408: No Such Thing As A 'Waiting For Godot' Action Figure

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Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast this week coming to you live from Chesterfield.

My name is Dan Shriver.

I am sitting here with Anna Tashinsky, Andrew Hunter Murray, and James Harkin.

And once again, we have gathered round the microphones 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 Andy.

My fact is that one Japanese slang term for a retired husband is soraigomi, which literally translates as bulky waste.

That is too on the nose.

It's a lot.

It's a lot.

Tone of is meant affectionately or less affectionately?

I think tone of voice counts for a lot in these scenarios.

I don't think it's a completely affectionate term.

It's a phrase that I think maybe older people will know more than younger people in Japan today.

I think it first came to prominence in the 90s and it was basically that certainly at the time in Japan the very, very strong culture of working very hard.

a lot of quite traditional gender roles at the time.

So you'd have, you know, a husband might be working sort of 16 hours a day for 40 years, and then suddenly he's retired and he's here all the time.

And this was the phrase that arose as a result of that.

Another one that they use is nureo chiba, which means wet fallen leaves.

And the idea is that if you have wet fallen leaves, they just stick to your shoes all the time, and the husband is just sticking to his wife annoyingly, and she can't get rid of him.

That's so funny.

That is horrible.

So Japan has a very high population that is sitting above the sort of 90s even.

Like they have the second largest number of centenarians in their country.

That came out so weird out of my mouth.

Because I was saying centenarians and then I thought centaurs and I thought which one is it?

And I got stuck halfway through.

It's both actually in Japan.

Yeah, a lot of old centaurs in Japan.

Yeah, which is amazing.

America has the highest.

America.

America has the most.

So America has, from the article that I read, was 97,000.

This is a few years old this article Japan with 79,000 so Japan

it's it's six people for every 10,000 people in Japan will make it to a hundred and above which

is high yeah so proportionally you say that proportionally I think it's Japan surely yeah yeah

proportionally Japan's got the highest number I think so centaurs do live long so it's not really as impressive as you think but it does lead to I mean there's a lot of retirement about in Japan and basically there are a lot of free hours to fill after you hit 65 or something.

So, you can always go to the leisure centaur.

That did not deserve even that sarcastic round of applause.

But they have lots of activities.

So, for example, Japan loves rugby.

There's a hugely popular sport there.

But they have 120,000 rugby players, give or take.

10,000 of them are over the age of 40, which is, you know, impressive enough as a contact sport.

There is one rugby club in Japan which has three over 90-year-old players.

Come on.

Genuinely.

Genuinely.

There was an interview with a few of them.

One of them was called Ryuichi Nagayama, and he said he found it an enormous amount of fun.

He said, Since I joined, I have broken ribs many times and broke my collarbone too.

I can't stand not playing.

He said it would kill him if he stopped playing because he loves it so much.

Well, it sounds like it will kill him if he keeps playing.

Yeah, I'm just picturing a crumbled heap of bones right now.

Very impressive.

Yeah.

They do.

There was a story, which I'd imagine, it sounds like one of those stories that must slightly be fake, but from what I can read, it's true, which is that the sales of adult nappies are overtaking the sales of children's nappies.

That's definitely true.

That's true.

Which is amazing.

Like, that's just, there's your indication about the difference in population in Japan.

Yeah.

More adults and nappies than babies.

Yeah.

And it's not just the old ones.

Sometimes it's just convenient.

You know?

How do you think we last an hour up here?

Yeah.

They do have in Japan a problem with dementia, as lots of countries do, but Japan, particularly, obviously, with its massively aging population.

And

there's been some kind of cool initiatives to deal with that.

So, one of them is that there is a restaurant called in Tokyo called the Restaurant of Mistaken Orders.

And it's where the waiting staff is comprised entirely of people suffering from dementia.

And so.

Oh, my God.

It's great.

The restaurant openly says that you, as a customer, may or may not get what you order.

We guarantee it's delicious.

Yeah, the chefs do not have dementia.

But yeah, it's quick and it's so good.

And it just allows people, it's sort of based on this idea there's a lot of misunderstanding of dementia and it thinks people think you're incapable of doing anything, whereas actually people are capable of doing lots of stuff.

They just can't remember a lot.

And so it encourages a lot of open discussion about it and gives them something to occupy them.

Yeah,

it's a great idea, but probably not for whoever owns a business, right?

It doesn't feel like well, people love it.

Yeah, I bloody love it.

I hate having to choose what I want in a restaurant.

If I could know that, I could just say a random thing on the menu and it didn't make a blind bit of difference.

I'd go there.

I read about these three women in Japan that are called the monkey busters.

Did you come across those guys?

So there are a lot of areas of Japan, especially in the rural areas, where you get the monkeys and they will come down and try and steal stuff from people and all that kind of thing.

And so this group of three women, one seventy four, one hundred sixty eight and one sixty seven have formed the Monkey Buster Group.

And if you see the monkeys coming along, if they're trying to like damage your fields and stuff or whatever, then you call the monkey busters and they come down.

How quickly do they come down?

If they're nearby, then quickly.

If they're down the road, it might take a few minutes.

That's so funny.

What d and when they get there, do they do they shoot the monkeys?

Do they trap the monkeys?

They don't shoot the monkeys, they shoot over the monkeys' monkeys' heads.

Like they do warning shots to the monkeys.

Firecrackers is the other thing they use sometimes.

That's great.

That's a great thing to do once you retire.

Just go around scaring monkeys.

I'd like it as a career.

Monkey busting.

I'm sure someone would pay me for that.

Have you guys heard of Yuichiro Miura?

No, he has.

So he is a sportsman.

He's Japanese.

And he is interesting partly because of what he's done since your classic retirement age.

He was the oldest person in the world to climb Mount Everest.

He climbed at age 70.

Then, five years after that, he did it again at the age of 75.

He's done it again at the age of 80.

So he's become the oldest person to climb Everest three times in a row.

Wow.

The high point of his career, I reckon.

In his 40s, he skied down Mount Everest with a parachute on his back so he could slow himself down.

Okay.

Wow.

It's unbelievable.

There was a film made about it in 1975.

I don't think we've mentioned this before in the book.

Did he go from the top?

That's he went from very, very high up.

Okay.

I don't know if he went from the exact.

I don't know if he went.

I think he did.

I thought it was.

It can't be the top.

No, it's too

much.

There's too much going on.

No, but there are.

There are lots of crevasses.

He nearly died many times on the way down.

He went 160 kilometers an hour on the way down.

Wow.

The parachute didn't work at first.

Nightmare.

He was sliding towards this huge crevass, and eventually the parachute kind of kicked in.

Oh my god.

He's a hero.

What I love, because you go past all the crevasses going, fucking come up, parachute, when it finally does deploy, parachutes, of course, rip you back.

Having to do all the crevasses all over again.

I don't think it sails you back up to the top.

I don't think it's safe.

He's still there.

He's still there.

He's still there.

It's just on a loop.

Because they have such an aging population, they have a problem with elderly drivers.

And they're trying to do a thing where they're trying to get older people to hand back their driving license.

There's a few ways they tried to do this.

There was a 97-year-old Buddhist priest who handed over his driving license.

The idea was if he did it, maybe he would encourage other people to do it.

There's some areas where they'll give you cheap ramen, 15% off your ramen, if you hand in your driving license.

Ironically, it'll stop you ramen anyone else with your car.

Very uncertain about that, just

a funeral home in Tokyo that's offering a 15% discount on the cost of a funeral if you hand in your driving driving license.

That's very late.

We're going to have to move on in a sec.

So,

here's a I'll give you a couple of sayings or phrases in Japanese, see if you can guess what they mean.

So,

bakudo ha, which means barcode baldy.

Do you know what that is?

Oh, is that someone with a comb over who's

got it?

Yeah,

yeah, really obvious comb over.

You're a barcode baldy.

The by the window tribe, do you know what they are?

That is

Madogiwa Zoku.

Brazil.

People who are underemployed.

Nosy parkers.

Sit by their windows spying on their neighbours.

Underemployed was close.

So it's people who've been promoted to quite a senior level, but they don't really do anything decent.

So they just sit there by the window looking out of the window.

And here's one more.

Kairo no Tura ni shomben, which means piss on a frog's face.

That's just good advice.

Is it like a frog's face is bad enough?

The piss on it is even worse.

If you're piss on a frog's face, you're the lowest of the low.

That's a good guess.

It's someone who is a little bit slow and isn't affected by anything.

So whatever you say to them, they'll just sit there going, yeah, fine, whatever.

And this is due to a theory, which I don't think is true, that if you piss on a frog, it just sits there.

My neighbour has tadpoles in their garden that are just turning into frogs, and I am going to try that.

I'm going to be squatting over the fence next week.

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Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is my fact.

My fact this week is that in 1969, Samuel Beckett wrote a play that lasts 35 seconds long and features no actors or any dialogue.

The play is still performed today and has even been adapted into a movie.

This amazing thing.

Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot, you know, one of the great playwrights and novelists.

He was called upon by Kenneth Tynan, who was an amazing journalist and writer, critic in London, famously first person to say fuck on television.

Dan, sorry.

It's all right.

First person to say, fucking Chesterfield.

So in 1969, he was putting on a play called O Calcutta, and the idea was he wanted to invite a lot of very famous people to contribute to this play, but he was going to keep them anonymous.

So he wrote to Samuel Beckett.

Samuel Beckett agreed to do it.

And the story goes is that he wrote this entire play, which lasts 35 seconds long, onto a postcard and mailed it to him.

So he received the entire play on this postcard.

And then it was put on.

But Beckett was very upset because when the play was eventually put on by Tinnen, he added extra stuff into the 35-second long play.

And he was like, that's, don't touch my play, you dick.

And yeah.

So what happened was, Old Calcutta was an erotic review.

So there were going to be loads of these little mini plays that were kind of erotic plays.

And when Beckett sent this stuff to Titan on the postcard, it was basically just a load of clutter on the stage.

The lights go on, off, on, off, and there's breathing that goes with the on and off.

And then at the end, there's a little bit of baby crying.

That's it.

And the whole point of it is it's a joke because everyone's expecting something really sexy and you get something really lame.

That's the whole point.

But what they decided to do was to add some naked people into it.

Well, it's an erotic review.

Let's just have all of that stuff, but with some naked people on stage.

And yeah, he was absolutely furious.

yeah that's so annoying to face the objects exactly beckett's very difficult i have to say really really difficult i agree really difficult to understand yeah you need an interval was there an interval in this one

it was it was part of a sketch within a bigger thing so there was lots of different places going on when it's now performed on stage uh it's a two-hander so it's like when we tour live we do a first half to our show we do close to 50 minutes beckett say 35 seconds and then there's an intermission for beers and then you get a full play on the second half oh yeah not a Beckett in the second half yeah Beckett was maybe the most Fecket the Fecket the most famous Beckett Andy!

Sorry.

Andy was the first person to say Fecket on TV, wasn't it?

Yeah, yeah.

It was my father's turtle edition tape.

Didn't get it.

Maybe the most famous play of his is Waiting for Godot.

Yeah.

Famously described as a play in which nothing happens twice, which is kind of true.

And it was written in French, which I didn't know.

He was a very international writer, you know, travelled around a lot, lived in France for decades.

But it was first produced in Blackpool in 1956.

And it's a pretty aggressively modernist play now.

And Blackpool in 1956 was not ready for it.

And there was incredible...

This was still an era where all British plays had to go through the Lord Chamberlain's office, the official censor of all theatre.

And an agent called C.W.

Herriot saw it on behalf of the Lord Chamberlain to say which bits should and shouldn't be allowed and said he had been through two hours of angry boredom.

The man next to him had fled the theatre saying, let me out of this.

And several women were apologising to their escorts for having suggested a visit to such a piece.

And he also requested that they cut the bit where Estregon's trousers fall down.

Come on, I can't.

He actually, it's quite interesting reading his notes because I kind of warm to him, to Herriot, because

he basically is saying it's really boring and pointless, not that it's too crude.

And actually, with Estragon's trousers, to be fair to him, he says, on the business of letting down Estragon's trousers, I suppose that may be alright.

Better keep.

You know, he thinks that's a bit fucking weird, but whatever.

I thought this was quite learned of him.

He censored the words gonococcus and spirochayete, which, yeah.

What's gonococcus?

What's the cocoa?

Well, gonococcus sounds like a magic trick, doesn't it?

Gonococcus does

I think

you're demanding a Darren Brown refund if he's done the Godococcus on you.

It's presumably a bacterium of some kind.

They're both microbes, so it's the micro, the bacteria of gonorrhea is one of them, and the bacterium of syphilis is the other.

But even he went to the trouble of looking in a dictionary to check up on those words.

Right.

It's a good on him.

Do you know you can get a Godo action figure?

Oh, cool.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Except it's on Etsy and it's just an empty package.

You wadder it and it never arrives.

That's it.

It's all got five-star reviews on Etsy apart from one person who says, I paid for expedited shipping and I still have not received the item.

Brilliant.

I love it.

He was once asked by the director Alan Schneider.

Beckett was once asked, who is Godot?

And Beckett answered, if I knew, I would have said so in the play.

Wow.

That's great.

He was a mystery, wasn't he?

Yeah.

Just genuinely a very mysterious man.

He won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Oh, yeah.

You'd think he'd be happy about that.

He said it was a catastrophe.

His wife said it was a catastrophe.

He refused to go to the prize giving because he was on holiday.

And his publisher wrote, Dear Sam and Suzanne, that was his wife, in spite of everything, they have given you the Nobel Prize.

I advise you to go into hiding.

And,

you know, the most eminent prize in the world.

Anyway, he seemed absolutely furious about it, although someone someone did write to him a message from a Mr.

George Goddo, got in touch with him and said, sorry to keep you waiting.

Which he must have hated.

I bet he cracked a secret smile at that and then just hated himself for it.

He's famously the only Nobel Prize winner to have played first-class cricket.

That's a quiz question that comes up quite a lot.

He played for Dublin University against Northamptonshire and he played two games and for some reason there was just this arbitrary thing where they said, Okay, this is a proper professional game now, and all these other games aren't proper professional games.

And that's why it counts that he played first-class cricket.

But actually, when you read the articles about the matches, it turns out that his team were absolutely shit.

There's no reason at all they should have been a first-class team.

Like the first game they played, the article begins: The university men are by no means a first-class side.

They are keen and enthusiastic, but their batting was poor, their bowling presented no terrors, and their fielding would have have been improved by alertness.

In the second game they played a year later, it said in the newspaper, they were weak in all departments of the game, and the university were outclassed from start to finish.

Maybe he liked that he hated the good reviews, maybe he loved the absolute snatching.

We're going to have to move on in a sec to our next.

We haven't mentioned that he was friends with James Joyce and used to wear shoes that were too small for him because he wanted to be like James Joyce.

We haven't mentioned that he was in the resistance resistance during the Second World War and almost got, you know, killed by the Nazis.

We haven't mentioned the fact that he was stabbed by a pimp in Paris.

All this stuff.

We've got to move on.

Was he wearing shoes that were the same size as James Joyce's shoes, or did James Joyce also wear shoes that were too small for him?

That's exactly what I'm wearing.

Is that what you're going to do?

That's my question.

He wanted to wear the same shoes as James Joyce.

James Joyce had very narrow feet, and so he wore these shoes that were really, really narrow, even though they didn't fit him.

He also would only drink white wine because James Joyce drank white wine.

He just wanted to be like James Joyce.

Because it was so needy.

Imagine how oppressed you'd feel if your mate was like that.

You know, you dump them.

I think they had a falling out, and it's probably because of that.

They claimed it was because James Joyce's daughter fancied him and he didn't return her affections.

But I think it was the weird wine-drinking shoe-wearing shit.

I think you might be right.

Can I tell you quickly, just back to Oak Calcutta, the play that Beckett submitted this breathe, it was called,

the play to.

Kenneth Tinnan wrote to a lot lot of famous people to try and get them to submit a thing.

And one of the people he wrote to was John Lennon.

And again, it was meant to be all anonymous, but apparently this is known that John Lennon did submit a sketch.

So he wrote a sketch about masturbation.

And it was based on his time when he used to masturbate amongst his friends at a party.

This is this sketch right now.

Paul McCartney verifies this story because in a biography on Paul McCartney called Many Years from Now, this is what he says.

Apologies for what I'm about to say.

We used to have wanking sessions when we were young at Nigel Wally's house in Woolton.

We'd stay overnight and we'd sit in armchairs and we'd put out all the lights and being teenage pubescent boys, we'd all wank.

What we used to do, someone would say, Bridget Bardot.

Ooh, that would keep everyone on par.

Then somebody, probably John, would say, Winston Churchill.

Oh no!

And it would completely ruin everyone's concentration.

So John, yeah, submitted a wanking play to Old Calcutta.

Actually, that sounds like a really fun game.

Yeah.

Sounds quiet.

I only wish I knew any Beatles songs because there must be some tongues in that summer.

Yeah, come together.

Okay, we need to move on to our next fact.

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

Okay, my fact this week is that the European road called E404 doesn't exist.

Have you searched for it?

Yes, I have.

It definitely doesn't exist.

It was in 1995 the European Parliament decided they were going to build the E404.

It was near Zeebrugge in Belgium.

And they decided they were going to build it, and they just never did.

And so now, if you try to go onto the E404, plug it into your sat nav it will just give you an error message that's brilliant

does it do you know if it predates the error 404 message 1995 it would not just about is thereabouts yeah yeah so the error 404 message which is where you go on the computer and you search for a website and it's not there uh that was invented by tim berners-lee around the start of the internet so that'll be around the late 80s early 90s something like that so it probably doesn't yeah yeah there's a a rumor that it was because there was a room at CERN where they were working on the World Wide Web called Room 404.

But it's not true.

No.

And one of the founders, Robert Caillio, Tim Bernardi's colleague, was asked about it,

that thing, the room, and he said, I don't even have a hunch about the 404 fascination, and frankly, I don't give a damn.

The sort of creativity that goes into 404 response pages is fairly useless.

The mythology is probably due to the irrationality, denial of evidence, and preference for the fairy tale over reality that is quite common in the human species.

Oh my god!

Wow!

Actually, like Barrel of Larson.

Four or four pages are really important at the start of the internet because it meant that you could search for something, and if you've got the wrong thing, it would just give you something basic.

You knew what you were going to get.

Otherwise, it could go in some kind of weird loop, and you're never, you know, it was a really, really important part when they were kind of putting the networks together.

Right.

It's not fucking interesting, James.

That's his point.

And the fact that you're bothering to discuss it is a waste of his time and yours.

Look, the number four was always used at the start of errors when they were user-created errors.

And they would have 401, 402, 45.

Are you trying to meet this?

This is interesting.

I find that very interesting.

And there's a better theory about where 404 comes from.

Oh, yeah.

In 1989, they were working on this.

There was a flight, flight 404, that went missing and it was never found.

And so they may have heard on the radio that 404 is not being found.

And then in 1990, there was another flight 404 which crashed.

So there were two flight 404s which went wrong.

And so...

Coincidence?

Yes.

Possibly, yes.

I grew up in Hong Kong, and four is a very unlucky number in Asia.

It means death or something like that.

Yeah, four sounds like death.

Which means death.

And yeah, so it's the same sound.

So room 404 in any hotel does not exist.

Let's say for a hotel,

room 404s.

And it's really interesting because 404 doesn't exist.

So obviously the whole of four doesn't exist.

So you lose floor four.

You would lose floor 13 as well.

But you also, because 13 for any foreign people we're coming in, they keep to the superstition for foreign builders.

You've got one, two, three, five.

Yep, through to 12.

Yeah, but then you would also lose any floors that would have four in the number itself.

So 24, 34.

In a hundred floor building, it's actually only about 80 floors once you minus all the floors.

Does it go from 12 to 15?

Because 14 has a forum.

Yes, it does.

Are they cheating?

You know how they claim to have, in that part of the world, a lot of the tallest buildings in the world.

Do you think that they're actually quite squat?

Yeah.

Yeah, Surge Altalifa is actually only three floors high.

It's a bungalow, isn't it?

Also, 87 is bad luck in Australia, I think, because it's 100 minus 13.

Yeah.

So you lose that.

So I don't know about that, but in England.

Who's annoyed about 87?

Because it's 100 minus 13.

Look, Australian cricketers hate 87, and if we ever got that high against England they would be really upset about it.

There's some slitting.

The year 404?

Oh yeah.

Oh, what a year.

4 AD, was it?

404 AD.

Did it not exist?

It did exist.

Last gladiator fight in Rome.

Really?

Apparently.

And it was alleged that St.

Telemachus tried to stop the fight, the gladiator fight, from happening and was stoned to death by the crowd.

Oh.

And that, but supposedly that was the last fight that ever happened there.

I don't understand understand why it would be the last fight that happened there because they've just stoned someone to death.

They're clearly very passionate about having a fight still.

Yes.

Maybe too passionate, you know?

You don't like football hooligans, maybe they didn't like gladiator hooligans back then.

It's like, all right, we're going to stop letting you watch this.

That's how you react.

There's a car called the Bristol 404.

Oh, yeah?

Yep.

Does it exist?

Yes.

But there are only nine.

Oh!

Okay.

How come?

It's very old.

But there are still nine registered on British Roads.

So if you try and search for that, you may find it.

But they're really expensive and they're mostly in private hands.

So I don't think you will find it.

I appreciate it.

I've gone through the ball and thresholds here.

Andy, before we went on stage tonight, said, I have a fact so boring

that I need to build up the bravery to say it, have we got to it yet?

No, we haven't.

Have we got to

do it?

Buckle up, people.

Just, James, you were talking about number E404, the road.

You know, E numbers, and yeah, like additives.

Additives, there is an E404.

Does it exist?

Yes, it exists.

Right.

I'm about to tell you in punishing detail what it is.

It's calcium algonate.

And it's a gelatinous creamy substance derived from seaweed and used to dress wounds.

And that's not the boring fresh!

Just wait.

It sounds like something you might get at a Beatles party that.

Yeah.

I think you should be dressing wounds with that.

Go on.

How many?

You haven't got 404 of these, have you?

I haven't.

I think I may be out of 404.

We should talk about something else for a bit.

I'm crying, shame.

Should we talk about roads?

Oh, yeah.

Oh, okay, yeah.

Cool.

So, Weird Roads at Hawaii has lots of roads that sort of only half exist because they keep getting covered in lava.

And

this is, I didn't actually realize that Mount Kiloea has been erupting basically solidly since 1983 in Hawaii.

So it's just been spewing out lava.

It's had it had like a little break in 2018, but then in 2018, it suddenly had this, you know, it took a little break and then suddenly had this huge spew and ejected enough lava to fill 320,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools.

It buried an area half the size of Manhattan.

And that includes quite a lot of roads.

And the road that suffers the most seems to be this road called the Chain of Craters Road, which should have known what it was doing when it called itself that.

But hang on, surely, I mean, sorry, layperson on roads here, but don't you just leave the road for a bit and then paint over it and then you can drive along the top of the road?

I think if you're driving over like craters and boulders and stuff, but dried lava, dried lava is like a rubber.

It's kind of bumpy, it's a bumpy ride.

Have you ever been to a lava field where the lava's dried?

Absolutely not.

Oh, well,

you wouldn't

cycle over it, put it that way.

Okay, also, they don't just paint roads.

It's like,

let's put the paintbrush out and paint us a new road.

Slava goes into it.

It just feels like lava would dry like asphalt.

It does.

I'm clearly wrong.

I'm clearly wrong.

It's very lumpy.

You'd need extremely good suspension.

Maybe in a monster truck or something, you can go gallivanting over it.

Right.

But yeah.

Just put up a sign.

Monster trucks only on this road.

I was actually driving in Hawaii, I remembered, and there's a sign that says, beware invisible cows.

Oh, cool.

Isn't that cool?

Not ghost cows, no.

Cows that are hiding in the landscape undulates.

I fear this might be a lot more boring than your guesses.

It's basically it gets very misty there, and there's lots of cows that walk over the road, so you can hit them without seeing them.

That's great.

They could maybe change the terminology just to make you understand what you're looking out for.

Yeah.

I agree with that.

Buckle up, kids.

There's some spooky ghost cows.

I've got such a good email actually a few months ago from someone called Tom Recht.

So thanks for this.

But he said, and I think he's just spotted this, the road to Armageddon is to drive to Armageddon, you have to go on road 6, 6, and 6.

So Armageddon comes from Ha Megiddo, which means Mount Megiddo, and that's a place in Israel, Mount Megiddo.

And if you drive there from Jerusalem or Tel Aviv or most places in Israel, then you take, just by complete coincidence, take Route 6, and and then you change onto Route 66.

Amazing.

Isn't that cool?

That is confusing.

Does that mean anything?

Does that mean the world is going to end there?

I'll refer you to Robert Kylo, who says the sort of creativity that goes into this is useless.

The mythology is due to the irrationality, denial of evidence, and preference for the fairy tale over reality that is common in the human species.

Thanks, Bob.

I found a few random road names, so like Error 404.

I was thinking, what else?

So there's a road in Alabama called This Ain't It Road.

there's a place called Error Place which is in Cincinnati as well and then I got distracted because there were places like wiener cutoff road

and then this is my favorite far from poopin road

and this is a real this is a real road and it's in a township called fanny in America and Fanny obviously meaning you're bum in America so far from poopin' road and the reason it's called that is because it's the closest road that gets you to a place called Constipation Ridge

and this and I went on Google Maps and it's all there.

It's all real.

These are real places.

Any ideas why it's called that?

The road is always blocked at Constipation Ridge.

All right, listen, we need to move on to our final fact of the show.

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

My fact this week is that in 2001 in Newfoundland, a golden retriever chased after a coyote and was never seen again.

Now, Newfoundland has its own population of white coyotes.

What are you saying about that?

What am I implying?

This was some research that was done by someone called Carl Zimmer, who was looking into these amazing white coyotes in Newfoundland.

They don't exist anywhere else.

They've sort of just appeared and they're not albino.

They've still got pigment in their skin and in their eyes.

They've just got white fur.

And they've looked at their genes and they found that they've got this specific mutation on a gene.

And the other place, the other significant place that this mutation on this specific gene exists exists is in golden retrievers and it's what makes them yellow and in the same way it's what's making these coyotes white and Zimmer realized that in Newfoundland in March 2001 there were news reports of a guy whose golden retriever went galloping off

down a hill after a coyote.

It's beautiful.

It's quite sweet.

It could be a Disney film couldn't it?

They're called coi dogs aren't they?

When a coyote has sex with a dog and that's what they create a coy dog.

And a koi carp of course is when a coyote has sex with a carp

Highly prized.

And in Mexico, they used to breed koi dogs on purpose in Teotihuacan, which is like one of the main cities that they had in the Mayan area.

They would have the coyote and the dogs, they would make them together, and it meant that they had them as guardian animals.

So they were really fierce, but they were also loyal.

So it's a way of domestication, but crossing it, crossing it.

domestic breed with it.

You still have something that's really fierce, like a coyote, but then you have the kind of domestic side of the dog.

That's very clever.

That's clever.

Nice.

You want to make sure you don't breathe something that's really pathetic, but also really fickle.

How do you know you're not going to get the opposite of both?

Yeah, yeah.

That's the risk you take.

Yeah.

There's the koi wolf as well.

So that's a coyote wolf, obviously.

And wolf populations were dwindling, and it seems like wolves basically got a bit less choosy in who they were mating with.

And coyotes were spreading.

And it's also known as the Eastern Coyote, but it's definitely a cross.

It's 10% dog, 25% wolf, and the remainder is coyote.

And they're big.

They're twice the size of a coyote, which is a fox-size-ish.

Yeah, they basically coyotes kind of fill the plate.

In the UK, we get foxes kind of going in cities and kind of going in bins and stuff.

And coyotes in America, especially North America, they kind of do that same thing there, don't they?

Yeah.

They're so good at navigating cities and generally adapting to human expansion.

I think they're the only carnival that's growing growing, like his populations are really growing exponentially everywhere, even though Americans are trying to exterminate them because they're thought of as pests.

But they, yeah, they do really well in cities, maybe even better than birds, and they do this thing where they navigate the traffic brilliantly.

So they look both ways before crossing the street.

Very impressive.

They'll run across half a road and then stop in the middle because, you know, the traffic's coming the other direction, sprint across the other way.

and they even know if they come to a one-way street they only look in the direction that the traffic's coming from

also just in terms of like let's say their populations are going up they do this crazy thing coyotes which is that they have the ability to change the number of the litter that they're going to give birth to based on the howls of a coyote.

So this is a thing where, let's say there are coyotes where they're being culled or they're being reduced by natural predators or because of humans.

They can do a call out.

So a male will be like, Coyote call!

I can't remember how they speak, but

it's like how?

How?

Yeah, I think they howl.

Coyote call!

Okay, like that.

So, yeah, so they do the how.

And once they do that,

they can understand based on responses what the population size is within the community.

And so, if you, let's say, you were culling the coyote communities by 70%, by the next time that they had given birth as in the timeframe that they would need, they would be back up to the population size because they can jump from five to six litter that they would usually have up to 12 to 16.

This core causes an autogenic response, basically, and they can just up the numbers.

That's unbelievable.

Unbelievable.

It's magic.

How clever they are.

It's like a hydra.

You just chop off its head and 17 more heads appear.

Yeah, pretty much is, yeah.

And they're very crafty, too.

They're extremely wily.

So Wily Coyote, obviously a cartoon character, but genuinely, they're wily.

So there was a biologist called John Way who was trying to trap some for research purposes, and he found they would take the meat off the trap and they wouldn't spring it.

Incredibly annoying.

Another scientist called Robert Crabtree was trying to find one in the late 90s and he had his own personal Moby Dick Coyote, which he could never get.

So annoying.

It would dig up the trap and flip it over and then leave it alone.

That's how you do it, you know.

Or it would scrape off the dirt that he'd laid carefully on the trap, it would poo on the trap,

and then he'd leave a loan.

There's one time where, I don't understand this fully, Crabtree was in a helicopter trying to drop a net on this one specific coyote, and it jumped up, tried to bite the helicopter, and then just ran away.

And he never caught it.

He never caught it.

Is it that this coyote is really smart, or that this guy is

pretty dumb?

If Robert Crabtree ever came up against a roadrunner, for instance,

Wiley Coyote.

A lot of misconceptions in that cartoon.

For example, coyotes can outrun roadrunners by twice the speed.

Makes no sense.

It should be the other way around.

Who would have thought that

was a David Attenborough documentary I was watching?

Okay, what do you think the E in Wiley Coyote's name stands for?

Oh, is it like, is it the European additives?

E404.

Calcium algonate is what?

No, it's not Ethelray.

Edith.

Oh, so close.

Oh, just, you know, it's not interesting, but worth knowing.

Yeah, Ethelbert.

So the thing about them being wily or crafty is just a conception of coyotes that's been around forever.

And so if you go, if you look back at Native American law almost across America before Europeans arrived there, they're known as kind of tricksters.

And they're probably the most important animal to a lot of Native American tribes, one of the most important.

And yet they're like this cheeky, yeah, trickster.

Exactly the same as kind kind of Loki or Mercury.

I find it really interesting that in all mythology, we always have this naughty boy who's doing bad stuff.

Very naughty boy, though, the coyote in some Native American stories.

Yeah.

There's a book called Tales of Coyote the Trickster, American Indian Folklore, and I read the reviews of it.

Someone said, We bought this book for our fourth graders who are learning about folklore.

We read reviews saying great for all ages, but one quick peek into the book, and you will quickly agree that is not great for all ages.

There is literally a whole section about coyotes' amorous adventures.

The amount of times the word penis, vagina, and horny and other inappropriate euphemisms show up in this book is alarming.

Four stars.

Held the time very nicely while waiting for my godo to arrive.

Wow.

This doesn't sound like the traditional Native American historic coyote chat.

I know they did.

I mean, he was like, he had a detachable penis that he would send around to have sex with people that coyotes were.

I'm a coyote, yeah.

Handy.

Gosh.

Because there's one very cool story in

Chinookan, which the people from Oregon tale, which is about how coyote learned to catch salmon.

And Coyote, so Coyote was actually a kind of half-person, half-coyote, sort of god-like figure.

And Coyote defecates while trying to catch salmon, and his own feces starts mocking him and laughing at him for how shit he is at fishing.

He's like, you're shit.

No, you're shit.

I'm supposed to be.

And then this blumper poo takes pity, offers him advice for how to catch and how to cook salmon, which I don't know if you take culinary tips from a poo.

But he does.

And then he succeeds for a while, then he fails again.

And so, as before, he thinks, what am I going to do?

He does another big poo.

And his poo tell gives him some more in-depth instructions this time for exactly how to fish and where to fish.

And, you know, that's how the coyote learned to fish.

Oh, that sounds great.

That's incredible.

There was another thing called coyote way, which was like coyote illness.

And the idea was that if you killed a coyote or even if you touched a coyote, you could get this kind of weird illness.

Is it where cooties come from?

No,

I don't think.

I mean, I'm guessing that it's not because that would be amazing.

But it's basically if you touch this coyote, you would get this real illness.

The various things that could happen to you, you get a twisted mouth, cross-eyed vision, loss of memory, fainting, mania, and prostitution.

Bit of a club twist at the end there?

Oh, no.

It's not my fault, officer.

I touched a coyote earlier today.

I'm sure you can understand.

Mr.

Hugh Grant, you're not.

Coyotes have a lot of encounters with celebrities.

There are rashes.

Rashes of stories.

Yeah, rashes of stories about celebrity coyote encounters.

So, for example, in 2010, Rick Perry, who stood for president in 2016, he shot a coyote while on a jog because it was threatening his puppy.

And apparently, he carries a pistol sometimes when going for a jog.

Is that like a coyote and Rick Perry having an

altercation rather than them meeting each other?

It's true.

Yeah, it's not much of an encounter.

Well, in 2009, Ozzy Osborne's pet Pomeranian dog was eaten by a coyote.

And he didn't hear it because he was watching a Michael Jackson memorial show on TV.

Right.

Oh, and that was live.

That was live.

So, which means if you were watching it, we all know where we were when Ozzy Osborne's dog was eaten by a coyote.

Exactly.

I think very.

Does anyone in this audience know where they were the day that Michael Jackson documentary was broadcast live?

Oh, exactly.

Okay.

One more, one more.

In 2015, Steven Spielberg's sister Nancy was briefly spooked by a coyote.

And that is the boring fact.

All right, on that absolute solid piece of gold, we are gonna wrap up.

That is it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

If you would like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter account.

I'm on at Schreiboland, Andy, at Andrew Hunter M, James, at James Harkin, and Anna.

You can email podcast at qi.com yep or you can go to our group account which is at no such thing or our website no such thingasafish.com all of our previous episodes are up there as well as links to all the rest of the tour dates that we are currently mowing through it's the nerd immunity tour do come and see us um but otherwise we will be back again next week with another episode chesterfield thank you so much that was so much fun thank you for being here from the home we'll be back with another episode we'll see you then goodbye