Little Fish: You've Hit The Nail On the Head

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1:13Hello and welcome to another episode of Little Fish. My name's Andrew Hunter-Murray. I'm here with James Harkin and Dan Schreiber. What the hell was that? I don't know if that would be picked up on the mics. James was just slapping his cheeks. Is that what it was? I wasn't looking. My face cheeks for those at home. Yeah, absolutely.

1:36And welcome to the show. You've had your fireworks right at the top. Now let's get into some facts. If that becomes our theme tune, then I might have problems because it still hurts a little bit. We'll do it next time. On my face. Oh, yeah, yeah. So you've been sending in all your facts. You've been sending them to podcast at qi.com. We've been sifting through them, winnowing, filtering, and we've got some absolute crackers for you. So let's get cracking. Who's got a fact?

2:05James Harkin:I got a fact here. This is from Stefan Grenz. My fact is, in Japan, baseball players get scouted based on blood type. Oh. Yeah. So this is, I'm reading Stefan's email here. This is based on blood type personality theory, which states that your blood type determines your personality traits. It's like their version of horoscopes. Exactly that. Yeah. And it appears in so many different places. So Stefan says, as a result, it is common to take blood type into account when hiring people or indeed scouting athletes. And baseball is very popular in Japan. But you'll also notice it. And it's something I never did.

2:42James Harkin:But now that I look on the images that I've Googled, it's definitely in the English versions on things like Street Fighter. so when you're picking your character like chun li or m bison or whoever okay they tell their blood type as well so that you get an idea of what their personality types are chun li guy yeah chun li or are you blanka's blanka right chun li is pretty cool as well it's like you're all speaking another language i've no idea what's going on really i mean partly you are speaking another language because these are all names from overseas but yeah well she's blood type a just uh for you to know um good to know yeah and so this became massive do we know what blood call us he was he has green blood yeah he's yeah i'm not sure i didn't look him up i know m bison i think is blood type a as well okay um and it's not that the rarer the blood type the better the baseball player will be i'm not sure i mean there's a whole theory about it it's it's like there were a series of books that were written in the 70s by a man called masahiko nomi and he wrote this book called blood type humanics and it's such a big thing in japan that not only does it determine things like on dates you would talk about your blood type to see if you're compatible but also there's a phrase in japan which is buruhara which is blood harassment and you can get bullied at work for your blood type and so that's what it gets called i'm getting buruhasa people are being very negative yeah oh negative yes brilliant if i just say it after a joke i think i can carry the room with me i think in other jobs actually as well like i remember reading that you go for a job interview and you have to put your blood type on and i think like like all these things i'm always a little bit wary because i'm not from japan and i i don't know how prevalent these things are and obviously there's only so many blood groups and it can't be that if you're really good at baseball but you have the wrong blood type they won't get you exactly that doesn't And also I think there's a real out from Nomi who wrote these books, which is that he says that your blood type only accounts for a quarter of your human personality.

4:43James Harkin:The rest comes from nurture. And so it's, yeah, that's a nice out to sort of say, well, of course it's not going to be right. You're a B negative, but you can hit baseballs very far. So we'll have you on the team because it's like 75 % good. Here is another sporting one, kind of. This is from Matt Burke, and it's a brilliant fact. It is that the world record for the longest darts bullseye, 8 metres, is about a tenth as long as the longest throw of a cowpat, which is 81.1 metres. There's someone out there who can throw a cowpat 80 metres. 81.1 metres, yeah. That's incredible. Steve Erner, no less.

5:30Steve Erner. Cowpats are

5:34James Harkin:Flattish on the bottom You have absolutely hit the nail On the absolute head of the importance Of shape in cowpat throwing Because you can frisbee it right Brilliant so good That's the most excited I've ever seen James be about anything I got scared When he started I was like oh no we've done something wrong We're in trouble I think he did something to his head when he did that slappy thing at the beginning This 81.1 Is under the non-sphericalization and 100 organic rule which was established in 1970 um so you have two different records one of which is where the um pat is molded into a spherical shape and one where it's done as a flat chip okay so wait the the one that was thrown this far was molded into a spherical shape no it was flat like a frisbee like a discus oh okay oh sorry spherical i was thinking around meant spherical no got it presumably if you fashioned your cowpat into a javelin, in much the same way that that guy made his own poo knife.

6:33You could throw it even further. Yeah. So you'd have to freeze it. Yeah. Oh, you'd have to freeze it. Is that in the rules? Well, you've hit the nail right on the head yet again. No, it's not in the rules. No one's thought of freezing the cow putts yet. I think that's a Fosbury flop moment waiting to happen. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Could be. Here's a fact from Dave Shaw. The only UK number one that doesn't contain its own title in the lyrics is... What? Must be loads. Dave says not. I think there have been some without any lyrics at all. There have been some which haven't got any lyrics at all.

7:07James Harkin:Can we try and guess it if you give us the name of the band? Or is it... If I give you the name of the band, you'll absolutely get it. Is it Living in a Box by Living in a Box? It's not Living in a Box. Because they do say Living in a Box quite often in that song. Was it No, No, No, No, No Limits by Too Unlimited? It wasn't that hard. They do say that in there as well, don't they? Is it Doop by Doop? Oh, no, they do say that in there as well. Shall I tell you? Give us a clue. An era. The 70s, I think. Bohemian Rhapsody. Oh, he's got it. Yeah, that's it. Oh, that's it. Is it? Yeah. Wow. That was like someone throwing a cow patch and hitting a bullseye 80 metres away.

7:46Yeah. Okay, so Dave says, this is what makes the fact amazing. There's a plot twist halfway through this fact, which I love. The only UK number one that doesn't contain its own title in the lyrics is Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody. It does, however, include the title of the song that succeeded it. Oh, yeah, it does. Which is? Mama by Abba. Mamma Mia. Mamma Mia by Abba. Mamma Mia. How weird is that? Yeah. There's a theory that it's the only one that does that, but actually there's loads, and I found loads of them, but I can't remember any of them. That contains the following song? Yeah, yeah, yeah. What?

8:20It's like a clue. They're all like songs with one word in the title, like yes or... Oh, okay. Love calls Yeah, exactly Oh, okay, Dave, you've been hearkened, I'm afraid I wish I could remember all of them It was worth it to get there, though Yes, wonderful It's a good fact, it's a classic fact, that one, I would say Dave, that's a devil's take that, Dave I've been in meetings before where James has said Ah, yes, this is a classic Oh, no, that's actually not what we're going for on QI Alright,

8:53James Harkin:let's have another fact This was sent in by Python Boy boy as in boi and it is in the movie adaption of the goosebumps series jack black plays the author while the author plays jack black this is very subtle i would argue that it's not entirely true it's gonna get a shriper ring arguably okay at the near end of the movie that's i don't want to give away too much but you don't want to spoil the goosebumps exactly which i have seen 13 or 14 times um jack black is have you seen it since your kids were born no actually they're not into it um a real bummer in my house uh so jack black is playing rl stein and he's walking in a school hall and rl stein comes into shot and the real rl stein the real rl stein i remember that and he's acknowledged as mr black now okay he's got the surname we hear mr we don't hear the name jack But also Jack Black is Jack Black.

9:50James Harkin:He's in Tenacious D. He's an actor. So yes, it's a lovely little swapping of surnames. But R.L. Stine's character is not necessarily the Jack Black that we know. Exactly. So he's not playing him. But yeah, it's a nice little nod. And it just reminded me how much I love R.L. Stine. So I was quite excited to see this fact. He's sold more than Stephen King in terms of books. So he's sold over 400 million books worldwide. That's a pretty astonishing amount. That's like one for every chess set that you can...

10:26James Harkin:Well, I'll send this to theboffins at fun.com and see if they agree with this number. We'll have to wait on that. Interesting. I mean, they are great books. They're very good. He pumped them out very, very quickly. And they're short. They're small books, so I can imagine there being more of them. They're for kids. Yeah. They were great. Not much goes into Stephen King's ones, in fairness. Oh, wow. just about to start some beef with yeah no the king community yeah yeah but this is quite a cool little fact i believe we have mentioned this in the past but before he was writing goosebumps he was a writer generally and he had to take on paid gigs and one of the books that he wrote was the novelization of space balls so the movie with mel brooks which was the star wars parody now one of the conditions of star wars and george lucas was that you can do the movie as a parody but you can't do any merch and this was the only thing that was let through his merch and so he wrote it under the name jovial bob stein and you can get copies online for on ebay and so on as i have for a few hundred pounds only a few hundred um which is really good deal actually vanilla um and uh yeah so yeah that's uh that's the fact uh really good boy okay here's another pop culturey one yep um this is from brenton innis from perth western australia and brenton says that while many people named tony have won a tony only one person named oscar has won an oscar and actually i can't remember who that is is it oscar hammerstein maybe i think but i forgot to write that down but anyway that's not the important part of his fact the important part is that in 2022 a granny won a grammy a grammy won a grammy a granny a granny like grandmother you might say grammy yeah yeah yeah yeah right yeah uh the age of 95 when singer angela alvarez became the oldest winner of a latin grammy award beautiful beautiful she's really sounds like she might be a latin grammy as well but i actually found another grammy who won a grammy have you ever heard of the um guitar style called cotton picking maybe yeah yeah it's like i guess it's kind of american blue grassy yeah well not quite the one that i'm talking about because this is named after someone called elizabeth cotton beautiful oh dear beautiful i didn't see that coming yeah from a clear blue sky that was an assassin shot wow i feel like that could be a new thing for these things that are named after people or whatever yeah is that we try to slip them in without each other noticing that's really good um elizabeth cotton she won um for her album elizabeth cotton live at the age of 90 in 1984 and actually in 1967 she released a record created with her grandchildren and with one great-grandchild as well who was in that album and she was a self-taught left-handed guitarist who played a guitar upside down amazing okay you know i mean so and that was her style was really unusual because she played upside down and that was why it was known as cotton picking brilliant cool great grammy yeah yeah i wonder if um an emmy has ever won an emmy oh very good question check out yeah name my next kid bafta fingers crossed i'm gonna change my name to Charter Award

14:00Here's another fact This one comes from Alex Thorpe Thank you Alex And it's that You should hire Novak Djokovic To build your flat pack furniture And Rafael Nadal To disassemble it There is a reason for this I can have a guess I've got a guess as well We should say something funny then We both know the answer Do you?

14:26James Harkin:It's just a guess Go on, what's your guess then? Shall we say at the same time? Yeah Start with Nadal Nadal is left-handed Okay, screw you guys You're not allowed to go into my nose before we do the show And gazump me like that So Nadal is left-handed And Djokovic is Serbian

14:50So when you're tightening a screw You guys are right-handed, aren't you? Yes When you tighten a screw with a screwdriver in your right hand, you're using a muscle called the supinator. Cool. Which is much stronger than the pronator, which is used to unscrew. Now, if you're using your left hand and a screwdriver, it's the opposite way around, right? It feels like someone else is making the wardrobe. That's right. If you're left-handed and you're tightening a screw, then you're using your pronator and you're not quite as good as it. But if you're using your left hand and you're unscrewing, then you're using the other muscle.

15:24So that's why it works out. So I'm left-handed. This is why I don't enjoy putting together flat-back furniture, but I do love taking it apart. I like unscrewing things more. It feels like a more natural action to me than screwing things up with my left hand. It's weird. And I'd never considered that before. So I love that fact.

15:41James Harkin:Never heard that. That's wonderful. And that's Supernator. Supernator. Supernator. That's cool.

15:51Dan, give us one more Okay Actually, I'm not hosting

15:55James Harkin:Dan, do what James says Okay, well this is from Joe Bartlett Who says that Qantas once spent $100 million to repair a crashed plane Purely for PR reasons Interestingly, I thought That they'd never had a crash Qantas They did not advertise that There we go Hello, you've hit the nail on the head And this is because in September 1999, Qantas Flight 1. It's really frightening when anyone does it, I just got to say. Boeing 747 flying from London to Sydney via Bangkok overran the runway into a bog and it crashed into a radio antenna as it went. There were no serious injuries or fatalities, but the plane was a write-off.

16:41James Harkin:At least it would have been for most other, or indeed any other airline. Qantas however has an excellent safety record with zero hull loss so they've had accidents but they've never lost a hull and they decided they wanted to make sure that that record stood you know what like just to say in my head they've never had a crash I didn't realize they had a little asterisk they're saying oh yeah we have but just not the hull we've never had a hull loss is a much less enticing offer in fact it makes me think about all the other things that are not the hull on a plane yeah i'll have a ticket in the hole please that'll be an extra 129 dollars so they decided they were going to repair it no matter what the cost and in the end the total repairs were estimated at 100 million uh the exact figure was never disclosed however that is more than the value of the aircraft at the time but it was worth it for the reputational value of maintaining the flawless safety record i feel like that's a handyman arriving at the runway with knowledge that he's got the whip handle over these people saying, I can charge these people whatever I like.

17:46Yes. You know how when a handyman comes over, sometimes they'll look at you, size you up, and just add a zero? No. They'll be like, this guy's left-handed. He cannot make flat-pack furniture. I'm going to charge what I like. Okay, have we got time for one more? Yeah, why not? Okay, this one is from Seth from Limerick. And Seth said, there once was a man called Seth.

18:09No, he didn't. that's silly seth said all golfers wear one glove why no idea however lucas glover winner of the 2009 us open does not wear a glove crazy really yeah i knew this in fact as a golf fan he doesn't wear a glove yeah does he not get very sore hands well why do they wear the gloves there's a few different reasons one it definitely can help you not get blisters for sure okay but if you if you're used to it then your hand will get enough calluses or whatever that you're not going to get blisters so it should be fine for everyone and also the early gloves would develop because the gloves would have like quite rough leather grips and also if it rains you couldn't really get a grip on them but these days they're made of synthetic materials very grippy they're not going to do you any harm so actually it's no real big deal for lucas glover not to wear gloves okay if you fashioned your cow Pat into 100 golf balls, I reckon you could get them to go even further.

19:12Than 81 yards? Yeah. Are they frozen? Yeah, they're frozen.

19:16James Harkin:They'd shatter as they got hit, I imagine. Who cares? Are people measuring? As you're hitting. Sorry. Okay. Yeah, that's a problem. Which of the fragments am I going to measure? Who cares? Who cares? Your problem. Not mine. I mean, we're at the Cow Pat Olympics here. No one's getting out of the Cow Pat Olympics and going up to the real Olympics, okay? You're stuck here. You're not impressing anyone with your oh, which fragment should I measure? Malarkey.

19:47Yes, so there is a player, Aaron Rye, who wears two gloves. What's his name? Aaron Rye? Aaron Rye, yeah.

19:53James Harkin:With the same hand? No. He wears one at each hand. And the reason is he's English and he played in English conditions as a child, which means you need to keep your hands warm. And so he would always wear two gloves and he's kind of kept it going. I've always wondered about the glove thing. Just one. Normally it's just one. Normally just one. It started with a guy called Sam Sneed in the 19... When was that? Probably in the 1930s. And he did it and he was one of the best or was the best of his era. And then everyone started doing it. And now I think because I play golf a lot and I always have done and I've always wore a glove.

20:29If you don't wear one, it just feels weird. Well, I thought you were gripping the shaft with both hands. As it were, come on, grow up. I'm going to show you on this ruler How I hold it I hold it like that My palm is holding The left palm is holding it And the right is more just the focus Anyway, tune in next week For our second lesson of how to play golf With James and Andy It's going bloody slowly Oh, magnificent Alright, well, that is enough of your facts Thank you so much for them If you'd like to send them in and see them get a harkening Or a schreibering Maybe there'll be a Murraying out there one day It's possible Just email them in to podcast at qi.com We love getting them I read every single one They're always so much fun to get Please do send them in But now it's time for some fact custodianships Because if you join Club Fish And you join at the highest tier of friend of the podcast Then we will dedicate one of our facts to you And what's more, we'll give you a shout out On an episode of Little Fish So it's time to do some of that now Who has got a fact that they'd like to dish out?

21:34I have one. This was ours and it is now under the custodianship of Mark. Mark, your fact now is that in a very particular time and place in history, you could avoid castration by shouting SOHO. What an interesting one. Get out of jail free card. What is it all about? What is it all about? I know that the word SOHO was used as a hunting cry. This was your fact, James. I know it was. and trying to go through the Rolodex of my brain to work out exactly what it was. This is Ashanti law. Oh, okay. We're in West Africa? In Africa, yeah. I think modern day Ghana, I think. I buy that, yeah. And it's, if you saw a member of the King's Haareem naked, you would be castrated.

22:23Oh dear. So you had to shout Soho before going into a room and that would give everyone time to get dressed. So it's a preventative. If you've already seen them naked, that's it. You're getting castrated, I'm afraid. But if you shout Soho before you go in, you're all right. That's really interesting. I suppose you could kind of shout anything like, I'm coming in. Yeah, true. Yeah, yeah. But there must be a rule for this. I honestly have literally no memory of this. Yeah, it's wild. Yeah. Whereas I do remember the next fact that was about to be dished out, if you're doing it, Dan.

22:52James Harkin:Yeah, sure. This is now under the custodianship of Andrew Shakespeare, which is Matthew Ricard, the man labeled as the happiest man in the world, is unhappy that people call him that. Yeah. He won the award. I think it was sort of pressed onto him by scientists who studied him and he's not in the game for that kind of thing. So I think it led to a lot of interview requests and he thought there were more important things to talk about. And he's written some books and he's a name that still pops up occasionally in the news. Still happy? Still happy. That's pretty good. Yeah. I don't think he's defending the title, I think.

23:30You probably also don't graduate from the Calpat Olympics to the Happy Olympics. No way, no way. Here's another one. This goes out to Spooltee. Spooltee, maybe a pseudonym. Your fact now and forever is that the route for the Hong Kong Ultramarathon is to run up and down the same stretch of road 25 times. Yes, I reckon that Soho Theatre show may be that one. I don't know, might be wrong. This was a really fun fact. It's basically about the shape of Hong Kong, isn't it? and the land that they've got available to do marathons on. Dan, you're from Hong Kong.

24:05James Harkin:I am. What road was it? Do you happen to know? I think it was the main road. Main road, Hong Kong. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. Is there a seafront bit? There is. There's many, yeah. I think it might be up and down the front. It's an island, Hong Kong Island. Could be all the way around. Could be all the way around. Yeah. 25 times. Yes. No, it's up and down. It's up and down specifically. I have a feeling it was like a promenade or something. I think it is, yeah. Yeah. There you go. How interesting. lovely stuff how interesting as you said but what a boring race to run okay the next fact is now under the custodianship of lisa gobel lisa your fact is that the meter is wrong that's an other fact she's just being contrary i think she said that the man who first made it called meshan later realized it was 0.16 millimeters inaccurate but everyone said they finished it and couldn't change it now magnificent and this is the original piece of metal i think that they used to standardize the meter and if memory serves it was one 40 000th of the circumference of the earth or something oh you're so close it was one 10 millionth of the distance from the equator to the north pole oh okay i was nowhere near well but you were you were right the right that it was one fraction of a set distance yeah it was definitely about it i was going off kilometers not meters anyway so i was i was totally miles off no but you got the principle yeah yeah but it was wrong anyway so that's why we're going back to yards on this podcast yards and feet which have never let us down but i think now they don't even use the physical meter anymore they don't use like the vibrations of some atom or they're all like the plank length clever dick method like that.

25:51Boffins. Rare for us to be anti-boffin,

25:55James Harkin:but I don't mind it. Let's have another one. This is for Jemina, and your fact is, St. Andrew's Aquarium has three meerkats called Churchill, Admiral, and Sheila's Wheels. Jemina, I hope you're listening somewhere that this cultural reference makes any sense to you, because you may well be overseas, and Churchill, Admiral, and Sheila's Wheels might not be a thing where you are. You know what? Is this my fact? I think it is, isn't it? Yeah. I got this fact when I went to St. Andrew's Aquarium and last week I went again. No. Did you go to the meerkat enclosure? I didn't even remember seeing it. I was with friends.

26:33I was only there for not very long. But yeah, I went there and found that out.

26:38James Harkin:Imagine the meerkats are going, oh my God, he's here. He's back. He doesn't remember us. Yeah, they also had Aviva and Direct Line, but they both died. It's a two. How long do mecaps live? I think maybe all of these mecaps might no longer be with us. Yeah, I imagine. Probably like an insurance payout though when they died. Very nice. Because these are insurance firms for international listeners. For Jemina. Anyway, lovely fact. Sheila's Wheels, it doesn't exist anymore, does it? Does it not? I don't know. I've not seen adverts for a while. I was with Sheila's Wheels until quite recently. You had to be a woman.