307: No Such Thing As EastEnders, The Opera

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Speaker 20 Hey everyone, before we begin this week's episode of Fish, we just want to let you know something hugely exciting. One of us has our first debut novel out this week.

Speaker 15 That is correct. Which one could it be?

Speaker 20 Andrew Hunter Murray. It's Andrew Hunter Murray.
Who's that guy? It's that guy. He has written a debut thriller novel.
It's called The Last Day.

Speaker 20 I've read it. It is, it's unbelievably good.

Speaker 15 It's really great. So it's kind of this sci-fi dystopian future where the world has gradually stopped spinning.
Half of it's plunged into darkness, half of it's bathed in light.

Speaker 15 It's impossible to live in any of those areas. But what about the middle sliver? The sort of half light, half dark.

Speaker 20 And that's where the novel takes place. It's wonderful, boldly imagined, and beautifully written.
The best Future Shock thriller for years. Those aren't my words.
Those are Lee Child's words.

Speaker 20 Lee Child.

Speaker 15 And look, I know a lot of people respect Lee Child's view, but my view may be even more important to some. And genuinely couldn't believe it.
Andy can actually write incredibly well.

Speaker 20 Absolutely. It's a stunning original thriller.
It's set in a world of tomorrow that will make you think about what's happening today. Not my words.
Harlan Coban. Harlan Coban said that about Andy.

Speaker 15 You may be beginning to think that Dan has no words of his own.

Speaker 15 And even more exciting news is that you can actually, you can buy this book. It's available to buy in what we call bookshops, all of them, or on the internet.

Speaker 20 And if you want to listen to it, there's an audiobook available and it's narrated by Gemma Whelan of Game of Thrones.

Speaker 15 If that's not a mark of quality, I don't know what it is. Go get it, buy it, read it, listen to it, do it now.
That's right.

Speaker 20 The Last Day by Andrew Hunter Murray. A fabulous achievement.
Not my words, Stephen Fry.

Speaker 15 Oh, Jesus Christ. Okay.

Speaker 20 On with the show.

Speaker 20 Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden. My name is Dan Shriver.

Speaker 20 I am sitting here with James Harkin, Anna Czaczynski and Andrew Hunter-Murray.

Speaker 20 And once again, we have gathered round the microphones with our four favourite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order, here we go. Starting with you, Czaczynski.

Speaker 15 My fact this week is that, after being stuck at an opera that went on twice as long as the scheduled running time, Emperor Joseph II of Austria banned encores.

Speaker 15 So, yeah, this was 1786. It was the marriage of Figaro.
Very good.

Speaker 15 No disrespect to that, I'm sure he emphasized, but it did go on twice the length it was supposed to because almost every single scene was encorded.

Speaker 20 That's so funny.

Speaker 20 It's rough.

Speaker 15 If you've got kids to get home to, it's difficult.

Speaker 15 So, anyway, he went, the emperor went, and he thought that was fine, but he immediately afterwards put up kind of bills in theaters saying that no piece of music should be encored henceforth.

Speaker 15 And to be clear, he said no piece of music for more than a single voice.

Speaker 15 So if you were singing your solitary little solo, you could maybe get away with it, but basically, you couldn't do anything else.

Speaker 20 It's an amazing thing, the idea of an encore mid-show or even at the beginning of the show and just carrying on and on.

Speaker 20 I've never heard of that before.

Speaker 15 They just used to interrupt shows. I mean, this is how encores worked until apparently up to the 1930s in theatre.
It was common.

Speaker 15 Like, if you were watching a scene and you liked it, you'd just shout encore and continuity couldn't happen because you'd have to do the scene again sometimes there'd be like a song the audience really liked sort of in scene two and then an hour later they decide to encore that song from scene two and they'd be like hey play hit me baby again that's exactly

Speaker 15 what's hit me baby is that britney spears opera yeah the britney spears opera uh i think it was 1810.

Speaker 20 one more time

Speaker 20 But there was a thing where you would sing an encore which wasn't even part of the opera you were seeing.

Speaker 20 So, some singers in the 19th and even 20th century would sing an encore, which is just a little musical bonus unrelated to the piece you'd just seen or the opera you'd just seen.

Speaker 20 And they would do encore after encore that was not in the opera.

Speaker 20 So, there was a Polish tenor whose name was Jan Kiapura, and he made sure there was a piano in the wings just in case he needed it for an opera for an encore.

Speaker 20 For an encore, yeah, but playing something else, just for

Speaker 20 pitching his other work.

Speaker 20 It would be like you suddenly reading a chapter of your novel

Speaker 20 mid-show right now for us.

Speaker 20 Don't do that now.

Speaker 20 Oh, that's sad.

Speaker 20 It was a dark and stormy night.

Speaker 20 Wow, okay.

Speaker 20 The last time I heard you do that accent was old John the Pooh smuggler, right?

Speaker 20 He's a main character at the end. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 20 It's a poo smuggling ring being busted wide open.

Speaker 20 Oh, that's disgusting.

Speaker 20 Anyway.

Speaker 15 Anywho, on to opera.

Speaker 20 Yes. Guys.

Speaker 20 Oh, Figaro was extremely extremely popular, wasn't it?

Speaker 15 Yeah, it was. It was a huge deal.
Well, I think it was popular eventually.

Speaker 15 Apparently, the first performance they didn't love. They didn't know what to make of it.
So this was in Vienna when it was first performed. And apparently, it was ruined by Hecklers.

Speaker 15 So someone who was there wrote that it was destroyed by obstreperous louts in the uppermost story exerting their hired lungs with all their might to deafen the singers and audience alike. Oh, wow.

Speaker 20 Is that from a rival composer?

Speaker 15 I assume so, yeah.

Speaker 20 Was it? And when it was played in Prague a bit later, it was really popular.

Speaker 20 So Mozart said, here they talk about nothing but figaro. Nothing is played, sung, or whistled but figaro.
No opera is drawing like figaro. Nothing but figaro.
All right, mate.

Speaker 20 Get over yourself.

Speaker 20 Yeah. I didn't even know it was a play before

Speaker 20 it was an opera. And it was written by a man called Beaumarchais, who is seriously interesting.
He's the best. He's incredible.
Because

Speaker 20 it was quite an incendiary play. It had lots of stuff about the aristocracy being rubbish and layabouts and useless.
And it was all pre-this was soon before the French Revolution. So

Speaker 20 Louis XVI banned performances of the play, which the opera was based on. Yeah, he said, actually, he said, for this play not to be a danger, the Bastille would have to be torn down first.

Speaker 20 And then everyone went, oh, that's an idea.

Speaker 15 He actually referenced himself in a a later play. So I think it was in Don Giovanni in Act II, Mozart, which Mozart also wrote, which also was an adaptation of the Beaumarche Don Giovanni.
Really?

Speaker 15 He played some tafel music, which is like table music, and it's like background music in a scene where people are chatting away.

Speaker 15 And as part of the table music, he used a marriage of Figaro melody that he got the wind players to play. So in his later opera, it was a callback to his previous opera.

Speaker 15 He was so far up his own arse by that point.

Speaker 20 I love another character who's a part of this story is Lorenzo de Ponte,

Speaker 20 who was, he wrote the words to the opera. So all the trilogy of those plays were done as a collaboration.
He was the Bernie Torpin to Mozart's Elton John. He was a big deal in his time, Lorenzo.

Speaker 20 He was the court poet to Joseph II. So that was great.
But then Joseph II died and Mozart died and he got banned from Austria and he had to flee where he moved to America and opened a grocery store.

Speaker 20 He lived in New York, he lived in Pennsylvania, New Jersey. In those times, he had a grocery store, a bookstore, a traveling general store, a gin distillery.

Speaker 15 So did he, he didn't bring the stores with him? Did he open up a new store in every new place?

Speaker 20 Yeah, every new place, yeah. And then the general traveling store, I don't know about that because that was on wheels, I assume.
So he might have brought that everywhere. Traveling store?

Speaker 20 Yeah, and he opened the first opera house in New York, but it closed after two seasons. And it was the first opera house to play Italian opera.

Speaker 20 But unfortunately, yeah, it failed. But amazing character.
Yeah, and he was actually really important with the merge of Figaro, wasn't he?

Speaker 20 Because Mozart wanted it to be close to the original story, which, like Andy says, was really anti-aristocracy.

Speaker 20 And it was about, was it about like someone who wants to shag some guy's girlfriend and he's the lord and he's like, well, I'm the lord, so I'm allowed to shag your girlfriend.

Speaker 20 And then the guy who's the girlfriend's boyfriend is like, oh, you're only there because you're rich, you idiot. And that's how we thought of these tenders.

Speaker 20 Yeah, because then the other guy goes, you slag.

Speaker 20 You slag.

Speaker 20 He's not worth it, Figaro. He's not worth it.

Speaker 20 But there were loads of quotes about why the aristocracy were bad in this original story. And it was DePonte who said, Let's get rid of all those passages.

Speaker 20 Let's just stick with the comedy bit with Barry and Janine. Let's just stick with those ones and get rid of the Mitchells.
Yeah. Wow.

Speaker 20 I read the plot of it today because I've never heard the music, except obviously I have when you press play on a Spotify list, it's like, oh, that most famous song ever.

Speaker 20 Is that what your Spotify lists are? They are now. It's that and Ariana Grande at the moment.
Don't ask me why.

Speaker 15 It's Arias and Ariana.

Speaker 20 Lovely.

Speaker 20 So I'd never heard it before, and I read the plot today, and it does read like a carry-on film. Like, it's total farce.
There's stuff of having to hide in the bedrooms.

Speaker 20 It's very funny, just even by plot. Can't wait to see it.

Speaker 15 It becomes less funny on stage.

Speaker 20 I doubt it.

Speaker 20 Apparently, I read that the play was so popular, the original play, that in France, women would have lines from the play inscribed on their fans. Oh, cool.

Speaker 20 Yeah, so that became like sort of merchandise, but bootleg.

Speaker 20 Not official, not official merch.

Speaker 15 It's awful that when you said fans, I thought you were going to say something else.

Speaker 20 God, I thought you were going to say fannies as well. Yeah, I was going to say, how on earth do you inscribe words from a play on your fanny? You need a mirror.

Speaker 20 The only person who can read it is Leonardo da Vinci.

Speaker 20 Do you guys know what the French for encore is? Encore.

Speaker 20 Encore. So it's not encore.
It's not encore. It's not encore in the French accent.

Speaker 15 It's not encore in any accent. No, it's B.
So encore is the French for Can I Have Some More?

Speaker 15 But actually, the English language nicked it from Italy's Ancora and changed it to encore, thinking that sounds nice in French. But the French just say B, as in a second time, do it a second time.

Speaker 15 Yeah. Not like a buzzy, buzzy, bumbling B.

Speaker 20 No, like we've heard it once, A. Let's hear it B twice.

Speaker 20 It's interesting because so modern-day encores, you don't repeat the material, it's bits you haven't played. So I don't know.
I once went to watch the band Junior Senior, and they only had one song.

Speaker 20 It was called Move Your Feet that anyone had heard of, and they played it four times. Did they? Wow.
There are occasional times where that happens.

Speaker 20 In 1926, there was a musical called Betsy, which is a Rogers and Hart musical, but there was a song that was added to it at the last minute, which was Irving Berlin song, and it was Blue Skies.

Speaker 20 And it was so popular that at the end of the night, they requested the song again. And it was sung by Belle Baker, but they requested it in total 24 times.
She did an encore 24 times.

Speaker 20 And on the final time that she was singing it, she was so dazed from singing it, she forgot the words.

Speaker 20 And while she forgot the words, suddenly a voice could be heard from the front row, which was Irving Berlin, who was filling in for the missing lyrics and singing the rest of the song for her. No way.

Speaker 20 Yeah, quite a cool opening night. There must have been some people in the crowd who were saying, after maybe the 20th time, well, we've all had a really good time.

Speaker 20 Back it in. Yeah.

Speaker 15 That is hell. You've got to turn it down.

Speaker 20 You've got to learn to say no to an encore, I think.

Speaker 15 Yeah. In that instance.

Speaker 20 There's just no way of voting. There's no, like, if a few people really want an encore, then you might get one.
It's hard. Yeah.

Speaker 20 Oh, there used to be a thing, in fact, where in the 19th century at these choral festivals that happened, it was so irritating that, you know, you kept getting loads of encores that the encore decision was reserved for a single person, like the bishop or the mayor or whoever.

Speaker 20 And they could.

Speaker 20 about,

Speaker 20 and they could decide what they wanted to hear again. Just because you talked about the bishop, yeah.

Speaker 20 Do you know that just after the marriage of figaros started, Beaumarchais got arrested and got sent to prison? And that was because there was a

Speaker 20 protest outside of the play, which involved the Archbishop of Paris. And he apparently assaulted the Archbishop of Paris and got sent to prison.
For bashing the bishop.

Speaker 20 Stop!

Speaker 20 that's where we get the phrase from.

Speaker 15 And was he assaulting him, but had he had he said no, had he banned an encore or something?

Speaker 20 Well, the Archbishop was trying to stop people from going into the theatre because he was like, Stop this filth kind of thing. So he was like, stopping anyone from going in.

Speaker 20 He was like, How can you stop these ladies from coming in? You shouldn't. And he kind of bashing him out of the way and then he got arrested.
Bruising for a bruising. Dashing for a bashing.

Speaker 20 He was dashing for a bashing. Anyway, Andy's novel is available.
at all goodbye stocks. It was a target star of the night.
It's a combination of Dr.

Speaker 15 Seuss and the pirates of Penzance.

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Speaker 20 Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is James.

Speaker 20 Okay, my fact this week is that humans have transported European earthworms to every continent on the planet except Antarctica in a process some worm experts are calling global worming.

Speaker 20 It's really good.

Speaker 20 You delivered that like I was a Fox News headline earlier.

Speaker 20 Well, this was an amazing article that I read in The Atlantic by Julia Rosen, and it's all about earthworms and the fact that mainly if you go to North America, they had a big glacial ice sheet over there about 10,000 years ago, and it killed off all of the worms.

Speaker 20 And so you would think there'd be no worms there, but actually, there are worms there, and that's because humans have brought them over.

Speaker 20 And this is actually bad news for the environment because worms are pretty good for the environment in some ways.

Speaker 20 But if you put them in a place where they're not supposed to be, then, like all animals, that's not a good thing. I like the tone of which.
Here's Tom with the weather.

Speaker 20 No, but it is, it's surprising, because I would have thought that I thought before researching this fact that worms were good pretty much wherever you had them because they what do they do in the UK?

Speaker 20 They

Speaker 20 make your soil better. Yeah,

Speaker 15 some people say it's a bit of a myth actually and a worm is a symptom rather than a cause of good soil so they go to good soil is the idea that's that's an idea

Speaker 20 look there are it's a controversial issue i don't want to get into it right now but that's what some people say but basically where they shouldn't be they are um the soil in um the boreal forest in the northern you know half of the planet um it's the largest carbon sink in the world it has 200 billion metric tons of carbon in this boreal forest.

Speaker 20 And that's not just in the trees. I didn't realise that either.
Loads of it is actually in the soil.

Speaker 20 In fact, under a tree, you might get twice as much carbon in the soil as there is in the tree itself, which I had no idea about.

Speaker 20 And so the worms sometimes they eat the top layer of the soil basically and they just make it thinner and thinner and thinner.

Speaker 20 And then all the carbon is actually being released into the air because the worms are eating it up and creating channels.

Speaker 20 Although there is another argument that when they're making their casts, which is when you're eating soil, you kind of give out some soil poo stuff, that that actually keeps in loads more carbon so really actually these days no one has really looked into earthworms enough to know exactly what they're doing to the environment i didn't realize there was such a hotbed of debate oh we don't see enough of this on uh tv

Speaker 20 yeah

Speaker 20 just wait till next week piers morgan will be wanging on about the earthworms

Speaker 20 but they they eat seeds They eat seeds, which is, you'd think would be fine because it's just their diet.

Speaker 20 But in the bits of America north of the Mason-Dixon line and east of the Great Plains, where where they used to not exist there used to be millipedes and mites everywhere now it's just worms yeah so they're hugely invasive and so for sure it's quite bad for them to be up there because like for instance you've got all this bits of leaves and stuff on the floor and all the millipedes live under there nice and happy and then suddenly the worms come along and they just eat all of the leaves and stuff like that and there's nowhere for the millipedes to live and they all die and someone said in this article I was reading, I think it was in this Atlantic article, that it's like going to the African savannah, taking out all the animals and just replacing them all with elephants.

Speaker 20 Just tons of elephants everywhere.

Speaker 15 And one of the problems seems to be that we know very little about them to some extent.

Speaker 15 So it was only in 2008 that we discovered the common earthworm, which was thought to be one species, is actually five.

Speaker 20 Wow.

Speaker 15 So that, you know, one common earthworm is as different from another as a human from an ape.

Speaker 15 And in the US, I like this quote. In the US, I was reading in one article a quote which said, shockingly little is known about any of our native earthworms.

Speaker 15 There is only one working earthworm taxonomist in all of America.

Speaker 20 And so I looked into this because I wanted to find out who it was. That's an easy job, isn't it? Of all taxonomy.
Oh, taxonomy. I thought it was taxidermy.

Speaker 20 Worm taxidermy is very easy.

Speaker 20 You're right. You just

Speaker 20 cut off the end and go,

Speaker 20 just blow out the middle.

Speaker 15 So I tried to find out about who the taxonomist is. And anyway, I came across this 1995 book, and I was just so impressed at the level of research.

Speaker 15 So it was about worms, and it says there's one trained professional worm taxonomist in America. And then it says, there is sort of a second, but she's only recently trained, so not good enough.

Speaker 15 And then says, okay, there's a third expert, but he was trained by his mother, and he actually works in a post office most of the time.

Speaker 15 And then it was like, he said, the fourth and last person in North America who has any knowledge of earthworm taxonomy works as a police lawyer in New Brunswick, Canada.

Speaker 20 Wow.

Speaker 15 This guy has actually been around every single person in America to find out if they know about earthworms.

Speaker 20 That's really impressive.

Speaker 20 So impressive.

Speaker 15 Yeah. You can get three metre-long worms.

Speaker 20 That's long.

Speaker 15 Yeah, this is the Australian giant Gypsland earthworm, up to three meters long. And apparently, they used to be very abundant in the 1800s.

Speaker 15 And if you plowed your fields, they'd be red with blood from all these worms that you'd plowed up.

Speaker 15 It's pretty messed up, yeah. They would hang from the plows like spaghetti, someone described it as.

Speaker 20 Wow.

Speaker 15 But they're quite cool, so you can hear them. They're so big and they're so vocal that when you're walking in the territory in the Gypsy area, in the territory where they live.

Speaker 20 Ow! You're walking up the ow!

Speaker 20 Is that when you say vocal? Is that what you mean?

Speaker 15 That's sort of what I mean. But if you walk along the ground, you can hear them squelching and squirming underfoot because they're very fast and so they squirm away.

Speaker 15 And so if you walk, you'll hear a gurgling, squelching sound.

Speaker 20 them moving through their burrows i think because it's like the water draining in a bath

Speaker 20 they move through their the yeah their bodies are sliming against the walls of their burrow

Speaker 20 they're a foot long when they're born when they're born yeah they're really big are they born in eggs are they in like a cocoon type thing i don't know if they're eggs or born live um right but they do so they have no teeth but they do have a gizzard

Speaker 20 you know like they

Speaker 20 like a chicken yeah they swallow swallow little rocks and they use those to grind up their food inside them do you know how you collect worms?

Speaker 15 Because there's a worm conservation effort going on now in the Worms Are Good for the Environment lobby.

Speaker 20 So I think you tap the ground and they think there's a bird there. No, they think there's rain there and they come up thinking there's rain and then you just plop them out.

Speaker 15 You do do a bit of that. And we have mentioned the worm tapping before, haven't we?

Speaker 15 I was actually talking about the more brutal way, which is you just shove a spade in the earth, which is what people used to do and they're doing it much less now.

Speaker 15 But it turns out you're just cutting them in half all the time and that does cause a bit of an issue.

Speaker 20 Because if you're trying to get rid of them, you're just doubling the population.

Speaker 20 Exactly.

Speaker 20 It gets out of control.

Speaker 15 No, so what they do to avoid using the shovel now is they take DNA swabs,'cause it's all about counting the population of a certain species.

Speaker 15 And so you swap the mucus from their passages, so they make these tiny channels.

Speaker 15 And scientists who are looking into earthworm populations will just swap a worm tunnel and they scrape their saliva off it and then they measure it in a test tube.

Speaker 20 When you said swapping their passages, I thought it was like inside their body passages. It's not.
That's a small swap, isn't it? That's what I was thinking.

Speaker 15 Worm goes, I've got my GP check up again.

Speaker 20 Worm spear test.

Speaker 20 There's only one stirrup.

Speaker 15 And the doctor uses a cocktail stick.

Speaker 20 Yeah.

Speaker 20 Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that the most popular street in America is 2nd Street.
The second second most popular street is 3rd Street.

Speaker 20 And the third most popular street is 1st Street.

Speaker 20 And who's on first?

Speaker 20 Yeah, so 4th is 4th. 5th is Park.
And 6th is 5th.

Speaker 20 Just to bring you further down the list. Is there not

Speaker 20 Main Street appearing anyway? So there is.

Speaker 20 This is from 1993. This was the Census Bureau in America released this report.
In recent years, I think it was in the 2013 sort of period,

Speaker 20 they released all new information about

Speaker 20 the just general information about geography, topography, and so on, but they didn't do the same list that they've done before.

Speaker 20 And few people have gone through it completely and they've compiled lists, but none of them seem to tally with the others.

Speaker 20 So Washington Post did one where they said that Park was the number one street. But then someone on Reddit called Darren Hawley, he did one that said Main Street was the top one.

Speaker 20 And so they think the reason first is not up there is because FIRST and Main were

Speaker 20 two versions of saying first basically. So it knocked it down, it halved its chances.

Speaker 20 Also, the idea is that if you have a first street, which is your main street in your town, you might name it after George Washington or Abraham Lincoln or Donald Trump or something like that. Yeah.

Speaker 20 Did you know that Ludford in Lincolnshire has a street named after Donald Trump? Well, I say it's named after Donald Trump. It's called Fanny Hands Lane.

Speaker 20 Oh, come on.

Speaker 15 Cheap and unfair.

Speaker 20 But actually, there's nothing rude about it. Nothing rude about Fanny Hannes Lane.
Yes, there is. The word Fanny.

Speaker 20 It is, it has been claimed that it's affecting property prices that having a street called Fanny Hands Lane.

Speaker 20 But the thing is, it was just named in the 19th century by a man named John Hands after his wife, Fanny.

Speaker 20 There's nothing rude about it.

Speaker 20 Do you know in London, just down the road from here, there's a place called Knight Rider Street?

Speaker 20 Very cool. And do you know who it's named after? Hasselhoff, I would say.
Well, the car. No, obviously not.

Speaker 20 No, it was because it was the route that knights used to take from the Tower of London to Smithfield, where jousts were held.

Speaker 20 So knights would ride across that street in their talking carriages, wouldn't they?

Speaker 20 I was reading about

Speaker 20 Nicaragua's capital city of Managua.

Speaker 20 So I was trying to find out, based on this fact about street names, I was trying to find out if there was anywhere where the streets have no name, like in the Salt. Yeah.

Speaker 20 Because Bonner wrote that while on a visit to Ethiopia, and it's thought that it was about the poverty there and, you know, that it didn't have a proper street naming system.

Speaker 20 So in Malagua in Nicaragua, it did have a modern grid system until 1972. And then there was an earthquake which destroyed lots of buildings and infrastructure.

Speaker 20 And basically, they've replaced the system with the really ramshackle one. So you might be directed to somewhere which is a block south of the convent and half a block east of the college.

Speaker 20 And you just have to get there. And so taxi drivers there are amazingly good because they know all these places.

Speaker 20 And sometimes you'll have the directions and you'll be told, oh yeah, go to the blue house which is actually brown

Speaker 20 because locals know that there is a house which is brown, but it used to be blue. Wow, so good.
I know.

Speaker 20 So, Cabby's there at like next level, or you might be told to go down, and that means go west because the sun goes down in the west. Oh, that's

Speaker 20 it's I don't know how any stuff gets delivered properly.

Speaker 15 Also, very, very difficult if you've got one of those travelling shops we were talking about.

Speaker 15 But it does, talking about this kind of thing, makes you really respect America for having just gone down the line.

Speaker 15 Grid system, you know, this is the number of the street, this is the number of the avenue, it's very boring, it's very effective. And so that was come up with by Penn, after him, Pennsylvania, named.

Speaker 20 Not from Penn and Teller.

Speaker 20 Yeah.

Speaker 20 Just magic streets into existence.

Speaker 15 So William Penn, he came up with the grid system in 1682 when he founded Philadelphia, which was only founded because basically the king of England, King Charles II, was massively in debt to him and had no money to pay him.

Speaker 15 So instead said, have this random tract of land

Speaker 15 in Philadelphia. And so he gave him this land.
And so Penn, a famous Quaker, set up this utopian where he wanted to be a utopian society. But he really didn't want it to be called Pennsylvania.

Speaker 15 And also, Pennsylvania is not named after him. It's named after his dad.

Speaker 20 Yeah. Who happened to have the same name?

Speaker 20 He was very clear.

Speaker 15 I don't want everyone to think I'm a cocky twat. He wanted to call it New Wales because it reminded him so much of Wales, of which he was very fond.

Speaker 15 Anyway, so yeah, he really didn't want it to be named after him, and now Pennsylvania forever bears his name, which is very sad.

Speaker 20 That's cool.

Speaker 20 They are quite good at coming up with funny names in America, aren't they, of their streets? I know they do have lots of firsts and seconds, but there's a few funny ones.

Speaker 20 I'm sure we've mentioned them before. Like, we did say once that the number 69 road markers always get stolen, don't we? Yes.
Didn't we?

Speaker 20 And there's a Stoner Drive in Colesville and a Blunt Road. And they have had people stealing their road signs all the time.
But they've come up with a way of stopping that.

Speaker 20 And that is they're making them without any vowels. So what used to say Stoner Drive now says S-T-B-N-blank R drive.

Speaker 20 And what used to be Blunt Road is now B-L-N-T Road.

Speaker 15 Do they leave the space?

Speaker 20 They leave the space. They leave the space.
Oh, wow. Because that just looks like it was made by a stoner.
Yes.

Speaker 20 I just couldn't be bothered finishing it. Unfortunately, they've all been stolen by fans of OnlyConnect.

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Speaker 20 Okay, it's time for our final fact of the show, and that is Andy. My fact is that the game of Scrabble is partly thanks to Edgar Allan Poe.

Speaker 20 Oh, Spooky.

Speaker 15 And that's why Spooky with 20 O's is actually accepted in Scrabble, isn't it?

Speaker 20 So this is about the man who invented Scrabble, whose name was Alfred Mosher Butts.

Speaker 15 And he sounds like a good time, doesn't he?

Speaker 20 Yeah.

Speaker 15 He's a good time guy.

Speaker 20 Yeah. That's Mosch Butts.

Speaker 20 He was

Speaker 20 an unemployed architect. He was a sacked architect in depression era America, so early 30s.
And

Speaker 20 he was trying to work out how to come up with a board game because he thought this could be worthwhile. He thought there aren't many wordy board games at the time, which there weren't.

Speaker 20 I think he was playing, was he playing Trivial Pursuit or something? He was playing some game that he absolutely hated and like, there must be something better than this. yeah.

Speaker 20 Um, and he was inspired by Monopoly as well, I think. And so, he, but he was trying to work out how to come up with a word game because he thought this might be something.

Speaker 20 And he had read as a child uh the Edgar Allan Poe story, The Gold Bug, and there's a code in that which has to be broken.

Speaker 20 And the way to break the code is that it's based on how frequently particular letters appear in the English language. So, the one that appears most is E,

Speaker 20 and so on.

Speaker 20 And so,

Speaker 20 and you know the rest, yeah.

Speaker 20 And so he decided to make that the system by which letters would score more or less in Scrabble. And he studied newspaper front pages for ages.

Speaker 20 And you can see there are photos online of his tally charts where he's methodically counting each letter, how often it appears on the front page of the New York Times, say.

Speaker 20 Very dedicated. Yeah, and that's what he came up with with the scoring system.
That's cool. He didn't really like playing his game too much by the end because his wife always beat him,

Speaker 20 Mrs. Butts.

Speaker 20 She once scored 234 for Quixotic against him.

Speaker 20 Yeah.

Speaker 20 Apparently.

Speaker 15 He sounds like a sore loser because I just knew it was only because he was losing at Trivial Pursuit that he invented Scrabble in the early days.

Speaker 20 I've got to invent some game. Okay, here's a game.
Whoever has the most stupid name wins.

Speaker 20 They've still got comes funny hands. Oh, for fuck's sake.

Speaker 20 They've still got the scorecard.

Speaker 20 The nephew, there was a journalist who fell madly in love with the history of Scrabble, and he tracked down the nephew, who has no interest in playing it, but has an obsession with collecting all the things that look like...

Speaker 15 Because I tracked down Marsh Butts' nephew.

Speaker 20 Yeah. And in his house.
So he has everything framed, but most of it is not up on the walls. It's still in the sort of brown packaging that the framers handed it over in.

Speaker 20 And in one of those is the scorecard that... So Mrs.
Butts kept the scorecard from her Quixotic score. I've had a lot of problems on the marriage website.

Speaker 15 If you're framing your victories over your husband.

Speaker 20 Well, actually, James is right. If you'd scored Quixotic, and supposedly it was across two triple word scores, I mean, it sounds like an absolute story checks out.
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 15 Set up.

Speaker 20 Do you know who is the best Scrubble players in the world? Which country?

Speaker 20 America. USA.
Nope, nope, nope, nope. France? Nope.
Well, I'm going to say from an old episode, I think it's a guy from New Zealand. Ah, yes, because he managed to win the French one, didn't he?

Speaker 20 Despite not being able to speak French. Yes.
But no, it is Nigeria. Oh.

Speaker 20 Okay, and the Nigerian Scrabble Federation has this year said that they really need to be given more money from the government because, according to them, it's the only sport that they're the world's best at in the world is Scrabble.

Speaker 20 Cool. Can I just quickly, because we spoke about Nigel Richards in episode 79, a long time ago, this is the guy who won the French Scrabble thing.

Speaker 20 I just wanted to check an update on him, see how he's doing in his championships. He is still the winner of the French Scrabble Championships.
He won 2017, 2018, and 2019 in their elite competition.

Speaker 20 So he's still just owning it.

Speaker 15 That's really how many people are competing.

Speaker 20 It's a biggie, I think.

Speaker 15 Is it though? It's Scrabble, isn't it? Let's face it.

Speaker 20 Do you know who our Scrabble champion is?

Speaker 15 No, no. He's a great guy.
He's called Alan Simmons.

Speaker 15 And he is banned from playing Scrabble as of 2017 because he cheated by peeking at the letters he was picking out of the bag and then putting them back in and swapping them for other letters.

Speaker 15 That is scrabbled champion of the UK.

Speaker 20 Wow.

Speaker 20 But that's the thing. There's a rule where, I think maybe, who knows if it's thanks to Simmons or not, but there's a rule where you have to take the letters out of the bag at eye height or higher.

Speaker 20 Really? Yeah.

Speaker 15 He was done for holding the bag too low.

Speaker 20 That's great.

Speaker 20 And there's a thing called brailling. Have you heard this? Oh, yeah.
Brailling is feeling the letters. as you're holding them in the bag and trying to work out what they are.

Speaker 20 Yeah, that makes sense, right? Because a blank would just be a flat surface.

Speaker 20 Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's true.
But I mean, I'm not very... I can imagine taking a long time to work out, oh, it's an E or whatever.
Like, it's quite impressive that you get that.

Speaker 15 Yeah, it's not just blanks and non-blanks, okay?

Speaker 20 They're more sophisticated than that. That's what I mean.
You can do it, huh?

Speaker 20 Yeah, it's no blank.

Speaker 20 I think if you're taking out three or four scrabble tiles each time and you pick four, quickly feel them, and if there's no blank, you pick another four, that's going to, over a long run, that's going to make a difference.

Speaker 20 Yeah,

Speaker 20 your mind's averages. Yeah.

Speaker 15 But I do think that if you are fondling around for what shape the indentation is in Scrabble tiles, you just need to reflect on your life.

Speaker 15 Just with your hand in the bag, you need to think, what the fuck am I doing? Winning.

Speaker 20 Winning.

Speaker 15 One thing that was a new, exciting moment in Scrabble is that last year, OK was added. Apparently, this was very controversial.
Yeah. Okay, you agree?

Speaker 20 I do, actually. Do you? Why? Because isn't one of the things about Scrabble that you're not allowed acronyms.
Okay.

Speaker 15 Oh my God, Andy, I can't believe you're on this side of the argument. Okay has not been an elitism for like a hundred years.

Speaker 20 What does it stand for? Oh, well, there we go.

Speaker 20 But that's the theory that it stands for all correct, but all with O-R-L. And correct with a K.
That's correct. Yeah.
Okay. It does stand for that.

Speaker 15 That is genuinely the first instance of OK, is the all-correct thing.

Speaker 20 But it was.

Speaker 20 There is another theory that it stands for happy birthday, but happy is spelt with an O, and birthday is spelled with a K.

Speaker 20 Okay

Speaker 20 to you.

Speaker 20 Yeah.

Speaker 20 But when I say okay, I am putting a full stop after the O and another one after the K. And therefore, no one should be allowed to play it in Scramble.

Speaker 15 Do you know what you should start doing then? You should start saying owl, which was another thing that this magazine tried to get going at the time when OK took off. So owl was for all right.

Speaker 15 And so it thought that owl was going to become a thing as well.

Speaker 20 What letters are you?

Speaker 20 It's OW. Oh, oh, oh, God.

Speaker 15 It's all misspelled. It's part of the satire, guys.
Comedy was different.

Speaker 20 I know the starts, but I'm going to start saying ow when I mean okay.

Speaker 20 People will constantly be asking me if I'm all right. Are you okay? Ow.

Speaker 20 All right. Yes, that's what it stands for.

Speaker 20 Crazy. Have you heard of coffee housing? No.

Speaker 20 It's another practice in Scrabble. It's not a frowned upon practice in Scrabble.
Can you guess what it is? Coffee housing. Is it when you shove the tiles up your ass?

Speaker 20 Like we all do in a coffee house.

Speaker 20 Where's your connection to that?

Speaker 15 It's frowned upon. I was just thinking of something you might do in Scrabble Scrabble that's frowned upon.

Speaker 20 Yeah, it's true. Is it frown upon it? Because you can feel that on the tiles in the bag, can't you?

Speaker 20 You can. He's a bit of an ass.

Speaker 20 If I go to a coffee house, I give them my name and they spell it incorrectly every time. So is it putting down a word which is correctly spelled, incorrectly spelled, and saying it's correct?

Speaker 20 That's actually much better than what it is. That's a lovely explanation.

Speaker 20 Coffee housing is just distracting your opponents with chat about their day or anything else that. Can I even put up your ass recently?

Speaker 20 That's quite good. That's a good idea.

Speaker 20 That's amazing.

Speaker 15 This podcast is all coffee housing, no scrabble, isn't it? It's like a game of scrabble where the coffee housing got out of hand.

Speaker 20 There's a blog which I really like called Ty WikiWhidby,

Speaker 20 and the person who runs it is called Minnesota Stan. And they play a game of Scrabble, which I think is really good.

Speaker 20 They do a few different things. First of all, double bagging.

Speaker 20 Hannah.

Speaker 20 Frowned upon.

Speaker 20 Well, you keep all your consonants in one bag and all your vowels in another bag, and so you can pick the ones that you want depending on what you've got on your rack. Oh, like countdown.
Yeah.

Speaker 20 That's a good idea, right? And they have another one which is open booking, which means you're allowed to have the dictionary open and check things as you're going along.

Speaker 20 And they also spin their racks around to ask the other person for help if you get stuck.

Speaker 20 And I reckon they've played a game where the two people playing got a combined amount of 2,000 points.

Speaker 20 That's so good. I just think it's a more friendly game.
It is, isn't it? It's more coffee housy. Yeah.

Speaker 20 That is good. I think I would play Scrabble more if I was allowed to do those things.

Speaker 15 Oh, no one let you play Scrabble with them anyway at school, did they? I don't know what that means. It's not a cool sport.

Speaker 20 It's not like a school. It's not like it's a funny thing.
I'm all led into Scrabble with that. That's so cool, Anna.
That's cool.

Speaker 20 You're ready to play Scrabble with me.

Speaker 15 That was my dream.

Speaker 20 Get led into the Scrabble team.

Speaker 20 I have a few things on Poe. Oh, let's go.

Speaker 20 Should we go Poe? Ow.

Speaker 20 All right.

Speaker 20 Wow.

Speaker 15 This is going to get incredibly annoying very fast, isn't it?

Speaker 20 So The Gold Bug, which was the initial short story that was written that inspired Butts.

Speaker 20 So Poe had,

Speaker 20 basically what it was, was that was a code that he'd worked out. And he, the same method, kind of looked through bunches of books and papers to see what a recurring letter was to give them this form.

Speaker 20 And he was quite a big code setter back in the day for the the newspapers he worked for.

Speaker 20 He used to do a thing of setting out a challenge of saying to the readers, send me a code, anything cryptic, and I will solve it. And he would publish his findings.

Speaker 20 He'd publish the solutions in the next week's paper. It's quite a nice idea.
It's a lovely idea. And he used to set them as well and give them out to the readers.

Speaker 20 And he was shocked when even one person was able to crack them because he thought he was so good at setting these codes. Asside of him, I had no idea about him.

Speaker 20 Yeah, he had the bit of the Mozarts about him, didn't he, Poe? When he published The Raven, it was basically an overnight success.

Speaker 20 Everyone thought it was amazing, turned him into a celebrity, and everyone said how brilliant it was. And he told a friend it was the greatest poem that was ever written.
Yeah. Wow.

Speaker 15 There were loads of weird parodies of The Raven, though, which came up straight away. So, as soon as he published The Raven, he became super famous.

Speaker 15 It became super famous, but also published were The Gazelle, The Whippo-Will, The Turkey, The Pole Cat.

Speaker 15 And Lincoln, actually, President Lincoln, read and enjoyed The Pole Cat, the poem The pole cat before he read the raven which was a piss take of the raven

Speaker 20 there's a there's a few people that believe that the raven was not originally going to be a raven that it was going to be a parrot well because it can talk yeah exactly and it was a mark

Speaker 20 it was a dark and stormy night

Speaker 20 um yeah poe wrote a philosophy of composition uh piece and in it he said arose the idea of a non-reasoning creature capable of speech and very naturally a parrot in the first instance suggested itself and then he later on says uh but then it superseded uh with a raven along the lines but we might have had yeah it just definitely doesn't have the same kind of mounting spooky vibe does it no no there's one theory i think this might be true actually that um the raven that he writes about was charles dickens's raven is that right oh yeah um so charles dickens had a raven called grip the knowing and he was a character in barnaby rudge and when edgar allan poe reviewed barnaby rudge he thought that this raven was an amazing part of it and the theory is that the raven in his poem was from that, and that's why he changed it from a parrot.

Speaker 20 Wow, so he cast the raven from someone else's book. That's an incredible book.
That's awesome. Isn't it cool? It's like going, I love Winston Smith in 1984.

Speaker 20 I'm going to bring him into my book and use him.

Speaker 15 But it's not like that, it's the raven from Barton. What a weird review that must have been.
Poe, did you read any of the rest of it?

Speaker 15 It's like reviewing Harry Potter and just talking about Hedwig the entire time.

Speaker 20 That's incredible.

Speaker 20 I mean, his reviews were a bit weird, though, weren't they?

Speaker 20 He liked to slag people off quite a lot in his reviews.

Speaker 20 He reviewed a collection of poems by William W. Lord in 1845, saying the only remarkable things about Mr.

Speaker 20 Lord's compositions are their remarkable conceit, ignorance, impudence, platitude, stupidity, and bombast. Wow.

Speaker 15 But he only read the bit about the sparrow at the time.

Speaker 20 He had his struggles in life. He died aged 40 of

Speaker 20 drink, really? Drink and poverty. He was incredibly broke.

Speaker 20 Well, his death was quite spooky in itself, wasn't it? Yeah. He was found in the street, wasn't he, in clothes that didn't quite fit him, and he was taken to hospital and he was raving about

Speaker 20 tough times for Poe. A lot of people thought when he was found, he was drunk and maybe he'd been on a drinking binge.

Speaker 20 But then his family and friends said, well, it's pretty unlikely because he couldn't really drink. If you gave him one glass of wine, he'd go Tonto.

Speaker 20 So it didn't seem likely that he'd been on some binge.

Speaker 15 Yeah, I think it's really even more controversial than that, really. So he was found in someone else's clothes.
It didn't even fit him.

Speaker 15 Some people think he was cooped, which is there was an election on the day that he was found dead.

Speaker 15 And so some people think that he was cooped, as in this was a weird thing that was practiced where people who were campaigning for a certain politician would literally coop people up, would drug them, would force feed them loads and loads of alcohol and would drag them from one polling booth to the next, force them to vote, and then leave them abandoned and they'd change their clothes as they went.

Speaker 15 So they looked like they were a different person. But

Speaker 15 his reputation as being an alcoholic and a bit of a disaster, walking disaster, is mostly undeserved.

Speaker 15 It's this weird myth that came about as soon as he died, and it was spread by this guy called the Reverend Rufus Wilmot Grizold.

Speaker 15 And it only happened because so he reviewed, so Poe reviewed one of Grizold's poems very badly a few years earlier, and then Poe started having an affair with this lady that Grizzold fancied.

Speaker 15 And then Poe died. And for some reason that no one knows, Poe's aunt made Grizzold the executor of his will and made him executive of all his papers.

Speaker 15 And so he was in charge of his papers, and he forged a bunch of shit.

Speaker 15 And he wrote this biography of Poe, which slandered him and basically said he was this opium-addicted, crazy, drunken, poverty-stricken. He deserted the army, expelled from university.

Speaker 15 None of this stuff was true.

Speaker 20 He wrote his obituary as well. Yeah.
He had the line, Will startle many, but few will be grieved by it, talking of his death. It's just

Speaker 20 a full-on guy.

Speaker 20 The Baltimore Ravens are an American football team and their name comes after the Raven novel because Poe lived in Baltimore. The poem?

Speaker 20 God, it's a short poem. It's a long novel.
I don't know what it is.

Speaker 15 Novel to James. Well, this is more than two pages.

Speaker 20 So they get their name from the poem, The Raven, The Baltimore Ravens, because Poe lived in Baltimore. And in 2001, they won the Super Bowl.
We've just had the Super Bowl last night as we record this.

Speaker 20 And in 2001, the Baltimore Ravens won the Super Bowl and they won it because they had a great defense. And ESPN said, quoth the Ravens, never score.
Oh, nice.

Speaker 20 Very strong. Yeah.
Well, it will be by the time I've edited it.

Speaker 20 Okay, that's it. That is all of our facts.
Thank you so much for listening.

Speaker 20 If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things we have said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter accounts. I'm on at Schreiberland.

Speaker 20 james at james harken andy at andrew hunter m and shazinski you can email podcast at qi.com yep or you can go to our group account which is at no such thing or go to our website no such thingasoffish.com we've got everything up there from all of our previous episodes to behind the scenes documentaries and uh why not also go to your local bookshop or an online bookshop retailer and get andy's new novel it's uh fantastic maybe try the audiobook as well if you like irish pirate noise uh coming at you okay that's it We'll see you again.

Speaker 20 Goodbye.

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