560: No Such Thing As Spanish Toes

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Hi guys, I know what you're thinking.

It's December, and so all these brands are going to start trying to flog me all of their merch to give as gifts to people where I can't think what else to give them.

And I bet that's what those fish are about to do as well.

Well, yes and no, because look, our merch is not just any merch.

Our merch is really cool swag that your bestest friends in the world and any fish fan in your life doesn't just want, they need it.

So what do we got to offer you?

Well, we've got a pair of t-shirts and a lot of people on tour in Australia where we just were sporting these t-shirts and they were looking, dare I say it, pretty damn cool.

For the more understated fan who doesn't quite want to commit to a full t-shirt, we've got a couple of very stylish little pin badges.

We also have our No Such Thing as a Fish Ultimate Guide, our tour book full of weird stuff we've written over the years.

James has got some poetry in there, Andy's got a moss wall.

I think there's some photos of me on nights out after shows that I never thought would see the light of day, that sort of thing.

Anyway, to get all of that stuff, go to no such thingasafish.com/slash shop.

And also, do you want to get something a bit more hefty for somebody?

Well, look no further because we have three books out between us.

Dan has a kids' book called Impossible Things, you'll find that at the top of our website as well.

Andy has a beginner's guide to breaking and entering, kind of thriller-come comedy.

And James and I have written a load of old balls out of QI History of Sport.

So, there you go, that's Christmas done for you.

You're welcome.

I am now off to audition for the shopping channel.

On with the show.

Hello, Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast this week coming to you live with the Sydney Opera House.

My name is Dan Schreiber and I'm sitting here with Anna Tashinski, Andrew Hudson-Murray and James Harkin and once again the four of us are gathered around the biker modes with our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order.

Here we go.

Starting with fact number one and that is James.

Okay, my fact

Okay, my fact this week is that break dancing can make you go bold

For the people at home, we've put up a picture of the greatest Australian sporting person

ever perhaps ever yeah Ray Gunn But this is a new study that's been done recently that describes breakdancers' bulge, which is like

sounds so much sexier than it is.

It's really not.

Well, you know, it takes all sorts, doesn't it?

It's like it gives you a bit of a cone head, okay, because you're breakdancing too much.

This was about a guy in his early 30s who'd been doing head spins for more than 19 years.

With breaks in between, right?

Yes, definitely.

Although Although it's five times a week for one and a half hours at a time.

So he's doing a hell of a lot of head spins.

Wow.

And it was the case talked all about him.

But in the middle of the paper, it said that they'd spoken to other breakers, especially in Germany, and they found that 31% had had some kind of hair loss.

Yeah, really.

And you get this sort of lump of squishy matter on top of your head, which is all you, but it's just...

You've been redistributed upwards, basically.

Where does it come from, do you think?

Where does it go?

That's amazing.

Where does it come from?

So you define gravity basically.

You're heading upwards.

Well you're just it's because you're upside down so gravity still wins actually

you're upside down.

You're right that's doing all the work.

So this guy had an operation and it can be dealt with with an operation.

He was really happy because he said he can go out in public again and people said he looked you know, he looked a lot better than when he had this cone head.

But some breakdancers will wear two hats to deal with hair loss.

That's one strategy.

Really?

Why not wear one hat?

They do wear one hat and then they wear another hat on top of that.

But that doesn't make you look even less like you've lost your hair.

It's not.

It's to cover your text against the spinning.

It's just to stop you going bold because it's the friction on the floor.

It's not to conceal the boldness.

No.

Just make the first hat not transparent.

I gotta say, Anna, look, I'm a man in my 40s.

I've got 12 hats under this one.

Yeah, so it's called, more broadly, it's called breakdancer overuse syndrome, this thing.

And with the hair loss, with the bowl thing, it's basically that the hair follicles become damaged because you're rubbing them on the floor so much and the hair just refuses to grow.

Yeah.

I went to Google it and I put Olympic bulge and breakdancing in.

Okay.

Yeah.

And I forgot, and I think it's, we probably will all remember, but it's worth just saying that one of the finest moments of the recent Olympics was the guy who lost the pole vote

because

his bulge box

took down the pole on the way over.

So there were more embarrassing bulges in the Olympic as well as that.

It feels like he sort of won the moral victory there, doesn't it?

He may have lost the contest.

Yeah, that's true.

Well, it's not a safe pursuit spinning round many, many times on your head.

I don't think it's very bad for you.

A much more long-term thing is break-dancing neck, which has been known about since the 1980s, which basically comes from putting so much weight on your neck the whole time.

It's spinal cord injury.

But people do it so many times.

The spinning round, that is.

The record for the most spins, and that both the male and female records are held by B-boys and B-girls, as I think they're called.

But that is breakdancers, yeah.

Yeah, the spins on that.

Well, you could just be into spinning around on your head.

I retract my comment.

Apologies.

Imagine if in the Olympics and the B-boys, someone came in who'd never done it before, but just loved spinning around on their heads.

Are they getting gold if they just, the whole time, they just do one big spin?

Because I think the record is 137 spins.

oh wow yeah complete complete complete full yeah yeah you're allowed to use your hands to keep the spin going oh are you okay yeah okay um this year it was because it was the paris uh olympics yeah and it was held i really just like this in the place de la concorde which is where marie antoinette was guillotined 230 years ago wow and that's just nice that just sort of matches doesn't it her head span around as it came up the

probably did you think if she had more head they would have just lobbed that bit off and she could have sort of just painted a little face on the top cone

with a big ruff around the head.

I should just say, I think we're showing ourselves up as massive dogs because it isn't called breakdancing.

It is called b-boying and b-girling.

Yeah,

breakdancing is a very, very uncool word to use.

Breaking, you say breaking.

You can say breaking.

I gather it's one of the four pillars of hip-hop.

Islam.

Oh, yeah, hip hop.

Sorry.

Five of Islam, four of hip-hop,

three for any sort of podium.

Anyway, and the others, I mean, I don't need to say it to you guys, but DJing, MCing, and graffiti.

Is that Islam still?

That's Islam.

Because with the breakdancing, that was coined by the newspapers.

Whereas the B-boys and B-girlers themselves wouldn't call it breakdancing.

Did they call it breaking at the start?

Yeah, they did, because it's the break in the music.

It's where you don't have lyrics, right?

Yeah, so you have the song, song, song, song, song, then you have a little break where it's just the music.

Drum.

Loads of drum, right?

Loads of drums.

Drums and stuff like that.

And then the DJs would just repeat that again and again and again so that people could dance in that little break.

I don't think we've ever looked so uncool in our lives.

Oh no.

Than what just happened just then.

What are you talking about?

We're passing ourselves off as hip-hop aficionados.

I want to talk about the coolest person alive, speaking of hip-hop.

I think the coolest person who ever happened right here.

I know, I don't want to embarrass you, James.

No, your second coolest, coolest is the person who invented hip-hop, or the person because of whom hip-hop came about.

I just think it's amazing that it was a schoolgirl who wanted to raise money to buy some new clothes for school.

Really?

It's so cool.

1973, there's a school girl called Cindy Campbell, and her parents have migrated in the previous five years or so from Jamaica to the US.

And she wants to look a bit cooler, buy some new school clothes.

She's like, I'll just throw a big house party.

Now, I tried to throw parties when I was 15, and what happened to her did not happen to me.

Everyone in the neighborhood came.

She asked her brother, her big brother to DJ, a guy called DJ Cool Hook.

Don't think he was christened like that.

In fact, he was christened Clive, which is not a cool name.

And that was the birth of hip-hop.

And everyone in the hip-hop movement knows that this, like, this is the origin story.

A 16, 15, 16-year-old girl went, I'm going to have a little party in my parents' house.

And that's when hip-hop is.

Everyone says that they were there, don't they?

Like, you just, anyone who was there near the start of breakdancing, they all say, well, I was at the party, of course.

Yeah, I was there.

Yeah, yeah.

And weirdly, in parental connections, there's another one because I think Australia's best male breakdancer is Jeff Dunn.

Is that correct?

Jay Attack.

Oh, so you guys aren't cool either.

That's good.

What a surprise.

Jay Attack.

Jay Attack.

Jay Attack, as he's known, or Jeff, is 16 and his mum is present at all his gigs.

He's the best in the world, right?

Or best in a world.

Best Australian male.

Yeah, yeah.

But the thing I didn't know about Olympic

break king, I'm just going to say breakdancing.

Not fooling anyone.

Is that I thought that like ice skating, you get to pick your own music.

You know, you have your tune, you go out to that, and then, and it's not the case.

In breakdancing, the DJ selects the tune, and you just have to adapt to that.

You have to improvise, sir.

You have to improvise.

So that's part of the, like, it's execution and originality and your vocab of moves and technique.

All of it counts in the judgment.

Oh, your vocab of moves.

Yeah.

I'm desperately trying to get it back to something vocabulary based.

But so for the Olympics there was a problem.

They couldn't just let the DJs play whatever they wanted because it's going out on telly.

So it has to be music that they've cleared the rights to.

So they had a library of 390 songs which the rights have been cleared.

So 390 is a lot of songs.

You probably couldn't learn all of them and react in time.

And also the DJs were not allowed to spend any time at all with the breakdancers in case the breakdancers leaned over and said, oh, can you play like Eleanor Rigby or whatever?

Like whatever.

classic break dancer you know what i mean like a silent night whatever it's like yeah yeah yeah yeah

have you thought about entering

you know what's weird andy you mentioned eleanor rigby yeah paul mccartney who wrote that song spends five minutes every morning upside down on his head wow even at this age spinning i think it's i think it's static i think he's yeah that's pretty good so he does yoga and every morning he's in he's hit 80s you know he's he's upside down on his head for five solid minutes and i want to see if the cone has arrived

possibly has right

can i just talk about the if if you're too cool even for breaking um as i am what you're really into is crumping do you guys know about crumping crumping uh no can i just get a poll to judge how cool this audience is who knows about crumping

They all know.

Quite a few.

Do they?

It's basically clowning.

But I find this so cool because hip-hop is the epitome of cool, right?

But crumping is a key kind of new part of hip-hop dance culture.

And it was invented by a children's birthday clown called Tommy the Clown in the 1990s who wanted to liven up kids' birthday parties.

So he started like jerking his body in kind of really asymmetrical ways.

And he'd keep, it's where you keep one bit of your body still and then you just like jerk one tiny bit of it.

It looks cooler than what I just do with my hand on stage.

And

it became huge and it's the big thing in hip-hop now and people go and do it in full clown gear.

Wow.

I'm really interested to know what the people in the audience thought it was

who all said they knew what it was.

Yeah.

Was that it?

Well, they're all in clown suits, so I assume.

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Subject to change.

Hey, we need to move on now to our next fact.

It is time for fact number two, and that is Anna.

My fact this week is that in North Korea, it's illegal to rest your cup of tea on a newspaper if that newspaper has a picture of Kim Il-sung on it.

And how many newspapers don't have a picture of Kim Il-sung on them?

That's the question.

I think quite a lot of them do.

And in fact, it's the two sub-Sookunk Kims as well, I believe.

So it's probably quite hard in North Korea to avoid a newspaper with any of their dear leaders in it.

And it's very, very illegal.

So I read this in an interview.

It was an interview in 2010, but I've checked it out.

It still is the case from what we know.

But an interview with a teenage girl who'd escaped from North Korea crossed the border into China and she was saying that any defacement of the image of Kim Il-sung of course the founder of North Korea was punished so if you destroyed any notes any bank notes with his face on them you're shot and it's yeah the newspaper thing illegal to put anything on that newspaper which I don't know if there's a coaster I don't know if that excuses you his face is probably on the coaster

yes is it illegal to put your tea on a coaster with the face on no you should put it on the coaster.

In fact, it's punishable to not put it on the coaster.

In my house, it's punishable not to use a coaster.

And again, that's just shot straight up, isn't it?

Yeah, that's right.

So these laws are actually quite common around the world to various degrees, right?

They're called les majeste, are they called?

And it's basically insulting your leaders.

And in the UK, in fact, the Treason Felony Act of 1848 makes it an offence to say that you want the monarchy to be abolished.

You can get life imprisonment under the Act, or in theory, you could be transported to Australia.

Is that too soon?

That's true.

Is that still on the books?

It's still on the books, but obviously, they would never do anything about it.

It would never be prosecuted, but they keep it on the books because of, you know, just ceremonial reasons.

Just in case.

Well, just in case.

You know, just be a bit more careful about what you say these days, Australia.

We've heard some of the rumblings.

This is, I mean, so as you say, this is around the globe.

Remember when we did, so back in the UK, we did a BBC2 show version of our show called No Such Thing as the News.

And,

yep, that's roughly how many people watched it as well.

But

we were told, there was at one point that we were going to do a fact about the King of Thailand.

And they said to us, the BBC, you can't, you can't do it.

Because if anyone who's connected to your family lives there and they make that connection by you insulting the king of Thailand, you will go to jail if you go to Thailand or one of your family will.

Yeah, and they would have to bring all of the BBC reporters out of Thailand, they told us, if we did that.

It was the only thing we weren't allowed to make jokes about.

That's true.

But we're not.

currently planning a tour to Thailand, so let's get into it.

Let's have some laughs.

I still have family there.

Okay.

Well,

okay, well, sorry for them, Ben.

I don't like them that much, though.

You knock yourself out, buddy.

So it's still very much on the books.

And the weird thing about it is anyone can complain about anyone, and the police have to start an investigation.

I could just go to the police and say, I heard James being a bit rude about the king.

And you'll.

I didn't?

Well, I heard it.

What?

And then an investigation is automatically opened.

So one guy got his brother locked up for a year with a les majeste accusation, and actually, their dogs had just got into a fight, and he was annoyed with his brother.

Oh, my God.

It's an inefficient system.

There used to be a system in ancient Rome whereby the person in power needed to be reminded not to go too far.

They were known as humblers.

If the Roman emperor was speaking, the humbler behind would go, yeah, but you're still a bit shit, mate.

Like they would just say things to bring them back down.

Australian version of an ancient Roman custom I've ever heard.

Yeah, no, you're not great at all.

No, yeah, yeah, no.

You're not all that.

Yeah, and that used to be a thing.

It's real.

I've read in multiple places that it's been a long time, Andy.

I don't know.

Well, it's the same role as a jester, I suppose, really, wasn't it?

But then it's a fine line you have to walk.

Your job is sort of to take the piss out of the king, but be very careful when you do it.

I think there was one of my favourites is Francis I, 16th century jester, I'm sure we all remember, Tribule.

Used to do quite fun things.

So once he slapped the king on the buttocks, and that was one step too far, the king said, sorry, one step too far, gonna execute you now.

Unless you can think of something more insulting than that slap.

And so, of course he replied, I'm so sorry, sir, I didn't mean to do it, I mistook you for your queen.

Nice,

got let off, you know, you gotta hand it to him.

Yeah, that's pretty good.

It's even more insulting to imply he's got a womanly bottom.

Is that I'm struggling to work out why that's an insult.

I think he's saying that his wife is so disgusting that her bare arms looked like they're there.

The arses were bare.

Why were the arses bare?

They all went around dressed like Donald Duck in the 16th century.

I didn't know that.

That's amazing.

No, you're right.

They probably weren't naked.

One of the things, just jumping back to North Korea quickly and Kim Il-sung and the descendants of him, is that you're not allowed to insult, but the flip side of it is you actively, constantly need to praise.

There are over 34,000 statues of Kim Il-sung, who is still the president of North Korea.

Despite being dead for many, many years, he's still an actively running president.

Well, he's not actively running.

He's hardly walking these days.

But

he's still listed as the president.

Forever president.

And so even the tourist phrase book has helpful icebreakers in a section when you're sightseeing the city.

It will say things like, why don't you just randomly say to someone, Comrade Kim Il-sung was the most distinguished leader of our times.

That will break the ice.

And then there was a journalist, a Western journalist, who went over there and he went to the zoo.

And the first thing that they showed him was a parrot who has learned to squawk, long live the great leader, Comrade Kim Il-sung.

That's what you see at the zoo, which, by the way, sounds like the most fucked up zoo I've ever read about.

They've got basketball playing monkeys.

They've got a dove that is part of a figure skating routine.

They've got a dog who is trained to manipulate an abacus and just do sums in the corner.

And then there's a monkey that just smokes ciggies all day long.

It just, you walk up, I've seen photos, it's just got a pack of ciggies and it just pulls out a new one each time, lights it up, and he's like,

I'm not really enjoying this basketball.

How much should I pay for it?

Rack this up on your abacus, dude.

The one person who is very positive to the leaders of North Korea is their poet laureate.

And he became very, very close to Kim Jong-gil.

And so much so that when he wrote a really long poem, it got immediately turned into the law of the land.

Isn't that amazing?

I find poems hard to interpret the best of times.

I don't know how how I translate it into it at all.

Say something about like no lettering or what is like what's that?

It's more it kind of tells like the history of the great leaders and stuff like that and it becomes part of the national history.

So it's become kind of canon.

Yeah, yeah.

Wow.

He's got to be careful when he's writing because it is illegal.

If you're writing any of the Kim's names, Kim Jong-un's name, it's illegal to let it run over two lines.

So, you know, if you're publishing a book and, you know, you have to let a word fall over two lines, that's very illegal.

Don't do that.

If you're writing a letter and you're getting up close to the edge, you've got to start a new line, mate.

Man, don't split those guys up.

Is it really insulting if you start writing it and you realize you're running out of space and write it smaller and smaller and smaller?

I think that's extreme torture.

Oh, my God.

Do you know what the people's instrument is in North Korea?

I rather like this.

Can we hazard a guess?

You can have as many guesses as you like.

I'd be impressed if you got that.

So, what was the question?

Sorry?

What is the people's instrument?

Oh,

musical instrument.

Not kazoo.

Good guess.

Theramin.

Theremin is nice.

No.

It's lower tech, but not much lower tech.

Recorder?

Higher tech.

Synthesizer.

Nearly.

Accordion, someone shouted out in the audience, and it is the accordion.

Okay.

There he is.

Wow.

Okay.

If you wanted to be a teacher in North Korea in the 1990s, you had to first pass an accordion exam.

Wow.

Pretty good.

Because

it was for songs, basically, so you could lead propaganda songs, things like that.

Wow.

There's one very famous story about Kim Jong-il, that he played 18 holes of golf, scoring 34, including four holes in one which would be 20 shots better than the best score ever shot by anyone else on earth playing golf.

But actually there's been more recent stories about it and what we think is that they used a different way of scoring.

So a par would be zero points, a bogey would be one.

So like if you do what you're supposed to do, you would get zero.

If you're slightly worse, you would get one.

If you're much worse, you would get two, et cetera, et cetera.

And if that's true, then he would have actually shot 106, which is quite good for someone in the first game, but not impossible.

So

are you saying it could be the case with this whole North Korea thing?

We've just been misunderstanding them the whole time.

Well, the truth is that a lot of it comes from South Korean propaganda.

Totally.

A lot of the things that we say and that we learn, it comes through South Korean press who haven't asked to grow.

Totally.

Well, this is from people in exile.

That's basically the only place you get actual information: people who've got away and said, oh, he's not going to be able to do that.

Absolutely.

So it might be that Kim Jong-il was not lying about his golf.

Donald Trump, on the other hand,

he claims to be scoring 73 on a regular basis at golf.

And if he did that, he would be the best golfer of his age in the world.

Okay.

That's fair enough.

Well,

he's pretty good at stuff, isn't he?

Just for clarity, I didn't vote for him.

What?

I didn't get a vote.

Wish I could have.

But Kim Jong- Kim Il-sung, by the way,

I think the North Koreans are very good at sometimes saying, actually, do you know what?

We were lying about that.

Because recently they revealed that Kim Il-sung cannot, in fact, manage to teleport by folding space, which previously they suggested he absolutely could.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So

since he's died, he's stopped being able to teleport by folding space.

That's probably what that is.

Yes.

Okay, so he still could do it while he was alive.

He was born supposedly again, who knows, on the day the Titanic sank.

Yeah.

Which is a harbinger of the fall of Western imperialism.

Oh, is that

why?

It's what they say it is.

And he wrote an eight-volume memoir about his life.

Okay.

Have you read it?

I haven't read it.

I think that's too many.

Well, don't judge.

I think it could have done the better.

That's too many.

Yeah.

We're going to have to move on in a minute, guys.

Okay, well, just quickly back to insulting leaders.

Yeah.

There was someone called Danny Lim,

who people in the audience might remember.

About seven or eight years ago, he had a sign that said, people can change Tony, you can't, referring to Tony

Abbott.

But the letter A in the word can't had been turned upside down and sort of rounded at the bottom.

How weird.

And with the cross kind of not very visible.

Oh, strange.

That must have made it very hard to understand what the sign was.

Yeah, people, I'll be honest, people misunderstood it quite a lot.

No.

But he did get off because the judge ruled that he hadn't unequivocally used the word Abbott.

Abbott.

Fair enough.

It is time for fact number three, and that is my fact.

My fact this week is that in the UK, there is a football competition called the Tolstoy Cup, in which the war study department at King's College London takes on the peace studies department at the University of Bradford.

Peace is currently beating war 10-3.

It's not real life, guys.

Let's not get too excited.

It's very much the opposite is true in the actual world.

Oh, it's pretty.

It's a lovely tournament.

It's a lovely tournament.

It's been going for years.

There was a break during the pandemic, and then they had one very recently.

And we got to meet the four of us, the captain of the peace team, Dr.

Alex Waterman.

And so, what's really great is they all represent someone who represents war and peace, and that's the name that appears on their back.

For example, the match that happened recently, it was like real nail biting, three to two in the end.

Mother Teresa got a yellow card.

Yeah, and Martin Luther King made it 2-1 for peace, 22 minutes in.

Some controversial choices.

I mean, Jesus, for instance, did he belong on the peace team?

A lot of people would say some wars are based around Christianity.

Did Tony Blair belong on the war team, which he was?

Or did he actually bring peace to a formerly troubled region?

We're not here to decide.

Yeah, no, it does sound really cool.

As in, it's a nice, they're both interesting institutions in different ways.

So the Peace Department at Bradford, they actually, they have the original studies.

You know, the peace symbol?

Oh, yeah.

The upside-down Mercedes with the extra one.

That was designed in 1958 by a guy called Gerald Holtom, and they have the originals there.

The anti-nuclear thing.

Exactly, yeah, really?

Very cool.

That's Bradford?

That's at Bradford.

Yeah, yeah.

It's not at the War Studies one.

The War Studies one is really interesting, though.

They do big war game exercises trying to work out what would happen if a war broke out.

And they actually, I mean, they're kind of on the side of peace.

They're not gunning for it.

They're trying to avert wars, despite the name.

But there are a lot of really interesting people there.

A lot of spooks as well, actually.

Ah.

Really?

In Bradford?

Noah, the War Studies Department.

Well, let me talk about a real sort of rivalry in sport.

Okay.

Cricket between England and Australia.

Oh.

There was a few interesting things about this.

After World War II, there were some things called victory tests that were held between English and Australian servicemen.

And there was one Australian bowler called Graham Williams, who'd only been released from a prisoner of war camp a couple of weeks earlier.

He was 35 kilograms below his pre-war weight.

And he had to take glucose tablets throughout the match.

He was given a standing ovation whenever he did anything on the pitch.

That's incredible.

And there was a guy called, an Aussie called Keith Miller, who scored a century in the first of those tests.

And when he was asked about the pressure of playing against England, he said, pressure is a mesh of smit up your ass.

Playing cricket is not.

I mean, cricketing rivalries are obviously a big thing in both of our respective countries, but university rivalries, which this is, also are everywhere.

And one of the most famous British university rivalries is a cricket one.

And it's the annual cricket match between Eton and Harrow, which are just two just very common man schools back in England.

No, they're two incredibly posh schools, and they've been playing the same cricket match at Lourdes since 1805.

Not the same one, they do different ones.

They do go on a while, those cricket matches.

Well, it's Tess cricket, so God knows when it's going to finish.

It's the oldest cricket fixture played at Lourdes, still played today.

And I really like the account of the first one.

So it was Harrow actually thrashed Eaton in the first one, but one man you might have heard of who participated was Lord Byron.

Really?

Yes, he did indeed play.

He played for Eaton.

He went to Eaton, didn't he?

I think he went to Harrow.

Cool.

He played for Harrow.

Oh, I'm not.

One of those will be correct.

I think so.

And he so he appeared in the game, but he had a club foot, so he needed a runner to run for him.

He did some batting, and then he had someone else run for him.

He batted really badly, but it's quite sweet.

His whole team batted very badly.

So actually, you're right.

But he batted for the losing team.

And he wrote a letter to his brother afterwards saying that he'd played played really well and it's just quite endearing no saying that he'd play he said look our team did dreadfully awfully but um i you know comported myself quite impressively by comparison and only batted the third best of everyone which still meant he only scored about six runs but

it's just so sweet knowing him as this great ego desperately trying to say i'm good at cricket and then he said later to be sure we were most of us very drunk and went together to the Haymarket Theatre where we kicked up a row, as you may suppose, when so many Herovians and Etonians meet in one place.

Wow.

Which pleuse achange.

Speaking quite similarly, actually, kind of similarly, in 1908, the Aussie Rules League in Australia had a team from Melbourne University join the league.

And everyone else at the time was amateur, they were all workers.

But this team from Melbourne University, you could only play for them if you'd matriculated or if you had a higher class degree.

Otherwise, you weren't allowed to play for the team.

And they left the league in 1916 after losing 51 games in a row.

row.

It is.

That's superb.

Australia has quite a lot of great rivalries, I think.

Not just with other places, but also internal ones.

So, for example, which is better to live, Sydney or Melbourne?

See, it's very mixed.

Canberra!

Well, I mean, you know, 40% of Australia's population live in one of those two cities.

Right.

And obviously, neither of you got to be the capital.

But

the rivalries are very tight on either side.

So for example, Sydney has been named the world's best city eight consecutive times by Condé Nas Traveller.

Oh yeah.

Pretty good.

But Melbourne has been named the world's most livable city seven times by The Economist.

So

is it rather to live in the best city or the most livable one?

Let's ask the room.

Which one would you rather?

I regret, sorry,

the room is curdling like milk as I'm reading this stuff out.

So can I tell you about a pumpkin growing thing

Thank you.

Which city is best at growing pumpkins?

Sydney.

Sydney.

The great Australian rivalry number one is the Atlantic Giant Pumpkin Growing Championship.

This is amazing.

The two guys called Gary Smith and Dale Oliver and they try and grow heavier pumpkins than each other.

The Australian record is 743 kilos for a pumpkin.

But they're very nicely.

They are sort of trying to beat each other, but they're also very relaxed.

So Dale Oliver was asked, what about Gary Smith, this guy who's trying to beat you?

And he replied, well, I hope he does.

He puts a lot of effort in, so that would be great.

That was actually a typo.

It was, I hope he dies.

I like.

I think we can't talk about rivalry without talking about the longest term rivalry of all time.

And it's just so epic, blues versus greens.

I don't think we talk about it enough.

Ancient Rome, blues versus greens went on for 400 years.

What do you mean?

What's that?

So they were the two sports teams, basically.

It was the chariot racers.

They were split into four teams originally.

It was Reds, Whites, Greens, and Blues.

And then eventually it became Blues and Greens, and Reds and Whites joined one each, respectively.

And they were fanatical.

And it really reached its climax by about the 6th century when it was the Byzantine Empire.

And it was things like, you know, you'd be in a big stadium and 3,000 people would be massacred as a result of this just like hot-headed rivalry.

And it wasn't about chariot racing anymore, much like football rivalries or sports rivalries today.

It was just kind of people who were either blue or green running and beating each other up.

And this epic moment in early Byzantine history, the Nika riots, happened because of this weird sports rivalry, which was it was the most violent disturbance in Constantinople's history.

It was the year 532.

There was a massive fight between blues and greens and the emperor was like, you're all you're all detentioned, you know, you're all doing lines.

I'm punishing you all.

The leaders of both of you are being executed.

Come along with me, get executed.

Two of the executions were botched, but it was one from the blues and one from the green side.

Oh, good.

So that was a lovely coming together moment.

Because they were both like, oh, you botched our executions.

And everyone was like, oh, well, let them go.

You fucked up their executions.

You know, just let them free.

How do you mess up an execution in ancient Rome?

Oh, it's a lot more complicated.

The scaffold broke.

Oh,

that'll do.

It's a project management problem.

Okay, yeah, yeah, so.

Yeah, I'm sure a carpenter was fired.

But there are still battles between the blues and the greens and the whites and the reds, right?

The Calcio Fiorentino tournament still goes on, which is like, it's like soccer slash rugby slash lots of different sports.

And they play it in Italy.

And it's very, very, very violent.

There was a guy called Mirko Cardelli who broke both his hands during a game, but carried on playing and complained afterwards that the main problem was he couldn't urinate properly for weeks.

Right.

Because his hands were broken.

I think it meant he couldn't hold his, not that he was urinating through his fingers.

And they brought in new rules about, maybe about 10 years ago, saying that convicted criminals are not allowed to play in the tournament.

And the green team lost 20 players due to that rule.

No.

Is it a descendant of the Bazan team one, do we think?

Not really.

The Calcios only goes, well, well, oh, it goes back to about the 13th century.

And not to,

because this one actually did end in them being wiped out during this botched execution thing.

30,000 people died, 10% of the population of the city killed because they got together and rose up against the emperor.

They were like, hang on, I bet we're better together.

Do you know why we are rivals with each other?

Us here today.

We're not.

We're all on the same team, Andy.

Okay, that's that's loser talk.

Well, is it not like a sexual selection thing?

Oh,

not tonight.

We sexually selected each other.

Wow.

Sometimes you forget there's two and a half thousand people in the room.

I'm just thinking, how is it possible for three people to have lost this competition between three people?

But go on.

Why are we rivals, Andy?

There's a theory that it's from the Unheimlich, which is the German for the uncanny, right?

So Freud had this theory that the rival, it's a double who reveals uncomfortable truths about ourselves.

You sort of see yourself reflected in them you know what i mean you see the similarities between you which creates a sense of you know unhappiness and unease within you therefore you react with kind of hostility and aggression you know those bastards in melbourne whatever that's that's the that's the principle like you you hate and you undermine them i i must be the true one it can't be these guys because they're so similar to me that i find that yeah yeah which i quite like i just i just think that word is too close to heimlik which is a very important maneuver which i don't want anyone in a restaurant going does anyone know the Heimlich?

And you getting up going, the Unheimlich.

Yes, it is a...

The Unheimlich maneuver is when you put more things inside their mouth.

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Subject to change.

It is time for our final fact, and that is, Andy.

My fact is that Spanish people have no way of telling the afternoon from the evening.

Come on.

It can't be done.

Well, until now, because we're here to tell them, Spain, is is when it gets a little bit darker, a bit more difficult to see.

End of facts.

There you go.

What the hell are you talking about?

You're welcome, La Spaña.

This is great.

This is, okay, so this is based on a brilliant piece that was in the Financial Times by Barney Jobson.

Kudos to him.

So there is a word, Latade, right?

Afternoon.

What's the word for the evening?

La Tade.

Uh-oh.

Yeah.

So tade is, as far as I can gather, either from soon after 12, not actually at 12.

It's either soon after 12 or potentially from 4 p.m., right?

So there's a gap.

But if you have lunch at 4 p.m.

or maybe 5 p.m., which is very common, it's not Latade until 5 o'clock.

And then you go back to work at 6 o'clock.

But if you say buenas noches to someone before 11 p.m., they'll look at you like you're insane.

They'll say, that's the sort of an ultimate faux pas.

It's like calling your teacher mum.

It's just so embarrassing.

So Spain just has the, yeah.

So does the whole country grind to a halt every single day?

Well,

it's not for me to say what's grinding to a halt or not, but I think.

Or are they just able to to tell everything by context?

Why do we need to tell?

The question I found myself asking is when you mentioned this, why on earth do we need to?

You know, it's afternoon and it's pre-noon.

I spoke to my brother-in-law who is Spanish, and that is exactly his attitude.

And I was like, no, but then say it's like you're reading a novel and they say these words.

How do you know?

And he went, we know.

How?

They just know.

I know.

It's quite baffling as a non-Spanish speaker to try and get your head around this.

But I think it creates problems because when do you have your tea?

When do you have your afternoon tea?

What if you have it at 7 p.m.

by mistake?

You've screwed up.

Disaster.

They won't.

Because they know.

I know.

But Spain is really mixed up about time in general.

So Spain is on the wrong time zone.

I think we've mentioned before that

in about 1940, General Franco was trying to kiss up to Nazi Germany and set Spanish time, pegged it to Germany.

And that means that for half a year, they're on the same time as the very eastern edge of Germany.

The other half, they're like halfway across Ukraine is where sunshine and midday matches the clock.

So everyone is out of way.

They don't have a random bit of the country that's half an hour different than everywhere else today.

No.

That would be insane.

I think I read something that said probably has a lot to do with the fact that it's lighter a lot more often and it's not, so it stays light later.

And it's the same in Arabic.

You don't really distinguish between afternoon and evening in the same way.

You have the specific prayer times, which refer to five specific times of day, but you basically have something that means good afternoon and something that means good night.

And that's, I guess, you know, it's light.

And maybe, because in the UK, because it gets dark much earlier, you know, basically whether it's the afternoon or the evening.

So Spanish people get very annoyed if you suggest they all have a siesta for three hours a day, because they actually, they really don't.

Yeah, I think only about 20% of them do these days, don't they?

Yeah.

And it's much shorter.

But the problem is that the workday goes from 9 a.m.

till about 8 p.m.

They're like some of the longest workers in Europe by hours.

And the good TV doesn't start until 10 p.m.

And children's TV sometimes doesn't start until 9.30 p.m.

Really?

Children's TV?

Yeah.

No way.

This is the maddest thing I found.

In 2017 in Spain, MasterChef Jr.

ended at 1 in the morning.

And like MPs complained about it saying, could they possibly turn off the children's TV by 11 p.m.?

Everyone is underslept.

Yeah.

Yeah.

My brother-in-law, he keeps telling me that Spanish is the superior language whenever we're talking about our respective first languages.

Well, I mean, compared to your language, yes, Dan, but he should compare Spanish to English one of these days.

Okay, I mean the language I speak is Australian, so that's a bold

little statement there, mate.

But no, I don't know, do we have Spanish speakers in the crowd?

Okay, a few, right?

Because while hunting, it's so hard to tell sometimes whether a translation is a bit too wild or not.

But so, for example, I read that the Spanish don't have a distinct word for toes, for the feet, right?

For your toes.

They they call them des dos des los spais which means the fingers of the feet

makes sense yeah you know how we always say you have a three-toed sloth and a two-toed sloth yeah yes but actually they all have the same number of toes but they have a different number of fingers oh wow but the problem is that it all came from a spanish translation where they called everything fingers.

So it's a three-fingered sloth and we assumed it was three-finger of the footed sloth.

Exactly.

But it's just three-fingered sloth.

So it can be a problem.

Yeah.

How big a problem has that been?

The sloth world, honestly, is crowded to a halt every afternoon.

An amazing language thing relating to day times between Spanish and English.

I've always loved the English word day and the Spanish word dear.

You know, they're completely unrelated to each other.

Really?

Isn't that so cool?

The Spanish is from Latin, DAs, which all the other Romance languages are.

Our day has absolutely nothing to do do with that.

So there's comes from heaven, least sky, you know, it's related to the lightness of the sky, which is why it's quite similar to Deus, God.

Whereas the English word comes from Old English, die.

Nothing to do with Latin.

Isn't that so cool?

That's weird.

In Spanish, they use reflexive verbs quite a lot.

So if I knock over this water,

you might say James knocked over the water.

But in Spanish, you would say the water knocked over itself by James.

And Dan, your brother-in-law says this is a superior language.

That's what I'm talking about, right?

But what it actually means is

when you show someone from Spain like a drawing of something that's happened, like there's a vase on the floor and there's one person looking guilty and one person not looking guilty, they find it more difficult to work out who knocked over the vase than English people because as far as they're concerned, the vase broke itself.

And they can still do it, but it just takes the brain a bit longer to process.

That's so interesting.

Does it also mean murder mysteries are a little bit more exciting?

Because there's the waiting that he was killed by dun-dun duh.

Whereas we just go, oh, Barry killed him.

Like, where's the suspense there?

But there's a thing about how Spanish speakers and English speakers think about time, which is just the same.

You get a different conceptual universe by the way your language is shaped.

So English speakers think of time as a length.

It was a long time, right?

Oh, okay.

It's a length stretching out.

It's centimeters, you know?

It's a sausage, right?

Spanish speakers.

Everything comes down to sausages with you doesn't it

in spain it's a volume it's a swelling it's a

again a sausage it's a

it's a an all an orb sausage uh if i could put it that way yeah like a haggis it's a grow is a constantly growing haggis that's right

so does that change things maybe a bit

yeah

It's funny when you get to, like when I talk to my brother-in-law about his impressions of English, you know, we could equally be doing a fact about how weird our language is, right?

One of the first things is when he started dating my sister-in-law and they eventually got married, there was a bit of religion going on at the time.

They used to go to church a lot.

His impression of how we generally spoke to each other was to speak in a voice like this.

And so that just used to be his thing at the dinner table.

Can you pass me the soul, Daniel?

He just saw the voice.

Why?

Because he's not.

He just saw a beautiful invention.

No, because he just used to hear the speeches.

So does that mean when he heard you and he didn't really know what he was hearing?

That's just the sound that made in his head.

Yeah,

he was trying to adopt certain accents and ways.

In the same way that if you were speaking Spanish, you might put on a slightly racist Spanish accent.

Now, I know you're referring to a previous episode in which I tried to explain that I find their lisp very sexy.

That sort of...

Oh, yeah.

Pete, patato.

That kind of...

Because it's not a speech impediment.

It's a thing that they purposely have trained their language to be, right?

I think it's important that we move on.

Can I teach you some Spanish?

Yeah, sure.

Okay.

Can you spell the word socks in English?

S-O-C-K-S.

S-L-C-K-S is Spanish for, that's really what it is.

S-L-C-K-S.

Oh, really?

Et-O-C-K-S.

These are really cool.

Can I just quick.

I I don't think that's racist, right?

Like, that is the thing that they've built into the language.

Am I cool with this?

Are we all right?

I got a big no there.

I'm going to stop it.

I'm going to stop it.

Okay, let's apologize.

Say I meant to kill you, but in a slightly Irish accent.

Nope.

I'll do it.

I'll say I'm not going to do it.

Let's try the best one.

No way.

Irish or Northern Irish?

Republic.

Oh, he meant to kill you.

Oh, he meant to kill you.

Oh, he meant to kill you.

Well, I meant to kill you is the butter in Spanish.

Oh, I meant to kill you.

Yeah.

Oh, I meant to kill you.

How does it break down?

What is it?

It's just a little special about it.

Oh, I've only ever heard them when they sing in choirs.

I

honour to kill you.

Just two more of those.

Fireman Derek sounds like thank you in Albanian.

Say it again.

Fireman Derek.

Fireman Derek.

Fireman Derek.

And 12 Months in Estonian sounds exactly the same as cocks tastes good.

Lovely.

There's one word in Spanish that can be spoken but that cannot be written down.

Oh.

And this has been stated by the Royal Spanish Academy, which, as you know, the French has the Académie Française, which monitors their language.

Spain has exactly the same thing, which monitors the Spanish language, made up of immortals who tell you what the rules are.

And there's this word which I find fascinating.

And it's the word that means

get out.

And you like get out to him or get out to her, you know, get out to him, help him out.

It's not super common, but it is used a fair bit.

And it's written S-A-L-L-E, or it should be, but if you pronounce that, you'd say SAI,

but it's actually pronounced when people say it, sol le.

And it's incredibly confusing.

And the Royal Spanish Academy have said, because this word has no spelling that matches the way we say it, this word is not allowed to be written down.

So this is the one word

you can say solé, but there is no correct way to spell it.

And it suggests if you do want to write it down, find an alternative.

They're crazy.

They are so they're so hardcore.

I love the Royal Spanish Academy.

I think they're brilliant.

So they, a few years ago, they printed an 800-page guide to the proper use of Spanish.

Like they really care.

Last year, only last year, they finished a 13-year battle over the use of the word solo and whether it should have an acute accent over the first O.

Okay?

That was a 13-year struggle in Spanish linguistics.

And I think they concluded, no, no

acute accent over the first O in solo.

But a very famous Spanish author called Arturo Perez Riverte, he declared, I will put solo with an accent until the cold of the grave.

Wow.

People care.

Which he has met prematurely and mysteriously now, hasn't he?

A huge acute accent sticking out.

They're great.

Can I tell you guys a quick thing?

I've just suddenly remembered speaking of my brother-in-law.

So he's Spanish.

Is he Spanish?

Yeah.

Wow.

So he got married in Spain, and two nights before he got married, he decided to throw a stag do.

And so I was invited to the stag do, and it was him and all his Spanish friends and me, who speaks no Spanish whatsoever.

So we went to this bar, and my soon-to-be-wife, Fenella, and I should say what I'm about to say next, put the whole idea of marriage in jeopardy.

She and her family went home and we stayed out and we were having one more drink.

And just before we were going, one of the bartenders spoke Spanish, I didn't understand anything,

slammed a drink down as a courtesy bottle for us to have for free and it was called Thunder Bitch.

And.

Sorry, is that Thunderbitch, but you're doing the sexy accent?

Yeah, it was called Thunder Bitch, and that is all I remember from the end of the evening, right?

I woke up.

I woke up in a hut in a farm with a man holding a bowl of paello over me going, eat up.

And I was like, where am I?

Fortunately, the groom was there as well.

I called my wife.

She's like, where the fuck are you?

We're in rural Spain and you've disappeared.

So I thought, and I was like, oh, I was trying to look after him, but I had no memory of the night.

So two days later, we went back to that bar and I thought, this will be fine because we couldn't speak to each other.

There's no chat that would have happened, right?

I get to the bar and I've told her that I've had a very casual night.

We walk up and we say, hi, can we get a couple of glasses of wine?

And the bartender looks at me and goes, oh my God, Crazy Dan is back?

And he went to everyone, guys,

Crazy Party Dan is back.

And they were like, you were amazing.

You were on all the tops of the bars dancing and stuff.

And Fidela was like, you fucking what?

And

I can't believe a conversation about the intricacies of the beautiful Spanish language has descended into a stag do story from Dan Schrader

that was one incredible afternoon

Okay, that's it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

Sydney, you have been amazing.

thank you for having us at the Opera House we will be back again next week with another episode and we'll see you then goodbye