371: No Such Thing As A Welcome Lasagne

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Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from four undisclosed locations in the UK.

My name is Dan Schreiber.

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

And once again, we have gathered around 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 James.

Okay, my fact this week is that the world's best Tetris player is a 13-year-old from Texas.

The world's second-best player is his 15-year-old brother.

Are they also the only remaining Tetris players left on the planet?

Oh, what?

How dare you?

It is hugely popular, Anna.

Yeah, the third best is Dan by the sounds of it.

The only other player.

I just think imagine being in that family like your two-year younger brother beats you in the world championships.

But at least you are, you know, at least you're the second best.

So the best player is called Dog Playing Tetris.

I don't think that's his real name.

He beat his brother, whose name is Pixelandy.

The surname of these two people is Artiega.

And if you go online, you can watch the final.

It's only one hour and 15 minutes with all the interviews as well, which is 13 minutes shorter than Stop On My Mom Will Shoot.

So it's a good use of your time if you want to.

But this is an interesting thing, I think, which is that all the best Tetris players in the world were people of my age who kind of grew up with it.

And then very recently, suddenly all these kids have come in and started kicking everyone's ass at Tetris.

And the reason is that if you think about about how I would play Tetris as a kid, I would be like on my Game Boy or whatever, playing on my own and wouldn't really talk to anyone else about it and would just have to learn it.

Whereas these days, they learn it all on YouTube and they're all swapping tips and all that kind of stuff.

And so the standard of Tetris has just gone through the roof in the last few years.

It's yeah, so lovely.

Because

just leave it to us.

Why are they stealing Tetris from us?

They've got a billion new fangled, colorful, high pixel games.

Just let us have Tetris.

No,

it's new Tetrises.

They're different games.

It's not like the same Game Boy.

That's like saying we shouldn't watch football anymore because the great Manchester United team of 1990 is no longer together.

But wait a minute.

I mean, it's still blocks coming down from the roof.

And in the World Championships, they are playing pretty much classic Tetris.

So basic formula is

pretty unchanged.

It's the same game.

Yeah.

The classic Tetris World Championships only dates from 2010, which I think is a massive swizz anyway, because it sounds like it's been going for, you know, centuries.

It started as a documentary, the World Tetris Championships.

There was a few people online arguing about who was the greatest ever player, and someone decided, well, let's get all these people together and have them play against each other.

In that World Championships, the winner was a guy called Jonas Neubauer, who unfortunately died earlier this year.

But one interesting thing about it, what I was saying about how you would kind of learn on your own and now you learn on YouTube, there was the fourth place person was a woman called Dana Wilcox.

There was only two women in this championships and she came fourth and when she turned up to the championships that was the first time she learned that you can flip the

locks in two different directions either clockwise or anti-clockwise oh no way and she'd become like one of the top 10 players in the whole world without even knowing that how is that possible that's amazing yeah i'm trying to remember if i knew that No, I don't think I did.

I don't think I did either.

Lost to history.

Yeah.

You know that champion you mentioned, James, Jonas Neubauer.

Yeah.

He won eight of the first 10 classic Tetris World Championships, and he came second in the other two.

So really very good at Tetris.

And he wrote an article in 2019 about his life in Tetris, basically, which was lovely.

And he said, Tetris has helped me to make quick and plentiful decisions in everyday life.

Have you ever been to a restaurant with a 12-page menu?

I can scan the choices and make a decision almost immediately without a shred of regret.

Even if they bring me the wrong order, I'll make it work.

I love that.

I just think, wow.

How does he relate this exactly?

Sorry, what's the logic leap between his Tetris champion status and the fact he's fast ordering in restaurants?

Because you see the options, you see the options in front of you, you get presented with a range of choices, and you think, bang, I know how to make that work.

I see.

I thought it was just he was so desperate to get back to his Game Boy that he farmed

funny around choosing me.

Do you think he only orders things like fish fingers and sausages that come in that kind of blocky shape?

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

Square potato waffle.

Yeah.

That's too funny.

I actually watched an incredible moment in Tetris history.

It was Kevin Birrel who became the first ever Western Grandmaster.

So there's never been a Western Grandmaster outside of Japan.

And he recorded the video that allowed him to become a grandmaster.

And what you need to do in order to get to Grandmaster level is you complete Tetris and you then have to play with invisible blocks over the credits.

And Kevin Kevin Birrill recorded him doing this.

It's a minute, 40 seconds, which is 48 seconds shorter than Stop On My Mumbleshoot, the trailer on YouTube.

So you can save some time there.

And you watch him going, Tetris, when he says that.

And the moment that he wins it and becomes Grandmaster, you are just with him.

It's heaven.

And he's jumping around the room.

Yeah.

Do you think that any grandmaster, I'm going to use inverted commas for that, any Tetris, has ever been introduced to a chess grandmaster and really claimed, looked them in the eye and said,

have a grandmaster club where all the grandmasters of all the different games meet up.

The chess people aren't letting the Tetris guys in that club.

Why?

They are turning those guys away at the door.

You're a grandmaster in Tetris.

Yeah, no.

Your instinctive finger movements are at a level of no other human.

Chess people take hours to play the game.

Take a single move.

That's a fair point.

They're winning on speech.

True.

Yeah.

We haven't talked about the origins of it, how it was officially owned by the Soviet Union.

It was this guy, Alexei Pajitov, who worked at the USSR's Academy of Science in their computer lab.

And he liked making games.

And

he liked geometric games.

And there was one which involved pentominos,

whereas Tetris uses, what are they called?

They're called Tetrominos because it's four.

And he had made this game.

He didn't really know how to...

publish it and it was already being pirated overseas because of how popular it was so he gave the rights to the government for 10 years And then the KGB got involved at one point in terms of the rights selling.

So they always did, didn't they?

They liked to have a finger in most pies back in the day.

Yeah.

He named it after quite odd stuff.

So Tetra Tetris, the Tetra and Tetris, that's just the four.

But then the Ispit is because his favorite sport was tennis, which does seem odd for a man who devotes his life to sitting in front of a computer screen designing games.

But I suppose you've got to have another hobby.

So yeah, Tetra and Tennis.

And I quite like the whole ominos thing.

This

grew out of the domino, which was the original omino, which is just a piece with two bits.

And then someone decided in sort of, I think, the 60s or 70s to make polyominos a thing.

So that's one of those shapes with various numbers of squares in them.

So yeah, you got dominoes, you got triominos, you got pentominos.

Did you say there was an original omino, or is that just

like this is a botched etymology?

I don't think it is, though, because the dot, the dot in domino doesn't mean two no no it's not an it's not a proper step it's the do was domino was a thing that's what then a person said oh do sounds a bit like it could mean two so let's create this whole class of things called fraudulent fraudulent it's a fraudulent etymology is what i'm saying domino derives from a word it was originally a we think a hood that priests dominican monks isn't it yeah exactly and so the domino was the hood worn by the dominican monks it's a you know it doesn't mean anything so what domino it then i i i haven't got an alternative etymology just lined up because I'm not a faker.

I wouldn't do that to you guys.

Okay.

I mean, you seem quite angry about it.

You had a few hours.

I would happily call it a dodomino because it's four sections and that could be two dominoes together.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Just sounds like you've got a stutter.

Do you know why Tetris is so addictive?

This is due to something called the zygarnic effect.

And what it is, is that your brain is hardwired to, whenever there's an incomplete task, you really, really want to fix it.

And so, when the Tetris things come down, every time you do complete a task and you get rid of one or four of the lines, then it always kind of gives you more things to do because there are more holes that you need to fill and stuff like that.

And this was invented by a woman called Bluma Zyganic, who was Lithuanian.

And she worked this out quite early in her career.

And then she went on to get a job working for the Soviet Union but she carried on as a part-time research scientist which I quite like because she was all about kind of incomplete tasks and she decided to carry on working part-time on it and then she won the Lewin Memorial Award but unfortunately the Soviet Union wouldn't let her collect it and she died before she could collect it so again that's another incomplete task in her life so she she died happy probably Yeah.

She died doing what she loved, not completing a task.

Yeah, exactly.

And then there's the Tetris effect,

which we will have all suffered from, I imagine.

Yes.

The Tetris effects.

I think this is coined by a wired writer in the 90s, but basically where you start seeing Tetris blocks wherever you look.

You start, you know, when everyone played Tetris in the 90s, you close your eyes and you just see Tetris blocks falling in front of your dreams.

And you can expand the Tetris effect to lots of other things.

So it basically means that you're doing something so much to such a stupid extent that everything in it is overlaid on the reality around you.

So sea legs is another example of the Tetris effect.

So you get off a boat.

Oh yeah.

So you're not at sea anymore and yet you still feel like you're at sea.

Yeah, right.

Your body's too used to it.

Very nice.

Did you guys hear about the other study that was done on Tetris about how it can help with traumatic memories?

This is amazing.

It's if you've suffered some kind of trauma.

Okay, so in this incident, it was people who've been in a traumatic car accident.

If you play Tetris for 20 minutes within six hours of the car crash you will get 62% fewer intrusive memories in the following week it seems to prevent negative memories and flashbacks from even

because you think of Tetris instead or no I don't know it's kind of the within those first hours is when the the memories get consolidated for long-term storage basically so if you just disrupt during that time Tetris seems to be especially good at it although I'm sure there are other things which could do it as well it kind of prevents the memories from forming in the first place and then you don't get flashbacks later down the line What if the terrible memory that you have is of being a 15-year-old and your younger brother beats you in the World Tetris final?

You should play Super Mario.

Just briefly back to Alexi, the inventor of Tetris.

I love that the very first version of it he built on a computer that had no graphics capabilities.

So he had to make a text version of the game.

So the blocks were basically brackets put next to each other.

That was the first version.

And then Alexi didn't just invent Tetris.

He sort of quite quickly invented newer versions of the game.

So did any one of you guys play Hattress?

Hats come down with different, like a top hat and a yeah?

It's literally that.

It's literally that.

It's Tetris with hats, and hats come down, and you have to line them up.

So he invented Hattress, and then.

I thought it was just playing Tetris three times.

It sounds a bit like he's called a Hattress.

That would be a fake etymology, Adda.

So sorry.

Yeah, so five hats of identical style had to be stacked, and that's how you would remove them.

And Entertainment Weekly at the time said there is, after all, a cure for Tetris addiction.

It's hat tris, a habit that's even harder to kick.

There's Word Tris as well, which was another Alexi game.

So Word Tris, I actually think would be really fun.

The idea is that you had to create blocks of three letters.

So letters would drop and you'd have to create a word.

So you could make it.

It's basically like a big crossword and you just have to decide where to land a letter, hoping, yeah, that the next one would come.

Yeah, pretty cool game.

Do you know, I think that James would have point blank refused to play Tetris when it first came to the West.

It was, Andy sort of referenced it earlier, but it was a big deal that it was a Soviet export.

And it was really, and no one had ever really exported something for financial gain from the Soviet Union before because it was so difficult to do because that just wasn't what they were about, obviously.

So it came out and the West was kind of very excited.

And it seems like the Soviet Union aspect was a bit of a gimmick.

So, they included the right visuals on the Tetris packaging for the West.

And so, of course, when you got the Tetris box,

backwards.

Oh, my God.

I'm afraid it was a backwards R.

Oh, my God.

I'm afraid it was spelled with a backwards R.

Brilliant, Frank.

Absolutely furious.

It's really, I think it's like the Tetris effect that when you're learning Russian and you just see these backwards letters everywhere, you can only read them because you're used to doing it, you can only read them in the correct way.

And it just none of the words make any sense.

Maybe we're supposed to be pronouncing Tetris that way, so how should we be pronouncing it, James?

It would be like,

there's no I in the Russian language, no, or that looks like an I.

So I'm now picturing how pissed off James must have been going to buy this backward R Tetris as he's walking into Toys R Us to get it.

Hey, can I give you one last fact, which is that the link between Tetris and Cats.

Was there a Catris then?

There wasn't a Catris.

I mean, Cats the Musical specifically.

Oh.

Ah.

Which is that the Tetris theme reached number six in the UK charts in 1992, and Andrew Lloyd Weber was the man behind it.

I bought it.

I remember.

Did you really?

Yeah, yeah.

He had a pseudonym.

He said he had the pseudonym Dr.

Spin.

So you, James, walking to the shops, would have just thought, oh, I'm going to get the cool new track by Dr.

Spin.

It was actually Andrew Lloyd Weber.

I think we knew at the time that it was Lloyd Weber.

I think I can't really remember it very well, but there was like at the time, a lot of video games kind of came out as dance tracks.

Okay, oh, cool.

Andrew Lloyd Weber

composed the tune.

No, he remixed it, didn't he?

Because it's an old, it's a very old.

Well, it's in Tetris, so it sort of existed for it's a Russian folk song, yeah.

Yeah, is it?

It's by Nikolai Nekrasov, and it's the story of a young peddler who seduces a peasant girl in a field of rye.

And he keeps saying that he'll offer her like some of his goods in return for a kiss/slash a shag.

And then she accepts a ring from him and he goes to the to sell his wares.

And he says, When I get all my money, then we'll kind of get married and stuff.

And that's where the song ends.

But the original poem, he actually gets robbed and killed by a forest ranger when he asked for directions on his way to the market.

But that's not in the song.

Game over.

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

My fact this week is that the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh has ruled that all government offices must be cleaned with cow urine.

Wow.

On pain of death.

No, it's not death.

But it is a new ruling.

So, Madhya Pradesh is the second biggest Indian state in size, and it's got 72 million people living in it.

And

the government has released an order saying that usually they'll use chemically made fennel,

P-H-E-N-Y-L, sort of chemicals.

Oh, right, not the

viana seed-tasting vegetables.

Sorry, they're not just rubbing licorice flavour all over the offices, although that would be awesome.

And they have to use cow urine instead, or use sort of an acid extracted from cow urine.

And the decision was made in a cow cabinet that was held in the end of the last year.

Wow.

I think it's kind of quite a similar fennel or phenol that they make from the cow urine, isn't it?

It's kind of a very similar thing.

Yeah.

And

is it the insides of the offices, or is it like the walls on the outside or or what do you know oh i think it's the insides i thought it was sort of like floors and surfaces yeah so in place of detergent right yeah

that's what you screw up with and the idea is they want to create demand for cow urine in order that the state sets up loads of cow urine bottling factories and you know cow urine extraction factories so they think that if they make this ruling that they'll have to set up factories that manufacture cow urine for them okay and the idea is that at the moment people keep cows um especially for milking, but then the male cows are often kind of abandoned often.

And so by creating this demand, it means that if you have a male cow, then you might not abandon it because you can milk it for its urine.

Ah,

it serves a purpose.

I would have thought looking into the amount that cow urine is used in India for various different things, you wouldn't have a need for sort of creating more demand.

Yeah, well, there's a thing there, which is that there are literally millions and millions and millions of cows on the loose in India, which are too sacred to be killed to the Hindu religion.

And so it is a supply and demand situation, but unfortunately, the supply is so massive compared with the number of people willing to use cow urine for whatever.

So what else do they use it for, Dan?

So, you know, some people drink it there.

It's seen as a health drink.

I read particularly about one of Bollywood's biggest actors, Akshay Kumar, who drinks it every single day because it's part of his fitness regime.

So that's one of the things.

It's used for religious services as well.

So if a new baby is born and you want to sort of bless your house for good luck, you might, you know, put some cow urine around the house in order to do that.

In fact, they sell it in London.

You can buy cow urine in London specifically for that, that I believe is imported sometimes from India, but also they manufacture it in Watford.

And it's called Gal Mutra.

And there was a BBC report where they found it being sold in certain shops, sort of on the shelf above the naan bread.

And there was questions about whether or not you should be doing that because it's yeah, we should say this doesn't it doesn't work.

It's not good for your health.

No, it doesn't it doesn't help anything.

It doesn't have health properties.

You shouldn't.

Do we know that?

Do we know that for sure?

No, we don't know, but I imagine it works no better than placebo and in lots of cases quite a lot worse than placebo.

It can contain harmful bacteria and cause diseases such as leptospirosis, whatever that is.

Oh, right.

But are they in India where technology, science is such a big thing?

Is there a big split between the people who believe that this is useful and the people...

Is it kind of like homeopathy over there?

It's not seen as part of science.

It is, but obviously it's incredibly widespread.

So it's part of the Ayurveda medicine, isn't it?

Which 80% of people in India would subscribe to that to some extent, I think.

But there definitely is a divide.

So for instance...

Here with this ruling, there is a rival body that's been set up, which has launched a competition to challenge people to apply the scientific method to all these claims that the government's releasing about the good that cow urine can do and basically prove that it can't do any good.

Because it's a big push by the government, it's huge at the moment.

So there are cow ministries popping up all over the country and cow ministers in states.

And it's kind of related a little bit to obviously a bit of Hindu nationalism at the top of government and it promotes that side of things.

So yeah, there is a divide, but it's really widespread.

Okay.

Hey, by the way, if you spill your cup of cow urine while you're drinking it in the office, do you just sort of leave it?

Because it's what cleans up the office now.

Okay, if you are in the office and you have a glass of water and you spill it, do you just leave that?

Well, you've asked the wrong person here.

But would a normal person clean it up?

Yes, I imagine they would.

Well, yeah, I think you can analogize from that.

Yeah, yeah, it is a really good analogy.

It is really bad.

Lots of scientists in India have basically been under governmental pressure to make research proposals on the subject of gomutra which is cow urine or the related substance uh panchagavya which is a mix of milk yogurt butter lovely sofa then cow urine and cow dung on top of that and basically they're saying they won't get research funding unless they research this stuff so yeah it's a problem panchagavya means uh five cow derivatives um just a bit of etymology

so it's just every bit of the cow apart from the meat of course um that goes into it

arguably i would say the nicest bit although that wouldn't get me very far in india because eating cows is so verboten in almost all the country uh cow politics in india uh dates back to the 60s and this was when indira gandhi was um in charge uh indira gandhi who was the daughter of the famous politician

i i'd say

i've completely ruined it i'm so sorry i was so excited that i bought that from my asia and africa conference at university

my foot was hovering over the landmine and anna just stepped in and put a safe mat in.

I can't believe I did that.

I apologise to the listeners.

I apologise to my parents.

I've been looking forward to that all week.

I knew he was going to fall for it.

Yeah,

Mary's daughter.

Look, we'll cut that.

Do it again.

Right,

so quiet.

So in 1966, there was a storm of the Indian parliament.

They were trying to pressurize Gandhi to criminalise cow slaughter.

And she refused to kind of kowtow to what they wanted.

And she had like

oh, yeah, I didn't think of that.

Yeah,

that's one thing that I hadn't been looking forward to all week.

I know you think that I was, and you think that I've been leading up to that, and that's the whole point of this fight, but no.

So then Gandhi negotiated with these protesters, and actually, people really started respecting her a lot more after that.

And her party congress they chose the cow and calf symbol as a result of this.

And then cow politics kind of became quite a big thing in India.

But what I like about Indira Gandhi is she started at quite a young age.

When she was 12 years old, she led a bunch of children in a group called the Monkey Brigade, which included 60,000 young revolutionaries.

And they would like send letters to people.

They would make flags.

They would put up notices before the demonstration and stuff like this.

And even before that, when she was five years old, she burned her own doll because she found out it was made in England.

Wow,

yeah, the monkey brigade sounds like a deceptively innocuous name for a bunch of revolutionaries.

It sounds like you're getting your little monkeys as they're burning your house down.

Yes, correct.

It's the um, the Lord Rama in the epic Ramayana had an army of monkeys, and so they were named after that.

And so, what's the connection of why she has the name Gandhi?

Is that through her marriage, or is that something she said?

She, I think, if memory serves, she um was educated in England, maybe, but she met someone who was not related to Mahatma Gandhi at university, I think.

Right.

Happened to be called Gandhi.

Yeah,

it's a good name.

It's a good name to sort of take to the world of politics.

Like, if I was a politician and I had the chance of changing my surname, I would so look for someone with the surname Obama.

I just won't.

I just.

What's your name?

Kathy Obama?

Absolutely.

We're marrying.

Okay.

Here is another use of cow excrement.

It can be used as a mobile phone case.

There's one quite hardline Indian politician called Shankar Lal who says that he has coated his mobile phone with cow dung.

And he said, if cow dung can treat cancer, why can't it save us from a phone's microwaves?

Okay, there is a far in that logic, isn't it?

It's an if, and it's a big if cow dung can treat cancer because it can't.

It absolutely can't do that.

And this is a man who's speaking with poo down half of the side of his face.

So you wouldn't take him seriously, would you?

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

My fact is that in 2020, a woman in the UK received medical treatment in two different hospitals at the same time.

What?

How is that?

What?

I don't get it.

Wait, what?

So exciting.

So this was a story that was in the news.

It was about a lady called Jan Ritson, and

she had a tumor, a cancerous tumor in her leg.

Now, she needed to have the operation

where, you know, the shin bone was removed and then treated for the radiation.

But unfortunately, due to COVID,

all sorts of cancer operations have been moved to a specific hospital, which has been kept clear of COVID patients.

So procedures have kind of been separated out.

So

the surgeons who were planning the operation realized that they had to take out her shin bone, take it to a different hospital, irradiate it to completely kill any cancerous cells while she was still under anesthetic, then bring it back and reinstall it in her legs.

Oh my God.

Unbelievable.

I know.

I phoned the surgeon who did the operation to ask him about it.

Yeah, he's a...

He's an orthopedic oncologist called Ashish Mahendra, and we had a whale of a time talking about it because it's just such an an interesting,

kind of miraculous procedure.

Was he the surgeon who dealt with it at the hospital where she was or where the shin was?

Or was he just like the taxi driver?

No, no, no.

Okay, so he was where the majority of Ms.

Ritson was.

He was with her.

Most of her, he wasn't with the shin bone.

I read in one article, I don't know if Dr.

Mahendra said this to you, but that she could watch the footage of her shin bone being dealt with from her hospital bed so they filmed it and she could watch it but you said that she was anisotized so i don't know if that's possible well why would you want to watch that oh why not oh yeah i mean what else is on snooker at the moment i don't know netflix you got netflix what's what's stopping your mum will shake i don't know

you'll watch an hour and 15 minutes of

nerds playing Tetris and yet you won't watch your own shimbone being operated on.

Well, is it a whole channel?

Can I flick over to someone's, you know, nose being operated on in a separate hospital?

Like, is it just one so i did say i i when i spoke to mr mahendra he did say that she was under i'm pretty sure that he said that so i don't know whether she was whether there was tv on i think maybe she might have watched it afterwards maybe she might have watched that afterwards entirely possible

something

yeah but it's it's such a tricky operation to do this because when when you remove like most of these tumors happen kind of higher up maybe the knee or the hip that's more common um and reconstruction is much easier because you need to give some you can give someone a hip replacement can't you you or you can put some metal in which kind of does the job when it's a shin bone it's much harder to reconstruct after the operation you know there's not much muscle cover the bone is really near the surface and just there are many fewer options for reconstruction afterwards so the bone the shin bone they had removed was the best thing to go back in and that's why they needed to do that they irradiated the bone killed off all the cells but unfortunately then you've killed off all the cells you know there's no live matter left in that bone and there normally is in our bones so they had to use her fibula, which is the next door bone,

and kind of use that as a spare to put that right against the now dead shin bone that was being reinstalled.

And that then helped to bring that bone back to life.

So amazing.

What we can do.

And then did she have to have like an arm bone taken out to replace the fibula?

And then

it's sort of like rearranging a spice rack where you think, oh, well, if I just put that there.

The only other thing I asked about was the container they use, because it's put in a special sterile container to be driven across the city.

And he said there's no specific optimum size of the container.

It depends on the tumor, it depends on the bone.

So frequently they will have to tailor make a suitable container for the bone that is being moved around.

I spoke to my sister-in-law, Beth, who used to be a nurse,

and she said that she thought...

probably the reason they don't do it much is because of contamination, right?

You don't really want to be taking stuff across to the other side of the city in case you get some, you know, a bit bit of dust on it or a bit of grease or something.

But then she did tell me that what they used to do to stop that sometimes with, you know, when you had to remove some skull, some of your skull to release some pressure, they would take that bone and then they would put it inside your belly almost, like inside your body, because that's where the perfect sterile place is for human bone.

Isn't that amazing?

Like they would cut you open, cut a little flap, they would put it in there while they're letting all the pressure release and then they'd put it back.

that's incredible amazing

that's amazing i was talking also to a uh a surgeon um so my buddy harry harris akram is a brain surgeon in london and he was saying that when he was in india the hospital that he was staying at you would be fitted with this frame around your head imagine like in all those sort of uh mad scientist movies where they put this giant frame on your head so it's it's metallic and it's big and it really sits on and clamps on um so they would put that on there.

But at the surgery in India, they didn't have an MRI scanner.

So they used to send their patients on the bus over to another hospital wearing the frame on their head.

They would go have the scans done and be prepped and then get the bus back and then have their surgery once the scans have been sent over.

Yeah.

So in India, you would see people with these giant frames on their head who were just transporting themselves to a different hospital.

Very good for social distancing because

from what you're gesturing here, it looks like you couldn't get that close to them.

It's a very, yeah, it's quite a big item.

It sounds like that thing gone saw, you know, that rips people's heads open.

Like you put them in this contraption and if you don't get the key in time, I'm the only one who's seen that movie.

Okay, never mind.

It's not a reassuring thing to say to the person sitting next on the bus chains on the way to their brain surgery.

I was reading actually a study about a particular brain surgery where the surgeons use stickers to label little bits of the brain.

So, this was kind of just a

throwaway comment in this study, but they referred to it as intra-operative electrical stimulation mapping.

And they were basically trying to work out which bits of the brain are responsible for which things.

And so, what they did was they would have a, you know, when patients are awake, but you're operating on their brain, the surgeons stimulated different parts of their brain and then looked at what the patient did to see which things it affected.

So, if they prodded one bit, the patient might lose lose language.

If they prodded another bit, the patient might start dribbling or something.

And then they added a little label to each little bit saying language bit, dribbling bit,

walking bit, playing the violin.

So, I'm just sort of, I didn't see a picture, but I'm imagining a brain covered in post-its.

Yeah, that's incredible.

There was another world first of surgery which happened last year.

This was the world's first double penis removal.

Ooh, just from one person, from the same person.

It was a baby boy who was born with three penises.

Wow.

Not two, but three.

Yeah.

It's the first recorded ever case of human trifalia, which is a criminal.

I was going to say treat us, but that's

that's Alexi's latest game he's working on.

Anyone for treatis?

That's incredible.

Did they keep the middle one or the left one or the right one?

Oh, good call.

They kept the functional one.

Yeah.

The other other two were more stubs than full-on.

They would have been able to get erections in the front.

They were built.

Could they urinate?

Could you urinate out of them?

I don't.

You don't know if the cords.

Yeah, no, fair enough.

Fair enough.

Like a sprinkler system, though, Dan.

You think you could stand him in a garden when he's older?

You could stand on all three urinals at the same time.

Yeah, you could piss on three people's shoes at the same time.

Would you, um, do you think you would keep them if that happened to you?

Would you ask to keep them?

Because people do that for surgery, don't they?

It's a vexed question.

Yeah, I don't don't know.

You wouldn't wear them as earrings or anything, but you might keep them in a drawer.

Put them on a mountain piece or something.

I went to someone who kept her hip bone

after it was replaced.

Yeah.

Yeah, I was talking to someone we all know, Case Moliker, who's the curator of the Natural History Museum in Rotterdam.

Anytime he has surgery that is removed, a bit of his body is removed.

So like gallstones or, you know, anything like that, he keeps it in a jar in his home.

And he's shown me them.

There's like, and all the things to do with his kids when they were born, placentas and so on.

They're all in formaldehyde.

I mean, sitting in his house.

I know what you're saying, Dan.

And I love Case, but he is a bit weird.

So it's not.

Oh, he should turn it into a museum and call it Cases Cases.

Oh, that's good.

Lovely.

Tall.

Yeah, it's weird the whole do you keep your limbs stuff.

I was reading a thing online from someone who used to work in a funeral home and said that they'd been asked to keep a leg in a freezer and it ended up being for over a decade because the person who'd had it amputated wanted to be buried with it in the end.

Wow,

that's nice.

I think that's a bit cheeky.

Yeah.

Well, it's using someone's freezer space, isn't it?

If I said to Andy, I've made some lasagna and I want to keep it, but I don't have enough room in my freezer.

Can I keep it in your freezer?

I think I'd say yes.

I know, but you would feel that you had to say yes.

Wouldn't you?

As the years went by, I would slowly grow more resentful of the lasagna in the freezer.

I think, oh, I've just, I've got some leftovers, but I can't freeze them because James is bloody lasagna.

And you probably keep like occasionally bringing up lasagna just in case I remembered that, wouldn't you?

I would, I would, James, every conversation we had, I would bring up lasagna in some way or freezing or leftovers.

Yeah, but this lady can't go.

Any plan on dying soon?

That's the only question she did.

No.

You would come to a rental agreement in the end.

I imagine that the rental agreement would be the best way for you.

Really?

Okay.

Where James says to me, for 50p a year, you can keep.

You're going to charge me to put my lasagna in your freezer.

After two years, James, which is my cut off, and I think that's reasonable.

I would insist on some kind of arrangement.

Can't believe.

I thought we were friends.

Anna, have you got a freezer?

I'm not getting involved in this.

49p a year.

You get briefed on how to care for your limbs if you choose to keep them.

You get told, because you can be given them in formaldehyde and water.

For instance, is one way they get stored.

And apparently, you get a little briefing booklet which says you need to change the formaldehyde and water every 10 years.

Okay.

So just set an alarm every 10 years is like changing a fish tank, which I think is about the same from memory.

That is a great alarm to go off mid-meeting, isn't it?

Oh, damn, sorry, I just got to change the water and formaldehyde of my leg to lean over behind you and release once bigot starts draining.

Do you you know that people didn't really like wearing surgical gloves when they first came in?

Like any technology, I suppose.

There's always some resistance.

But there's quite a lot of hesitation with surgical gloves because people would kind of root around with their hands and they felt like if they wore gloves, then they wouldn't get the feeling and they wouldn't be able to do the job quite as well.

But one of the reasons is because like some of the gloves that they use were not exactly good for purpose.

So the first ones were like elbow length cotton or silk gloves and they would just like get covered with blood within about two seconds and you'd have to keep changing them.

And then there was one surgeon who put wax directly onto his hands and so kind of dunked his hand in some molten wax and then let it dry and then would use that.

And the idea of course was to try and make the operation sterile but a lot of people thought that maybe that's a bit pointless.

They thought it's impossible to make everything completely sterile so we should just accept there'll be some contamination but then try and kill the bacteria afterwards do you know what i mean so there's like these two kind of sides of what they should do right but now they use gloves now which did they go with yeah oh they were i think sterilization for operations largely speaking is orthodoxy now

it's the preferred way although sometimes you don't have a choice um there was a case in 1995 when a woman just was getting onto a plane and slipped uh and she thought she was okay but then it turned turned out that she'd fractured her rib, which had punctured her lung.

And the plane was already in the air, and so they weren't going to be able to do an emergency landing because the change in pressure might kill her.

And so they had to do something about it.

And there's these two doctors called Angus Wallace and Tom Wong.

And the case was written up in the British Medical Journal, which honestly is such a good read.

It's an incredible story.

And they used a

they kind of got a urinary catheter, which was in the first aid kit, but it wasn't good to be used for a chest, so they had to use a clothes hanger to stiffen it up.

They didn't have any sterilization stuff, so they used Corvoisier cognac to make it sterile.

They didn't have any surgical clamps, so they held the incision open with a knife and fork.

Sorry,

that was the first aid kit that's supposed to be on board.

Well, since then, since this happened, the medical kits on certainly British airlines, and I think American as well, and probably throughout most of the world, have improved a lot, and they've got a lot more stuff now.

So I read the story too, and I love that she had complained about it before the plane took off.

And she said that she'd had a slip and it was this rib problem.

So the doctors actually saw her before the plane took off and they went, okay, no, you should be fine.

And then when it got up to high altitude, it started really hurting.

And then she came clean that she hadn't just slipped.

She'd actually been knocked off her motorbike and hit by a car

just before getting on the plane.

So it was a proper, proper accident.

Actually, if it was 10 minutes, this bit of surgery, and then they put this catheter in, and she spent the rest of the flight just watching the movie.

Unfortunately, it was stopping by Mumbai Street.

She died of boredom.

What if Juliet got a second chance at life after Romeo and Juliet, created by the Emmy-winning writer from Schitt's Creek and Pop Music's number one hitmaker, Playing October 7th through 12th at the San Jose Center for the Performing Arts.

Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is my fact.

My fact this week is that in 1990, five children in America were given the first name spelt ABCDE or ABCD.

All were born in Hawaii, where the local alphabet doesn't actually contain the letters B, C, or D.

Wow.

This is amazing.

There's a lot of things to unpick here.

So it's pronounced Absidi.

There's actually a couple of pronunciations, but that is one of them, yeah.

Sometimes pronounced ab city, which is what I'm going to call my gym.

Yeah, so this was in an article that sort of erupted in 2018 when a girl who was trying to book herself, her mum was trying to get her and her daughter onto Southwest airplanes.

They took a picture and put it online going, look at the name of this girl.

Her first name is ABCDE and kind of shamed her and that turned into a national story.

But then people were digging into it and finding out that this isn't as rare a name as one girl in America.

It turned out that as of 2017, 373 girls were named ABCDE or ABCD.

Further people have done sort of their little checks into how far back the name goes.

And in 1990, five were registered as being given that name.

And all five of them were located in Hawaii.

And yeah, and it's been growing ever since as a name.

And it doesn't really have an origin as far as I can tell.

Well, I mean, it does, probably, but no one knows it.

It must have started somewhere, mustn't it?

Some alphabet teacher in primary school going, oh, I think that sounds like a nice name and spread from there, but we'll never know unless someone out there does.

Yeah.

And it's, yeah, so, so the Hawaii, this is the modern Hawaiian alphabet that doesn't have it.

And I looked up our names.

James, there's no J in the Hawaiian modern alphabet as well.

So, your name is different.

So, Anna, your name, if you were being translated into a Hawaiian name, is still Anna with one N, A-N-A.

James, you are Kimo, K-I-M-O.

Strong.

I am Kaniella, so K-A-N, instead of a D.

And Andy, you are Ainulu.

You are

A-N-A-L-U.

That's what you are.

A-L-U.

Yeah.

Analu.

I like that pronunciation, and I'm sure it's correct.

I don't know what the pronunciation is.

It's A-N-A-L-U.

Yeah.

It sounds like a product.

Are you bored of anal Sol?

Then try Anal U.

I thought it sounded like a bathroom cleaner.

It's more like something to sit next to the cow you're in, I think.

The sequel to Despicable Me.

Anal U.

Anal U.

So baby names.

Oh, yeah.

Baby names,

we only know about baby names due to a guy called Michael Shackelford who before him,

people just didn't give babies names.

They were like, what's this called?

No idea.

We just don't know.

1997.

We know Michael Shackelford here.

He was a guy who

worked at he worked at so it's it's the sort of we only know that there are 373 absides for example because of Michael Shackleford.

He worked at the Social Security Administration of Baltimore, and he and his wife were expecting a baby, and he just wanted to know if they were going to have a baby with a very common name, because he was called Michael, which was a massively common name in America.

And, you know, wherever you go, three people born in his generation, you know, somebody shouts, Michael, three people turn around.

And they didn't want that.

So he thought he'd just program in a little computer program and work out the names.

And he thinks he was the first person to see an accurate nationwide sampling of first names.

Wow.

And that was 1997.

Good old Mike.

A lot of people listening now think that I'm saying

I read an amazing book called Through Fru Frisbee and Brick, The Book of Unfortunate Baby Names by Rushall Ashe.

And it's got people such as Mabel Abel, Ruth Booth, Danny Fanney, Hugh Glue, and Nellie Smelly.

These are all people who are around.

There was someone in the 1830s in New York called Preserved Fish.

His father was called Preserved Fish and his grandfather was also called Preserved Fish.

But his father and grandfather were both blacksmiths, but he was actually a shipping merchant.

He started off as a whaler and then started

selling fish and he was called preserved fish.

Amazing.

That's pretty much the most, it's not a subtle nominative determinism, is it?

Yeah.

It's a bit too on the nose.

I like it.

Does it help the name when you add the third to the end of it?

I don't know.

Preserved fish the third.

Yeah, just sort of like, why are you called that?

Okay, the third.

I get it.

You got weird ass grandparents and parents.

Urethra scoggins, filia leg, and posthumous mints.

Just

filia, P-H-E-L-I-A leg.

Posthumous mints.

Posthumous mints.

I want all my mints to be posthumous.

Well, I've got some lasagna in my freezer.

You're very welcome to.

Do you know when

baby sort of naming books

took off?

1997.

No one had books before then.

Well,

there were, I mean, they sort of really did take off in the

80s, but actually, they do date back way before that, sort of names of interesting babies.

But they used to be in the back of cookbooks because cookbooks used to have all kinds of extra gubbins in the later pages just to kind of pat out the recipes, I guess.

So, Mrs.

Clark's cookery book in 1883 was subtitled, including What to Name the Baby, as kind of general all-purpose household guide.

Um, so you got that kind of thing in the 19th century

because you don't want to confuse a recipe with a baby name.

I don't know.

No, that's how actually preserved fish got his name.

Ad posthumous mints, yeah.

Um, a couple of people who do have Hawaiian names, uh, that we all know.

So, Keanu Reeves, Keanu is a Hawaiian name.

And yeah, and it's a lovely, unique name in Hollywood, and it means cool mountain breeze.

But when he first started in Hollywood, his agent said, This name's not going to work.

You need to go away and come back with another name because no one's going to hire you.

It's too weird.

So he agreed and he went away.

And he came back and he said, I've got my new name to his agents.

And they said, okay, what is it?

And he said, I want to now be known as Chuck Spadina.

Chuck Spadina.

So, yeah, his agent said,

I'm not sure that Chuck's Badina is going to work.

Go away, come back with another one.

So then Keanu Reeves went away, brainstormed, came back and said, Okay, I got my new one.

I'll now be known as Templeton Page Taylor.

And they said, What?

Mate, you're not getting this.

And so they said, just keep Keanu.

And that's the only reason he kept it.

He was so ready to change it to either of those names.

So do you think that he came up with these stupid names to stop the idea of him having to change it?

It was like a clever thing, or do you think he just is an idiot who doesn't know what a normal name is?

I think, yeah, I hadn't actually thought that, so maybe, maybe that's exactly what he was doing.

Yeah, not sure

it sort of reads that story reads like you're reading Rumpelstiltskin backwards, doesn't it?

You know, when you go and try and guess at the name every day, yeah.

Um, in 1900, 91% of all children were given a name from the top 1,000 most popular names.

This is in America,

but by 2000, only 75% of girls were given a name from the top 1,000.

And for boys, it was 86%.

So a lot more children have been given unique names or very unusual names.

And they've looked into this.

It was a 1995 study, and they find it's very common in African-American families.

And they looked at the whole country over the whole of that century, and they found that in Illinois in 1920, 31% of African-American girls and 25% of African-American boys had unique names in the whole country.

And the reason they think this,

there's someone called Sandra L.

West, who is the co-author of the Encyclopedium of the Harlem Renaissance, and a couple of scholars called Ayanna F.

Brown and Janice Took Lively.

And what they think is basically the surnames that African American families have are often things that were given during slavery times and they were forced upon them by white people.

Whereas the first name is something that's given to you by a loved one, by a family member.

And so people will give names that kind of show that they're loved by their family.

They can show that by giving them unique sort of special first names because they're stuck with these old-fashioned surnames.

That's interesting.

We are definitely getting more into our unusual names.

There have been various studies about why we have, but I mean, it's largely, obviously, because we're a bunch of individualistic millennials, I suppose, and everyone wants a special name for their kid.

But there's also a really interesting study, which I thought sounded like rubbish, and then I saw it being written up in a serious and reliable way about how there's an exact correlation between how recently a US state joined the Union and how many newborn babies get unusual names.

And so there's the idea that if you're a frontier settler, so you know, you're going and you're settling a new land, you are more sort of bold, it's more bold society, it's more individualistic,

it's more gung-ho, get out and make your own way, and it's much more likely that you'll be willing to break the mold and give your kid a weird name.

So there's literally an exact inverse correlation between common names and how recently a state was settled.

Same with Canada on the east of Canada, which was settled first.

Kids have much more common names, but the west of Canada, which was settled more recently, still has that hangover of, yeah, we're new here, we'll do what the fuck we want.

And that's that correlates.

That's a very interesting idea.

Not many Ivankas, it turns out,

that people thought that perhaps there might be more Ivankas because she was a prominent political figure.

Do you know why that might be?

Not many Ivankas.

Because it's O

sounds Russian-y, which might be a bit off-putting to all Americans.

I think there's something about that.

Basically, there is not much fashion at the moment for any name which contains the letters N and K next to each other.

And this is according to Laura Wattenberg, who wrote the Baby Name Wizard book and runs baby namewizard.com.

She said that basically NK is very much out of fashion so frank for instance very much out of fashion franky bank anything like that yet my son wanker is uh

fucking the trend

um you can get consultants can't you you can get professional advice on this if you like there are various services which do it there's one which i found in america which is called i love this it's called appellation mountain okay so it's appellation as in naming but obviously there are the appalachian mountains

thank you andy just in case not everyone knows the Appalachian mountains, they're not in the top three mountain ranges, I would say.

I reckon I'm more familiar with the mountain range than the word to mean to give someone a name, actually.

Great point.

Really good point.

Well, anyway, I've covered the ground, I think, pretty exhaustively now.

And

you can pay for the very basics is a 45-minute call as a kind of urgent assistance thing.

If you're, I don't know, maybe if you're hanging around outside the baptism office, whatever.

Or you can pay a lot more and get an eight-page report you know if you need a baby name to work in three different languages let's say because the parents are from different places uh then you can get that and it'll really drill down into the detail you want to avoid particular syllables that's what you go for interesting so they basically kind of go through you know like in um the simpsons when they name bart they try and work out if there's anything that rhymes with it and they go cart dart er no we're fine does this for these people basically do eight pages of possible ways that your child could be bullied in every different country bullying nicknames basically, yeah.

I think it's if you want to avoid particular abbreviations of the name, they can do that too.

Interesting.

I think if you need professional consultation over what to name your child, you've got to take a really long and hard look at your capacity to make an independent decision.

Okay, well, my parents wanted to call me anal you, so I'm glad for one that they took that advice.

Okay, that's 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 accounts.

I'm on at Schreiberland, James, at James Harkin, Andy, at Andrew Hunter M and Czaczynski.

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 thingasoffish.com, where we have all of our previous episodes, as well as links to any upcoming live shows we might be doing and video links to anything that we've done that's on YouTube.

Do check it out and come back again next week because we will be here with another episode and we'll see you you then.

Goodbye.

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