That's a great fact. That's a thing that's named after a person. Oh my god I'm doing it by accident now It's a book But other places That are called capital Seoul means capital in Korean Astana means capital in Kazakh Cool Beijing means northern capital In Chinese Some kind of Chinese And Kyoto means capital city But isn't the capital But Tokyo is the other way around, isn't it? Yeah, but that to means I think eastern or western or northern or something.

5:17Oh, okay. Because to means different, it has different meanings. Okay, got it. But yeah, Kyoto means capital city. Is that because it used to be the capital? Yes, it was. It has been the capital. But Tokyo means like, let's say it's eastern capital. So the kyo means capital, but then the to meant eastern. So nice. So good. Really good. So it's not that unusual. That's great. Did you say who sent that in? That was sent, of course, by David Leifertilli, because I always credit the people who send that back to social media. Just to say like I always do, I would never, ever forget that because that would be a terrible thing to do.

5:52No, indeed. Especially after I've just made a big deal of it. Here's one. This is about a place name. It's not as famous as Kyoto and not as famous as Cairo, but it's a place which our correspondent, Dan Kohansby, lives about 10 minutes from, and it's Buttsville, New Jersey. Named after obviously Nicky Butts the footballer Well it's named after a man named L.L. Butts Oh yeah, okay By his father Michael Robert Butts Butts with a Z? Yeah, yeah, B-U-T-T-Z Population about 200 Hang on, so it was named after someone By that person's dad As sort of a gift to his son Yes, Michael Butts named it after his son L.L.

6:33Badly named, yeah, yeah And just that's New Jersey for you Only two famous LLs then Him and Cool J hey LL Cool J of course is shot for ladies love Cool James And I think the same is true of Ladies love Butts Yeah I suppose Never a truer word was spoken That's a very good fact LL middle name Big Butts Brackets and I cannot lie Yeah so there you go I've got a fact here from Jill Rogers Oh yeah No, Jill Rogers said that my fact is that vampires are a recession indicator. The more vampires you get, the worse the economy's going. Interesting. So the last big vampire thing I would say would have been Twilight.

7:16Yeah. Did that come during the financial crisis? It did. It did. Now, I don't like to read out someone's fact and then take a slight issue with it. But yes, that's the example that she uses, along with a few other vampire things that were released during that particular recession. and I would say it could just be that that was a time when vampires were trendy and it happened to come inside with a recession. But apparently this is a big pop culture theory. What about that sort of like vampire stuff with Michael Jackson and stuff, right? You know, thriller and all that kind of thing. Was that vampire stuff?

7:50It's just general spooky stuff in thriller, isn't it? Because I thought that might coincide with like Margaret Thatcher closing the mining pits. Maybe, but it was in America, it was more Ronald Reagan-y, wasn't he? I don't know how he left the economy. I think it's these kind of stretches which lead to these spurious correlation and causation things. Anne Rice, nice. Don't know, not cited here. What about John Polidori, who wrote the first ever vampire story in Lake Geneva with Byron and Mary Shelley and Percy Shelley when she wrote Frankenstein? And that was because there was the year without a summer.

8:21Do you remember this? Yeah. 1816, because the volcano had erupted and crops were ruined everywhere. Unquestionably a recession. Yeah, so I'm surprised she doesn't cite that. That would have made her case quite plausible. Does she cite any other? Like, are we doing all the hard work here or what? You are, yeah. And it is hard work, Jill. So next time. No, she mostly is citing a theory. She says that this was dropped, in my opinion, too casually by my friend who works in publishing when I was talking about the wild coincidence that a bunch of my favourite authors announced their next books would be vampire-based, even though they'd never done vampires before.

8:51So she's saying, does this mean another recession's coming? Okay. She also asked, Andy, as a fiction writer, have you ever been pressured to add some vampires to your work? I've never been asked to add anything supernatural to any of mine. Haven't you? No. It might work. Maybe consider it next time. Anyway, no, that is a great fact. And I liked digging into it, even though it is a potentially spurious correlation causation. It's definitely something that a lot of people online think. I think we came up with two examples there. Anne Rice and the Thatcherite coal mine stuff and the Polidori thing.

9:22I think that actually I'm starting to think it holds water. Okay, well done. Yeah, my thing was more about Michael Jackson. And I don't actually know when Anne Rice wrote Interview with a Vampire, so I can't claim that. I thought it was probably earlier than that, but I might be wrong. It's not important. This isn't the really heavy facts-based show. This is the round of speculation show. If we are going to win the Nobel Prize for economics, then we might as well get it right.

9:50Okay, here is one from Tommy Curran Jones. And this, he says, is an architectural irony fact. And it is that buildings in the flamboyant style, and flamboyant means flaming, keep catching fire. Great. Okay, so he gives us some examples. Nantes Cathedral, Collegiate Church of Saint-Volfrin in Abbeville, Arras Town Hall in Arras, the Palais de Justice in Rouen, and Rouen Cathedral, Chartres Cathedral. basically all of these French places and a lot of them burnt down and Tommy says whether they burnt down so frequently because of their name or because their 600 year old building is largely made of timber I'll leave up to you That is great Stop doing stuff in the flamboyant style Flamboyant?

10:41I didn't know that meant flaming I've never heard that I suppose it makes sense When you say it out loud, you think of course but I just never made that connection I do need to say, who wrote in? It was Tommy, Tommy Curran Jones. Tommy, and he says that's an ironic buildings fact. Yes, he does. Which, if we're really nitpicking, it's not, of course. It's opposite, isn't it? Not irony. If something called flaming yourself on fire, it's the opposite of irony. But that is not to take away from how amazing the fact is. Well, I'm sorry, Tommy, you've been Tyshynski'd. Yeah. I kept it very positive, I think.

11:13Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I don't think anyone's egos have been damaged there. All right, well, let's see if you can Tyshynski this one, Anna. This is from Eva O'Donnell, and it's about a place called Bell Harbor. Which is a little town on the west coast of Ireland Right? There's a nearby town called Ennestimmon and one night Some locals in Ennestimmon which had Only two houses with wirelaces At the time this happened right? Two radios In the whole village. Sorry Wireless has a different meaning these days Sorry this is several decades ago Some locals were in Ennestimmon on a wild December night They were trying to listen to the events of the second world war Despite the Oh did you hear that?

11:48That was a big bang What was that? To a news article, I suppose. Yeah, exactly. Radio news. And then through the hissing and interference, they gathered to their consternation that a nation on the far side of the globe had had the audacity to bomb Bell Harbour. They didn't panic. They set about barricading the roads and preparing for the Japanese invasion of Ennis Timmons. They felt sure it was coming. Because obviously nobody in Ennis Timmons had heard of Pearl Harbour, but they heard Bell Harbour has been bombed by huge Japanese air fleet. And that's to be assumed. Yep. It's quite egotistical, don't you think?

12:26To think, rather than the fact that there might even be another place called Bell Harbour somewhere, because it's not that unusual a name. It's true, but they blocked the roads with rubble, and they got an array of weapons together, and they stayed up all night preparing for the Japanese onslaught. No. I wonder if they would have won. It's one of the great what might have beens of history, isn't it? What if Japan had decided to invade the west coast of Ireland? Here's another one. This is from Gio James. This email says, Hey guys, long time listener and long time fact submitter. Ouch. Hoping that the timeliness of this one makes it more interesting than the drivel I've shared before.

13:02I feel like I would remember that name if Gio had got in before. That's a cool name, isn't it? It is. I think it's Gio short for Georgina. I think because I know one of those, but a very cool short name. Well, it's a surname that I thought was most cool. James. You find this, James. Yeah, yeah. No. I'm not getting that. Of LL Cool fame. anyway don't do yourself down Gio I'm sure your other facts were great but I love this one she says whenever the Swedish national football team plays the Danish national football team the scoreboard reads S-W-E-D-E-N as in Sweden but she then says and here's a quiz for you this is also true of a few other team combinations can you see if you can guess them all and she lists three I haven't checked if this is all of them but I suspect it is how are we going to guess can you give us half of it or something oh what a good idea i'll give you half of it so andorra is the second half okay who are andorra playing to make this combination okay so poland really good poland andorra yeah very good although andy of course was the one who read these emails initially i've forgotten everything no no no no no like in any quiz sometimes you can work out the answer but mostly you get it because you've heard it somewhere before just because andy literally heard it this morning before he sent you those emails doesn't make it any different than if i heard it on the radio 12 years ago we'll look at one now let's see how we go um these are so these are such a good collection um okay this one is if tanzania is playing boutan can very good yes come on one one boutan one all okay this is the decider also i would say that boutan and tanzania have never played each other at football.

14:43I'm very happy to say that. In theory... I actually saw someone in a Tanzania shirt two days ago. And that's why you got that right? Isn't that amazing? That's really cool. It's so unusual. I'd never seen anyone in a Tanzania shirt before in my whole life. That's so weird. I wouldn't recognise one. Well, it says in massive letters Tanzania on the front. Still wouldn't get it. Is that a Bhutan shirt? So, if Russia... Belarus? No. Hold on. Yeah. If Russia are playing someone, this is the hardest one. This is a really tough country to get. You've probably forgotten this is a country. No offense to those who live there.

15:19Something that ends in our US though, right? Yes. So that can't be that hard. There's only 193 countries. Let's start alphabetically from the beginning. You should get there quite soon if you start alphabetically. Cirrus, the cloud. Cyprus. Well done, James. Cyprus as well. Yeah, but if Russia were playing a Cirrus cloud. well it was a good assist yeah you knocked it over and then i headed it in but you weren't intended to knock it over you were intended to hit it straight at the floodlights and you accidentally sliced it over and it landed right on my head and went in the goal that's a beautiful cross from andy he looks surprised myself on the goal post i don't know what's going on

16:01most people don't realize how much of their personal information is being bought and sold every day. Data brokers are making billions, pulling details about you from public records and the internet, then packaging and selling it, usually without your consent. That's how your information lands in the hands of scammers, spammers, and even stalkers. It's why you get endless robocalls and why ads seem to follow you everywhere. That's where Aura comes in. Aura actively removes your data from broker sites and keeps it off. They also instantly alert you if your information shows up in a breach or on the dark web.

16:32But Aura goes beyond data protection. With one app, you get a VPN, antivirus, password manager, spam call protection, dark web monitoring, and even up to$5 million in identity theft insurance, all backed by 24-7 U.S.-based fraud support. Other companies might just sell credit monitoring or just a VPN. Aura gives you all of it, together, at the same price competitors charge for just one service. Start your free trial today at aura.com slash ready. Protect yourself now at aura.com slash ready. Our mission is 24-7 access to fresh food for all. This is Hoda Kotb from Joy 101 with Hoda Kotb. And that was Jalea Hemings.

17:09She and her husband created Nourish and Bloom Market. When we decided to open this 24-7 AI grocery store, people thought we were crazy. But our first store was completely community funded. And when your family and your friends bet on you, it hits a little differently. And the city of Atlanta took notice and decided to be part of the change. But the city actually put dollars behind that change and said if the big box stores won't come, we'll build our own. One community-funded store became several, but eradicating food deserts across the country takes more than a village. We won the AT &T Small Business Contest Ramp, and that was what we needed to open the first AI-powered shipping container grocery store in the country.

17:52Having a powerhouse like AT &T stand behind you takes it to a whole new level. Connecting changes everything. AT &T. Okay, what about another one? Is it my turn? Can be. Can be. It's going to be. This is a song. We've reached that part of the show where Anna does her song.

18:17You've got it out every time. But I think this week is the weakest going in. What are you on about? Sorry, this is a fact sent in. Did you just read the word fact as song? I think you'll see why I said it. When I tell you that this person's name, he sent this in, is Are Tunes Samonsen. And Samonsen has a lot of the same letters as the word song. And also I'm very tired. And he says that I was just listening to you talking about toothpicks, as we were recently, and I thought I should mention that the world's largest factory of wooden toothpicks is at Flissa in Norway. or rather was it's been closed down and it actually closes down at the end of this year so get there quickly if you need to Andy.

19:05The closing was announced in October 2025 but it's obviously taken a while to wind down. The factory was churning out over a billion wooden toothpicks a year at that time. So God knows why it's closing if it's churning out that many. Maybe the demand has dropped off I don't know. You can get plastic toothpicks these days. You can yeah the modern thank God plastic was invented a couple of years back to allow for that. I guess they're probably making them in another country which has more accessible and cheap wood. I think it must be that. Good point. Yeah, yeah. But they do have, at this factory, the world's largest wooden toothpick.

19:38No, that's just like a tree, right? It has to be usable as a toothpick for it to be a toothpick. Actually, I don't know if it is usable. It's 11 metres tall. It doesn't say how thin, but it does have to be quite thin, doesn't it? If it's sharp enough at the end, you can use it as a toothpick that just doesn't go all the way in. Do you know what I mean? Like if the end gets absolutely to a level of normal toothpick. It could taper to normal toothpick level. And then in that way, Bill, you could just get an enormous telegraph pole and stick a toothpick up the top. That's true. That's true. It's basically the same thing.

20:08Yeah, yeah, yeah. Stupidly, I didn't look it up to see how thin it was. I do like the fact that it's the world's largest toothpick factory and they have the world's largest toothpick. I think that's pretty cool. Yeah. And this person also goes on to say, by the way, Flissa in Norwegian, while a place name also translates to the wooden splinter. That's crazy. Well, he says coincidence. Probably not. Probably not. Probably not. So they probably named it after the toothpicks. But who knows? Maybe it's one for the book. Oh, I don't think so. No, no, no. No, no. Okay. Too good. Too good. Yeah. On that note, let's segue into the bit where we give you some facts.

20:46So this is the part where we take some custodians to custode various facts we've said on the podcast over the years. And these go to people who are members of our highest tier, the Friends of the Podcast tier. So without further ado, should we start dishing out facts? I'll go first. This one goes out to Michael Medlin. What a brilliant name, Michael. Michael Medlin, this is a Christmasy fact for you. and it's that when it gets really cold Christmas trees can turn to glass. So cool. So cool. So the Christmas trees, but I suppose they could also be a Christmas ornament because they're often made of glass.

21:24Yes. And it's about the sap when it's really, really cold in these northern forests their cells might rupture. So the molecules kind of freeze so they don't rupture. And glass is like a technical term of like something that's not quite solid and not quite liquid. Yes, people say that stained glass is a liquid and I can never remember what the latest agreement or disagreement was. It's not a liquid. No, so it's a bit thicker at the bottom, but that's because if you made something that was a bit thicker, you wouldn't put the thick part at the top and it was hard to make flat glass. But glass is a state of matter.

22:00It's not quite solid, not quite liquid. Yeah, not a solid. So you're halfway there when you say it's a liquid. No, you're not. You're just wrong. Yeah, cool. Here is one that is now under the custodianship of Lassie Haviland. And Lassie, your fact is that one of the contenders for the 2015 Christmas charts was a prog rock album by Pope Francis. So cool. Very cool. This is quite a classic Danny type fact. He loves a pope. He loves a pope doing a pop culture unexpected thing. He loves a wacky pope. Prog rock as well. Yeah, but then what would you expect? You wouldn't expect the pope to go into, you know...

22:36J-pop? J-pop. No, that's probably the most unlikely. It's the most prog rock, if I had to pick a popular genre. But I would have thought it would just be classical, classical bangers, you know, plain song or plain chant or whatever it's called. Here's a fact for Lizzie. And this is the fact that Czech deer still avoid crossing the Iron Curtain between Germany and the Czech Republic. Nice. Amazing. Because the commies. It's quite confusing that the Czech Republic was bordering West Germany, obviously, which is why there was a border there. But because obviously Czechoslovakia was on the east of Germany.

23:08but it's when you forget that East Germany was only North East Germany wasn't it so actually the whole of Bavaria is all East Germany but that was West Germany because West Germany was L shaped yeah exactly yes that is confusing and that is something I have not considered enough they didn't do it right I don't know how they screwed it up it's like the West really did one over on the East there and Berlin wasn't like the bit on the border or anything was it no that was way in the East but you always think because there was like checkpoints there and you had to go from East Germany to West Germany but actually that was just like a little island.

23:41Yeah. So a little conclave, enclave, whatever you call it. But yes, these poor deer. Anyone over the age of 50 will be like, yeah. Yes, I think. Obviously, yeah, yeah. So that's a good fact. Enjoy that, Lizzie. Great fact. Here's another one that goes out to Christina Elforis. Christina, your fact now and forever is that if every car in Monaco decided to go for a drive at the same time, they wouldn't fit on the roads. That is such a great fact. There's a fun fact about the, I suppose, the fact that Monaco is quite small and Monaco people drive a lot of, have a lot of cars. Yeah. More cars per capita than anywhere else.

24:19I was thinking about this the other day. I was in a theme park in Spain and like you're in the, in the queues all the time. And I wondered if they deliberately make sure that the queues are a certain length so that everyone isn't just wandering around the theme park. And we know that some people are going to be in the queues. What do you mean? how do they make sure the queues are a certain length? Well, like they might slow down the number of people who get on so that the queue gets to like 30 minutes or something. And then you know that you'll have a certain number of people queuing at any one time, which means like the concession stands won't get too busy and all that kind of stuff.

24:54I think you're crediting theme park designers with even more foresight than they have. I think theme park design is like one of the most academic things that you can get into, really. That's good. That's a good, yeah. It's nuclear fusion people who don't quite pass the final exams. They're told, well, we do have some jobs at Thorpe Park. It's like, oh, you're a rocket scientist, are you? Oh, dear. Oh, you're a brain surgeon, are you? Oh, dear. Yeah. I make sure people have to stand in queues for 45 minutes so other people can get hot dogs. Really doing God's homework. Great fact. Okay, here is one that is now under the custodianship of Michael Hargreaves.