399: No Such Thing As Larry Grayson's Shut That Cock

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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 Exeter!

My name is Dan Schreiber.

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 my fact this week.

My fact is, in 2015, 86 inmates at the Exeter Prison wrote an angry letter to their local newspaper complaining that the weekly Suducco puzzle was too hard to complete.

Yeah.

You talks.

I don't think they're going to be in here tonight.

So, this was 86 inmates.

They found it completely impossible.

It was an unfinished puzzle that they ended up sending in to the editor of a local newspaper.

It wasn't impossible, right?

No, it wasn't impossible.

The newspaper replied and said, actually, it is possible.

Sorry, sorry, sorry, but it was possible.

Well, they discovered that basically the inmates had got some of the numbers wrong in the middle.

And once you do that in Sudoko, it's impossible to fix it, you know, if you're trying to just continue on.

But how were 86 inmates trying to solve the same Sudoku puzzle?

Because they don't get many newspapers.

So they all join in and take turns and leave.

Is there a queue?

You queue up, you do one number, next person goes.

Because you can't get your heads all around.

Like is there 81 cells in a thing?

They could have one cell each, couldn't they?

Five people to just check it over.

Great shout.

That's nice.

That's a good system.

Yeah, so they wrote this letter and it turned out that they're wrong.

And that is a problem because they get access to Thursday's newspaper, but the answers are on a Monday and they don't get that.

So they couldn't even check it.

So they were so frustrated.

That's annoying.

That's why they wrote in.

But with Sudoka, you know when you've got it right, really.

You don't need to check.

Like, you know, either you've got it wrong or right, right?

I would argue, you don't need the Monday's paper.

You know, you fucked up.

Now get back to the word search where you belong, clearly.

Fair enough.

Can I just say on this?

You don't always know when you've got it right.

So for example at the 2011 World Sudoku Championship one of the contenders called Wei Hua Huang he jumped up in the final he started high-fiving his friends in the audience.

He'd won and a judge had to point out he'd included the same number twice on the top row and that he hadn't won.

Oh, that's a moment.

That's unbelievably embarrassing.

It's embarrassing enough to be attending the World Sudoku Championships then.

Sudoku is, I mean, it took over the world.

I don't know if you remember, 2006, the world world became obsessed with Sudoku, and it was basically down to a New Zealander called Wayne Gould.

Are we gonna?

I'm so sorry, but I just know that there'll be 10% of the audience.

This is driving me mad.

Are we gonna address your pronunciation of Sudoku?

Thank you.

So, how are you saying it?

I'm just saying it how it's pronounced.

And how am I saying it?

You're saying it Sudoko.

And it's Sudoku.

Sudoko is what I was saying before.

Yes.

Yeah.

Right.

So don't do that.

Okay.

So, Soduko is a.

Tell us about Wayne Gould.

So Wayne...

It's Gould.

Wayne Gould was from New Zealand, and he basically bumped into it in a newspaper when he was in Hong Kong, and he thought this is really interesting.

And then when he was in England, he basically sold it effectively like a door-to-door salesman.

He went to the doors of, I think it was the Telegraph newspaper, Times.

That's how I pronounce Times.

He went to the Times newspaper and he said, check this out.

And they liked it and they started using it.

And he patented this idea of a computer generating all of the numbers so it could just generate multiple different Sudokas.

Did you read the account by the features editor of the Times?

It was a guy called Mike Harvey.

And it genuinely was like a door-to-door thing.

So he got a phone call, Mike Harvey, saying, there's a man who has a puzzle to show you.

And so he thought, great.

And he said afterwards, Harvey said, I asked one of my staff to get rid of him, but he said he was too busy.

So I went down myself trying to get rid of him.

But Wayne Gould had had a mock-up of the back page of the Times made,

which included a Sudoku on it, and they ran it the following month.

And as a result of that, Wayne Gould was named one of the world's most influential people of 2006 by Time magazine.

That's how big it was.

It was a quiet year, wasn't it?

Well, what happened was that the Times decided to run this, but the word got out really quickly.

And so all the other newspapers went, oh, we're going to get that in our newspapers as well, right?

And it was just after the 2005 election, and so kind of there wasn't much stories left in the newspaper.

They had lots of inches to fill, so they thought, let's just bang a load of Sudoku in there.

And like The Sun, for instance, made a version called Sundoku, which featured topless women.

How did you get a 9x9 grid of numbers?

Lots of eights and zeros, I don't know.

Sixes and nines, I don't know.

But one newspaper editor said they were so popular, they called them Viagra for newspaper circulation.

Wow.

And the editor of The Observer said I'd put one on every page if I thought it would increase circulation.

Well, that was the thing.

When it exploded in America, certain newspapers carried it and the other ones didn't in the early days.

And people who were lifelong readers of newspapers changed allegiance just for the Sudoku.

They suddenly were like, okay, I'm going to read the right-wing thing or the left-wing thing that I never read about.

That's not why Brexit happened.

It's just because 10 years earlier, all these Guardian readers preferred the Telegraph Sudoku.

I can't believe this fact, but I'm going to say it anyway.

This was a report in the Daily Mail that said that global pencil sales increased by 700% in 2005.

I 100% believe that.

You would never have a pencil before that.

I would never have a pencil.

Why would you?

You write with a pen, you're not a child.

You've got to write those little digits up in the top corner.

Then, when you get the fill-up, then you've got to erase it.

Got it.

I mean, there are just a few more things about the craze, which was all 2005.

Radio 4 apparently did an audio version of Sudoku.

I have no idea how that works.

I have no idea.

They just read out the numbers, didn't they?

They went gap, gap, gap, gap, gap, seven, gap, gap, gap.

Maybe, yeah.

Yeah, that's probably.

It genuinely seems so.

Yeah, that makes sense.

Sky 1 commissioned a 275 square foot Sudoku in a chalk hill at Chipping Sodbury.

Yeah, but do you know the thing about that?

No.

It was wrong.

What?

What?

So it was on the bath exit or near the bath exit of the M4 and it was specifically put in a place where there was a 40 mile an hour speed limit introduced because otherwise it would be dangerous and distracting.

Yes, I always try to solve my Sudoku below 40 miles an hour when driving.

I keep it to the built-up areas.

The responsible way to do it.

But they offered £5,000 to the first person to solve this particularly fiendish Sudoku and it was revealed later that it actually had 1,905 correct solutions.

Wow.

Wow.

That's the one thing that people hate, isn't it?

If there's more than one solution.

Yeah.

This was in the very early days.

The mail in the telegraph really rushed out the Sudokus.

And the Telegraph's compiler called Michael Mepham, he made some puzzles that had more than one solution.

And he said, my golly, I did get some mail.

What's the problem with it?

It's just because it's unsatisfying if there's lots of different answers.

There should only be one right answer.

Yeah, exactly.

Part of the craze thing, one thing that happened in Sydney, Australia, there was a court case that was going on for three months.

They had 105 witnesses, and while someone was giving evidence, they looked up and they sort of noticed that the jurors were looking a bit distracted, and it turned out that they were secretly doing Sudokus underneath their desk.

And then it turned out that four of them were in cahoots, and what they were doing were printing out Sudoku on photocopiers and sharing them around.

And while the trial was going on, and witnesses were talking, they were doing it underneath and then comparing notes in the breaks and seeing how far they got.

Yeah, so that cost a million dollars that trial up until that point.

And it had to be thrown out because it turned out the jurors weren't listening.

What was it for?

Oh, drug trial.

No, it was for conspiracy to manufacture a commercial quantity of amphetamines.

Sounds like a drug trial to me, yeah.

But it wasn't, it was a conspiracy trial.

Oh, yeah.

Thanks, Turn.

Sorry.

I was reading an article about the World Championships in 2009.

So what they often do in the World Championships is they'll have have normal Sudokus and then when you get to the final they'll give you some kind of crazy Sudokus that are a little bit different like they might be jigsaws that have to come together, might be bigger.

And in this case the final variants were so different to normal Sudokus that the winner from the previous two years who's a guy called Thomas Snyder says it was like playing the final of basketball championships with a different size ball.

The hoops are higher up than normal and everyone has trampolines in their shoes.

Cool.

That was the difference.

That's how different it was.

There was a second puzzle hidden underneath the first puzzle, but then for two of the competitors, the first puzzle accidentally fell down halfway through, so that gave away the surprise.

This was all in an article in the Irish Press, so they were quite interested in how the Irish team got on.

And they said that the Irish team came second to last, and three of the four Irish players were beaten by Tiang Jiang, a ten-year-old boy.

The only guy from the Irish team who beat them, a guy called Bernard Sellers.

He said, I must make it clear that this is due to incompetence, not lack of effort.

He said, he has beaten us at Sudoku, but let's see him after a few beers.

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We need to move on, guys.

We need to get to our next facts.

Okay, let's do it.

Let's do it.

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

My fact is that in 1913, it was claimed that French farmers were raising automotive chickens, which were bred specifically to throw themselves under passing cars so the farmer could claim compensation.

Wow.

So we now know the answer to why did the chicken cross the road?

Absolutely.

It was on a mission.

Do we think this is true?

I don't.

Everyone else is reading a thing what they like.

I think it's Hooi.

But it was printed in a newspaper called Le Figaro, a famous French paper.

And yeah, farmers were breeding this chicken so that the owner could claim, you know, five francs or whatever of damages from a driver.

How interesting.

And I just find it hilarious.

I did find one guy called William K.

Vanderbilt.

He was known as a scorcher.

He was American, not French.

But he was well known that he would pay compensation if he ever hit your animals.

And so there were newspaper articles that people would deliberately push livestock into his way.

Yeah.

So it was kind of some of it happening, wasn't there?

Poor sucker.

I wonder how many times he had a chicken suddenly appear in front of his car before he started to suspect.

It's like the 12th time that day.

It's just another cow.

Come on.

Some people said it was horses that got pushed in the way of his car.

You think he he must have been quite a bad driver if you can't see a horse.

How could you get a chicken to do that, by the way?

How could you?

You couldn't.

It's not a thing.

No, but

if he was paying compensation all the time,

you could throw it.

Wait a minute, you can.

You could get a chicken to do that.

You can get a chicken to do that.

Someone in the audience has just claimed, I could get a chicken to do that.

For one second, I forgot we were in Devon.

I'll do that.

I think if you were to draw a white line on the ground, sometimes chickens will just follow that white line, will they?

That's true.

I think that was a thing.

That guy, Vanderbilt, William Vanderbilt.

He was like a squillier there.

And this fact came from a great article, I think, in Lithub, the website, and it mentioned that he had these crazy adventures.

He may have been the inspiration for Mr.

Toad in The Wind and the Willows.

You know, who's always got his car and he's going poop-poop, and all of this.

It's a good impersonation.

You know.

Right.

Get out of my way.

He's Mr.

Toad.

Sure.

Anyway, okay, but he did have a lot of crazy adventures, which were even more exciting than Mr.

Toad's adventures.

So in 1899, visiting France, he had to kill two dogs, which were trying to bite his tires, and then flee from a mob.

He had to kill two dogs.

Circumstances forced him to shoot.

He did a lot.

He had a gun a lot of the time.

He traveled with a gun, like Mr.

Toad.

You know, crowds with whips and rocks would try to attack him because he was just such a reckless driver, and he'd shoot in the air and shoot over their heads and then drive off saying poop poop.

They weren't, people were just generally terrified about the car for a long time as well and angry and farmers especially.

But around the same time in Pennsylvania, the legislature passed a law that all cars traveling on country roads at night had to send up a rocket every mile to let everyone know that they were coming.

Just, you know, big on fireworks.

Suggested a law rather than passed it, though.

No, they passed the legislature, passed the law, and then it was rejected by the governor.

So the legislature said, pass this law, and then they have to send a rocket up every mile, explode it, then wait for 10 minutes for the road to clear, and then the driver had to proceed with caution, blowing his horn and shooting off Roman candles as before.

Wow.

So if you were on your horse, you'd have to judge, was that a mile or two miles that the rocket went up, right?

Yeah.

Do you think there was like, you know, when a thunderstorm's coming and you count the seconds?

Was it like that?

Yeah, between the light and the sound.

That must have been that.

Patent number 1,122,742 in America.

Don't tell me, don't tell me.

I know this one.

I'm so annoyed.

I know the one before.

It was a huge knife that you attached to the front of your car.

Can you guess why you might do that?

Chicken Kebev.

To make everyone get the fuck off the road.

Kind of.

So, like Anna said, people were really scared of cars, but they also hated them.

And there was a thing where people put ropes across the road to try and stop you from going too fast because then it would like you know like a barrier would stop you and so this thing was invented to kind of cut those ropes wow nice

it's crazy what do you read about it because it sounds like it was just hectic to drive a car in those early days there are accounts of where sort of like farmers and locals would sort of sprinkle nails and broken glass on the road they would as you say tie ropes across um they would dig holes in the ground so they would just you know fall into it there was a story that near sacramento in california 13 cars were captured

is the word they use of the article.

Yeah, and just they were trying to stop people from speeding.

So there was one town in America where they put a big sign up just said the speed limit this year is a secret

And the idea is everyone drives think oh shit.

I'm gonna have to go slow now because it's probably really low.

God

it sounds really fun.

It sounds like it's like doing an obstacle course driving back in the day.

It's like you're rally driving on the street.

It's very World West, isn't it?

Yeah.

But one of the legitimate concerns, which is like the opposite of the concern we have now with driverless cars, is that humans were going to have to be responsible for concentrating the whole time.

Because if you think about it, cars back then were called horseless carriages, basically.

And the difference between a horseless carriage and a horse carriage is that you can kind of leave the horse to do most of the work, much like a driverless car.

So, you know, if you're driving, if you're the cabby, you can lose concentration, you can have a chat with your friend, you can have a little snooze, the horse has it under control.

And one of the terrors was that you know if you're driving then it's all up to the human and we're yeah and they were right another thing in the 1920s there was a judge um who said that the automobile was a house of prostitution on wheels

and that of the 30 girls that had been brought in front of him charged with sex crimes 19 offences had occurred in cars really

there's a real worry that young people were going to be able to get away from their parents and stuff and they would be in an enclosed vehicle and you never know what they're going to get up to

right Didn't Madame Bovery have sex in a car?

A carriage.

That was a big thing, wasn't it?

A horse car, yeah.

And in 1926, the Cleveland Motor Company realised this was happening and so they invented the honeymoon special car

and that came equipped with a foldable bed which could be put up in just one minute and the doors were fitted with curtains.

That's really rude.

For the 20s?

Guy, for the 20s, you're all sauce pots.

I thought you were going to say there was a car company which invented, you know, the car with a knife in the the middle so you can't go near anyone.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

An inflatable dad of the daughter or something.

I like this in 1895 in The Spectator.

It was talking about how when the car first came about, everyone said horses were going to disappear off the face of the earth, which was kind of true, but it happened more slowly than people had predicted.

And the spectator wrote, When the car first appeared, it was a common prophecy that the horse was a doomed animal, but the threatened institution of the horse-drawn cab has managed somehow, like like the House of Lords to survive in full vigor

I just love the idea that even in 1895 people were looking at the House of Lords going how the fuck is this still surviving

that's so funny it feels like that so one of the big problems with all these early day cars is that they would come round and they would spray dust on these roads into houses and they were in France where this fact begins we were talking about the fact that it was really badly received and part of that was people trying to say rent out villas and so on.

They were losing all their business because, as cars came by, all this spray of dust came, and no one wanted to be there.

So, roads were effectively invented by people trying to stop that because they started putting basically asphalt and so on just outside their house, just strips, so that when the car went over, it would miss the house.

And then it kind of, my theory is it caught on and that they went, oh, let's put more of that down.

That's a good theory.

Yeah.

There was in 1905, the Royal Commission on Motoring was held in Britain.

And they, again, were looking at the dust and saying this is terrible.

They blame the dust for throat and eye infections, for the inability to hang washing to dry and the clogging of at least one lady novelist typewriter.

Things are serious.

That's so funny.

We need to move on in a sec to our next bag.

I've just got one more thing.

Yeah, because I found it because I was searching about chickens and cars, and it's a piece of advice about playing chicken in a car.

Okay, oh, yeah.

I mean, don't, but if you are, there's advice from a 1960 work called The Strategy of Conflict.

Okay, so chicken is like two cars driving up to each other.

Absolutely.

You're driving towards each other and whoever swears first loses, you know.

And this is by a Nobel laureate called Thomas Schelling, so it's legit stuff, all right?

And what he said is that extreme irrationality can be rational.

So if you are playing chicken in a car, the best thing to do is rip off the steering wheel from the column and throw it out of the window.

But you should only do that if you are confident that the other driver has seen you do it.

Oh, wow.

What year was that?

Is that an early day as well?

It was 1960.

He died the next year, weirdly.

Horrible car.

I read about the first car horn, which was in 1649.

And this car is in a horseless carriage, and it was a carriage invented by a guy called Johann Hausch.

And it was a dragon which went at the front of the carriage and it rolled its eyes and it spouted water to clear pedestrians out of the way.

That's fucking cool.

Isn't that cool?

And the horn part was carved angels on either side holding trumpets that were constantly blowing.

Oh, wow.

And this didn't need any horses to pull it.

Amazingly, this vehicle.

Although it did have two men concealed under the body of it who had to run along with the algae.

It was a flip stone.

That's incredible.

Yeah.

We need to move on to our next fact.

Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is Anna.

My fact this week is that when libraries are flood, the books are saved by putting them in the freezer and then vacuuming them.

Yeah, I was reading about library book salvage, and it's so cool.

So, basically, any library worth its salt has to either have its own massive industrial freezer or have access to an industrial freezer.

You freeze the paper as soon as it's got wet.

And this is both for floods and fires because the biggest problem really for books in libraries with fires is the getting wet afterwards.

Usually, they're put out in time, but they're put out with so much water that they get covered in water.

If you you freeze it immediately, then the water stops making the ink bleed and it stops mold growing and all of those things.

But then, obviously, you've just got a massive freezer full of frozen books.

It's really difficult to read, and you can't just melt it.

And so, then you vacuum it, by which I mean put it in a massive vacuum chamber, and that means that the water can go straight from a solid to a gas.

It can sublimate

GCSE chemistry there

because it like reduces the pressure in the air if it's in a vacuum, and so that means that there's like not enough pressure for water to form right it becomes gas immediately because there's so much space all the solid ice molecules just jump around in the space and become a gas that is amazing because they not just buy some new books

Shit, you should mention that.

Yeah.

A lot of time's been wasted.

Yeah.

Now these are precious old books, aren't they?

Yeah, these are the originals.

Yeah, there was one, there was a massive library fire in 1986, the biggest library fire in America.

It was in Central Library in LA, and that one, they had to ask a load of, there are a lot of fishermen in LA, and they had to ask the fisherman to lend them all of their fish freezers, put the books in.

I didn't see where you were going with that at all.

I thought you were going to say they had to get the fishermen to get the books out of the library with their rods

because it was still too dangerous in there.

They're very attracted to maggots' books, actually.

They leap up.

And the reason, and that really is, if you look that up, it doesn't go down that much in history because it happened three days after Chernobyl.

And so it was very much buried in a slightly bigger explosion that week.

The only paper that put it like proper front and center, I think, or this is what I read in a book called The Library Book, which is a very good book by Susan Orleans, Pravda in the Soviet Union.

Funnily enough.

There was nothing else happening that day.

Exactly.

How embarrassing for America this library fire, right?

Look at that.

They should have, like, in libraries, just giant freezers.

You know, in Australia, when you go to the bottle shop, the bottlow, there's always this one shop.

Just a wine shop.

Yeah, wine shop or when you get beers, there's always this giant freezer room that you go into.

It's freezing to be inside, but it's very common in every bottle shop that you get there.

And yeah, they should have that, just where all the precious books just can't be.

Oh, I suppose some of the bigger places do, right?

Like the Natural History Museum, not a library, but they have a huge freezer.

Can you guess what's the largest animal they could fit in their freezer?

A seal.

Giraffe.

A big seal.

A diplodocus.

Giraffe.

Diplodocus.

Giraffe.

Giraffe.

Yeah.

The answer is a fully grown rhino.

Oh, yeah.

And the largest fridge in the world, 2,800 pole away, this is in Richland, Washington, in America.

That is big enough to fit every single living rhino in the world.

Wow.

And actually, they'd have a bit of space as well.

They'd have to be on top of each other's shoulders.

Yeah, yeah.

I don't think that's going to be your biggest logistical problem in terms of gathering all the rhinos, getting them to the fridge.

I think once you've done that, shoving them in is going to be an easy job.

Yeah, yeah.

Okay.

Whose fridge is this, and how big is the party they're having?

This is a huge fridge that they use in America.

Their farmers will send all their goods there and it will keep the fruits and vegetables kind of fresher for a bit longer.

Nice.

Okay.

Nice.

Imagine how many magnets you could get on that.

So many.

It's a lot of shit drawings from your children, isn't it?

Libraries.

You know the Bodleian Library in Oxford?

Yeah.

I think it's one of only three libraries which gets a copy of every single book published in the UK.

So it's the Cambridge Library, the Oxford University Library, which is the Bodleian, and the British Library.

For 250 years, the librarian of the Bodleian was supposed to be celibate, and none of them were.

It was one of the main, it was founded by a guy called Thomas Bodley, who read this main thing.

He wrote up a list of rules when he was founding the library.

The first rule was celibate.

I want no librarian to have sex ever.

The first librarian got married that year, the year he founded it.

All the successors did, pretty much.

And was 250 years it was kept in place and then they repealed it saying this is a ridiculous rule.

And why sell the book?

Because you must love the books more than you could ever love the human flesh.

Or what?

What a lovely poetic way.

I think it's...

They didn't want to get any come in the books.

Oh my god.

Oh my god.

Less poetic from James.

No, no.

It wasn't that.

No, I think it was...

I was trying to guess.

Yeah, no, it's fine.

And I'm blushing on stage now.

I didn't say...

Oh, my God.

I think it was because it was kind of connected to the priesthood.

And so it kind of came from that tradition that he was.

But Botley himself was a bit of a mug.

He said they didn't want idle books and riffraffs, which was anything not in Latin.

And the library got a first folio of Shakespeare's works.

Pretty good, pretty nice book in 1623, pretty valuable.

And then a few decades later, the third folio came out and they just sold the first folio off.

They said, well, we don't need this.

We've got a more modern one now.

And so, as a result, they had to, yeah.

Just on random fun things about libraries, I was reading about Berkeley Library in America, and they have every year an edible book festival.

And the idea is that there's a few categories, but one of the main things is you need to do food-based puns on existing books.

So, infinite jest becomes infinite zest, for example.

So, I've got a little quiz for you guys.

Okay, thank you.

Wait, who needs to do it?

How does it work?

I'm going to give you the book name and see if you can guess what they did with it.

Waiting for Godo.

Waiting for Cheddar?

Waiting for Gouda would be better.

There we go.

That's my

one nil to James.

I just crushed it and I just nodded it and

Game of Thrones.

Game of Cheddar.

Game of Bones?

Game of Scones!

Game of Scones, one of them.

Also, game is already a type of meat.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Traitors are submitting no change.

Technically, game is a kind of meat.

Question number three: one flew over the cuckoo's nest.

You can eat a cuckoo, says James.

No change.

One flew over a cooker's nest.

Oh, yes, good.

One flew over the cuckoo's nest, one flew over the cuckoo's

cuzcu's nest.

Can we play this for the rest of the podcast?

I'm enjoying it so much.

So I'll give you two more.

Okay, something wicked this way comes.

Something wicked this way buns?

Very good, but no, it's dumpling wicked this way comes.

And last one.

Dumpling wicked this way comes.

Heart of darkness is the last one.

Heart of cheddar.

It's correct.

No, it's not.

Actually, heart is already part of an animal that you can eat.

Yeah, I'll choke Heart of Darkness.

Oh, that's good.

It's Tarte of Darkness, and I think Andy takes it with the win there.

I demand a recap.

Have you guys heard of Barbara Pratt?

No, no.

This is now more on refrigeration than on libraries.

But she was hired by the shipping company Sealand, who's now Maersk.

And basically, what would happen is they would refrigerate fruit and vegetables and stuff and send it around the world.

And then sometimes it would be fine and sometimes it would be rotten and no one could work out why.

And so Barbara Pratt spent seven years living in shipping containers being shipped around the world with a load of vegetables and working out how to stop them from going rotten.

Wow.

Is that the one thing more boring than watching paint dry?

Watching vegetables rot?

She is an absolute hero.

Isn't that amazing?

She had a bunk bed.

I don't know why she had a bunk bed because I can't imagine.

Because she had to have some fun and bunk beds are fun.

I mean that's a pretty boring.

I would say like the Bodleian, this is a place where you're probably celibate if you're doing this job.

But yeah, she would monitor temperature, airflow, humidity, all that kind of stuff.

She had loads of microprocessors, all that kind of stuff, and eventually worked out the regimes that they use today to make sure that peppers and watermelons and stuff can go around the world and not go off.

That's great.

Isn't that amazing?

Did they ever have an inspection of the shipping container and they just open it and they find a load of watermelons and Barbara Pratt just, hello, y'all?

I fear that didn't happen.

That's so good.

On fridges, you know there's a Guinness World Record for the world's largest fridge.

Oh, is it not the one that's on

America?

No, it's not that.

Yeah, the official, according to Guinness World Records, is the Large Hadron Collider in CERN.

And it's because it has 9,300 magnets inside it, and they need to be kept at an exact temperature.

And so it's got 10,800 tons of liquid nitrogen, 60 tons of liquid helium, and that creates the.

Does it count as a fridge if you can't put your cold rice from the night before in it?

But hang on a second.

We said in the first ever episode of Fish that the Large Hadron Collider had to be stopped because a bit of tuna baguette was dropped into it.

That's right.

So if that is still in there, then it counts as a fridge.

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We need to move on to our next fact.

It is time for our final fact of the show, and that is James.

Okay, my fact this week is that there is an ophthalmologist at the University of Leiden called Dr.

I.

C.

Notting.

Does work better in an Irish accent, doesn't it?

It does, and I'm not going to do it.

So, this was a post that I saw on the website improbable.com, which is run by Mark Abrahams, who is a friend of ours, who's been on Fish actually, and he runs the Ig Nobel Prizes.

But he noticed this person, and she was part of a team in May this year that replaced both lenses in the eyes of a chimpanzee called Fiffy.

Fiffy could no longer tolerate light because of the situation that she'd been in.

And so, like, really had the lenses had gone all cloudy.

And she was the first person to ever do in Europe a double cataract operation on a chimpanzee.

That's super cool, but at the same time, a shame because I just want to see a chimpanzee wearing sunglasses for the rest of their life.

And apart from that, I know nothing more about Doctor Notte.

She specializes in neuro-ophthalmology, cataracts, and trabismus, which I didn't know means being cross-eyed.

And she's got a load of papers online, but they're so far out of my pay grade.

Her latest one is spectral domain optical coherence tomography in retinal vasculopathy with cerebral leucoencephalopathy and systemic manifestations and monogenic small vessel disease.

Right.

She sounds clever.

She sounds super clever.

So she's got a funny name.

I did find another optometrist called Hugh Seymour, which is a...

That's great.

There's a big list of ophthalmologists on Wikipedia, and I went down looking for an apt name.

There was a guy who was the first person to prove that providone iodine could be safely used as an antimicrobial for the eyes.

He's got a very apt name.

His name was Leonard Apt.

Right.

He's going to be at home listening to this thinking, oh no, they've done it.

So this fact is basically nominative determinism.

determinism and the idea of that is you've got a name that matches the job that you're doing.

So for example, the professor of geology at Exeter University is called Dr.

Stone.

Did they become professor of that because of the name?

Did it lead them towards that?

And there's a lot of people who say there's no truth in that, but it is fun when you notice people that seem to have gone into it.

So Leiden, where you were saying IC Nutting is from, I looked at the University of Leiden, which is a different university, just to see if there was any people who had similar names to the thing that they do.

So I found there's a professor of religion called Peter Bishop, but it's Bischup, but it's very, very close.

A professor of European law is Rick Lawson.

And they have a professor of anthropology who's called Gerard Persson.

Oh, that's good.

I think that Leiden University is just literally choosing people just based on their names.

Yeah, so

you'd think that academics would be above this kind of thing.

And if they heard this, they'd be like, come on, just talk about my area of knowledge.

But this is one of my favourite things.

I don't think we've ever mentioned it.

One of the most important papers ever written in astrophysics, the authors were Alpha, Beta and Gamow.

Not quite Gamma, but it's close enough.

And the reason for this, it's a guy called George Gamow, who's the professor on the project.

And this paper was so important.

It was in 1948 and it was about, it basically discovered that the background radiation of the Big Bang essentially kind of justified the Big Bang happening and talked about that that it created hydrogen and helium and all the elements that we now live with today in their proportions.

Seminal paper.

So the lead author was George Gamow.

His PhD student was Ralph Alpha.

George Gamow said, Hey, Ralph, wouldn't it be so funny?

I've got a colleague called Beta.

He's really nothing to do with this whole astrophysics thing, but let's put him as an author on the paper.

And then it'll be Alpha Beta Gamow.

And Alpha said, absolutely not.

This is a huge deal for me.

I'm a PhD student.

No.

And he got completely ignored.

And in fact, not only that, but George Gamow asked another one of his colleagues called Herman if he'd change his name to Delta.

Oh, wow.

That's too far.

And they went ahead and like, he was furious.

Ralph Alva was so angry for years afterwards, said it completely undid my great achievements.

So, okay, yeah, nominative determinism, we think it's probably bunk.

Right.

But there was a paper by a group of researchers about medical workers and, you know, all kinds of medical work.

And it was a group of researchers who found that there was a greater frequency of medical names in various specialisms than you would expect by chance.

And the researchers were named Lim, Lim, Lim, and Lim.

They were in the same family, but still.

So, you know, they looked in the American Directory of Physicians and they found lots of doctors with the surname doctor or fix or cure or heal.

And they also found that some promising partnerships failed to materialize.

Doctors Batman and Robin are registered, but failed to team up in any speciality.

Selfish.

It's almost like they've got bigger priorities.

And the paper which debunked it, which most people point at, was in the Journal of Personal and Social Psychology.

And it was called, I Sell Seashells by the Seashore, and my name is Jack.

Killjoy.

That's so good.

I think now, because we've talked about so much nominative determinism over the years, as in just names that are very apt.

And now I feel like we have to go a level up.

So you've got to do the doubles.

You know, if like two of someone's names are nominatively deterministic, like Andrew Drinkwater, that's I think that's loud, he's head of research at the Water Research Centre, he drinks water.

Um, I think that's okay.

I also like doubles.

I did spend quite a lot of time looking at the student's guide to the seashore that was written by fish and fish.

I probably spent an hour desperately trying to find out if they were related and hoping they weren't, because then that would be an amazing catch.

Yeah,

they are husband and wife.

I have discovered, deep in the bowels of Cardiff University websites.

Wow.

I think, and also Andy's favorite thing of words like name sentences.

Yes.

Yeah.

So what are the examples of that we always say?

Like Ben Folds and Jeremy Irons, Tom Waits.

Yeah, yeah.

I think.

Wesley snipes.

Sting.

Stick.

No, not sting.

It works if it's an imperative, but that's not a...

It's not a property.

Sorry, James.

I was reading a study from 2018, and this is about injecting medicine directly into your eyes.

Okay, it sounds pretty awful, but apparently, if you have something called macular edema, it really, really helps.

And the person who came up with that idea was a physician called Douglas Jabs.

Oh, that's great.

Sentence person and nominative determinism.

Yeah.

I found a urologist who performs pasectomies called Dr.

Richard Chop, aka Dr.

Dick Chop.

That's the double.

And that's well done.

That's quite strong.

There was, in fact, in a similar vein, there was, in, I think, the 19.

There was a quote in the British Medical Journal in 1935, a guy calling for all male children to be circumcised in order to reduce masturbation, which he thought was very harmful.

And he was called Richard Cock Shut.

No!

Very good.

Shut that cock, kids.

Shut that cock.

That's a hell of a catchphrase as a sick cop from the 70s, isn't it?

Larry Grayson, shut that cock.

Have you thought about our names and what we, if we were connected to a thing, what would it be?

Schreiber is writer.

Schreiber would be writer.

Toshinsky means like little bird.

Like a little bird, which is why I'm wearing owls on my dress today.

You'll notice I'm never not wearing a bird.

Is that true?

No.

I mean, how long have you known that?

Years.

Years and years, but I just thought, oh my god, I can't believe I've never noticed that all this time.

I'm the worst friend and colleague in the world.

It was a test.

I would have thought, I think Harkin is just a place in Ireland or something.

Well, Harkin's, no, that's got an interesting thing.

It goes back and back, and so it sort of like changes, but as it goes further back, bloody and pig are two things.

Sounds about right.

So a farmer, maybe.

You knew about the chickens earlier, so maybe that's.

What are you

Murray?

Yeah.

Murray.

Surely just a river in Scotland.

Yeah, I don't think it means anything.

Sea and settlement is something that's not a good thing.

It sounds a bit like Murray.

If you were an officially a wedding officiant, maybe at a stretch.

I'd love to do that.

He murried me today.

That sounds disgusting.

You're rather he murried me.

Do you want to get married?

Married?

No.

Reader, I murried her.

We need to wrap up.

Okay, 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've said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter accounts.

I'm on at Schreiberland, Andy.

At Andrew Hunter M.

James.

At James Harkin.

And Anna.

You can email our 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 a link to the current tour that we are doing right now, nerd immunity.

Thank you so much, everyone, who came tonight.

Exeter, that was fucking awesome.

We really enjoyed it.

Thank you so much.

And we will be back again next week with another episode.

We'll see you then.

Goodbye.

Let's be real.

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