307: No Such Thing As EastEnders, The Opera

Running a business online?

Look legit and own your own brand with professional tools from GoDaddy.

Instantly build trust with your customers and boost your credibility with an email that matches your domain so people know you mean business.

There's never been a better time.

Just go to godaddy.com/slash GDNow and choose from a wide variety of popular domains to find one that's right for you.

Pair that with a professional email that works for all your business needs from daily communications to email marketing and everything everything in between.

That's a little price for a lot of credibility.

For a limited time, get a domain and matching professional email for just 99 cents a month for one year.

Go to godaddy.com slash gdnow and look legit with godaddy.

That's godaddy.com slash gdnow.

Again, go daddy.com slash gdnow.

There's never been a better time to choose the domain and email that's right for you.

New customer purchases only products auto-renew separately.

See terms on site.

Godaddy.com slash GDNow.

Time for a sofa upgrade?

Visit washable sofas.com and discover Anibay, where designer style meets budget-friendly prices, with sofas starting at $699.

Anibay brings you the ultimate in furniture innovation with a modular design that allows you to rearrange your space effortlessly.

Perfect for both small and large spaces, Anibay is the only machine-washable sofa inside and out.

Say goodbye to stains and messes with liquid and stain-resistant fabrics that make cleaning easy.

Liquid simply slides right off.

Designed for custom comfort, our high-resilience foam lets you choose between a sink-in feel or a supportive memory foam blend.

Plus, our pet-friendly stain-resistant fabrics ensure your sofa stays beautiful for years.

Don't compromise quality for price.

Visit washablesofas.com to upgrade your living space today with no risk returns and a 30-day money-back guarantee.

Get up to 60% off plus free shipping and free returns.

Shop now at washablesofas.com.

Offers are subject to change and certain certain restrictions may apply.

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.

That is correct.

Which one could it be?

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.

I've read it.

It is, it's unbelievably good.

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.

It's impossible to live in any of those areas.

But what about the middle sliver?

The sort of half light, half dark.

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.

Lee Child.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

The Last Day by Andrew Hunter Murray.

A fabulous achievement.

Not my words, Stephen Fry.

Oh, Jesus Christ.

Okay.

On with the show.

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.

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

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.

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.

So, yeah, this was 1786.

It was the marriage of Figaro.

Very good.

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.

That's so funny.

It's rough.

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

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.

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

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

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.

I've never heard of that before.

They just used to interrupt shows.

I mean, this is how encores worked until apparently up to the 1930s in theatre.

It was common.

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

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

one more time

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

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.

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

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.

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

pitching his other work.

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

mid-show right now for us.

Don't do that now.

Oh, that's sad.

It was a dark and stormy night.

Wow, okay.

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

He's a main character at the end.

Oh, yeah.

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

Oh, that's disgusting.

Anyway.

Anywho, on to opera.

Yes.

Guys.

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

Yeah, it was.

It was a huge deal.

Well, I think it was popular eventually.

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.

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.

Is that from a rival composer?

I assume so, yeah.

Was it?

And when it was played in Prague a bit later, it was really popular.

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.

Get over yourself.

Yeah.

I didn't even know it was a play before

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

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

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.

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

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?

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

So did he, he didn't bring the stores with him?

Did he open up a new store in every new place?

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?

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.

But unfortunately, yeah, it failed.

But amazing character.

Yeah, and he was actually really important with the merge of Figaro, wasn't he?

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

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.

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.

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

You slag.

He's not worth it, Figaro.

He's not worth it.

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.

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.

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.

Is that what your Spotify lists are?

They are now.

It's that and Ariana Grande at the moment.

Don't ask me why.

It's Arias and Ariana.

Lovely.

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.

It's very funny, just even by plot.

Can't wait to see it.

It becomes less funny on stage.

I doubt it.

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.

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

Not official, not official merch.

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

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.

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

Do you guys know what the French for encore is?

Encore.

Encore.

So it's not encore.

It's not encore.

It's not encore in the French accent.

It's not encore in any accent.

No, it's B.

So encore is the French for Can I Have Some More?

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.

Yeah.

Not like a buzzy, buzzy, bumbling B.

No, like we've heard it once, A.

Let's hear it B twice.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Back it in.

Yeah.

That is hell.

You've got to turn it down.

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

Yeah.

In that instance.

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.

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.

And they could.

about,

and they could decide what they wanted to hear again.

Just because you talked about the bishop, yeah.

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

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.

Stop!

that's where we get the phrase from.

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

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.

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.

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.

Seuss and the pirates of Penzance.

Running a business online?

Look legit and own your own brand with professional tools from GoDaddy.

Instantly build trust with your customers and boost your credibility with an email that matches your domain so people know you mean business.

There's never been a better time.

Just go to godaddy.com slash GDNow and choose from a wide variety of popular domains to find one that's right for you.

Pair that with a professional email that works for all your business needs, from daily communications to email marketing and everything in between.

That's a little price for a lot of credibility.

For a limited time, get a domain and matching professional email for just 99 cents a month for one year.

Go to godaddy.com slash gdnow and look legit with godaddy.

That's godaddy.com slash gdnow.

Again, go daddy.com slash GDNow.

There's never been a better time to choose the domain and email that's right for you.

New customer purchases only products auto-renew separately.

See terms on site, go daddy.com slash GDNow.

Life's messy.

We're talking spills, stains, pets, and kids.

But with Anibay, you never have to stress about messes again.

At washable sofas.com, discover Anibay sofas, the only fully machine washable sofas inside and out, starting at just $699.

Made with liquid and stain-resistant fabrics, that means fewer stains and more peace of mind.

Designed for real life, our sofas feature changeable fabric covers, allowing you to refresh your style anytime.

Need flexibility?

Our modular design lets you rearrange your sofa effortlessly.

Perfect for cozy apartments or spacious homes.

Plus, they're earth-friendly and built to last.

That's why over 200,000 happy customers have made the switch.

Upgrade your space today.

Visit washable sofas.com now and bring home a sofa made for life.

That's washable sofas.com.

Offers are subject to change and certain restrictions may apply.

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

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.

It's really good.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

They

make your soil better.

Yeah,

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

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.

And that's not just in the trees.

I didn't realise that either.

Loads of it is actually in the soil.

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.

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

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

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

yeah

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

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

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.

Just tons of elephants everywhere.

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

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

Wow.

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

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.

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

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.

Worm taxidermy is very easy.

You're right.

You just

cut off the end and go,

just blow out the middle.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Wow.

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

That's really impressive.

So impressive.

Yeah.

You can get three metre-long worms.

That's long.

Yeah, this is the Australian giant Gypsland earthworm, up to three meters long.

And apparently, they used to be very abundant in the 1800s.

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

It's pretty messed up, yeah.

They would hang from the plows like spaghetti, someone described it as.

Wow.

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.

Ow!

You're walking up the ow!

Is that when you say vocal?

Is that what you mean?

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.

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

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

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

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

you know like they

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?

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

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.

You do do a bit of that.

And we have mentioned the worm tapping before, haven't we?

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.

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

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

Exactly.

It gets out of control.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Worm spear test.

There's only one stirrup.

And the doctor uses a cocktail stick.

Yeah.

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.

And the third most popular street is 1st Street.

And who's on first?

Yeah, so 4th is 4th.

5th is Park.

And 6th is 5th.

Just to bring you further down the list.

Is there not

Main Street appearing anyway?

So there is.

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,

they released all new information about

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

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

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.

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

two versions of saying first basically.

So it knocked it down, it halved its chances.

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.

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.

Oh, come on.

Cheap and unfair.

But actually, there's nothing rude about it.

Nothing rude about Fanny Hannes Lane.

Yes, there is.

The word Fanny.

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

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

There's nothing rude about it.

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

Very cool.

And do you know who it's named after?

Hasselhoff, I would say.

Well, the car.

No, obviously not.

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

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

I was reading about

Nicaragua's capital city of Managua.

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.

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.

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.

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.

And you just have to get there.

And so taxi drivers there are amazingly good because they know all these places.

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

because locals know that there is a house which is brown, but it used to be blue.

Wow, so good.

I know.

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

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

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

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

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.

Not from Penn and Teller.

Yeah.

Just magic streets into existence.

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.

So instead said, have this random tract of land

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.

And also, Pennsylvania is not named after him.

It's named after his dad.

Yeah.

Who happened to have the same name?

He was very clear.

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.

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.

That's cool.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

Do they leave the space?

They leave the space.

They leave the space.

Oh, wow.

Because that just looks like it was made by a stoner.

Yes.

I just couldn't be bothered finishing it.

Unfortunately, they've all been stolen by fans of OnlyConnect.

Running a business online?

Look legit and own your own brand with professional tools from GoDaddy.

Instantly build trust with your customers and boost your credibility with an email that matches your domain so people know you mean business.

There's never been a better time.

Just go to godaddy.com slash GDNow and choose from a wide variety of popular domains to find one that's right for you.

Pair that with a professional email that works for all your business needs from daily communications to email marketing and everything in between.

That's a little price for a lot of credibility.

For a limited time, get a domain and matching professional email for just 99 cents a month for one year.

Go to godaddy.com slash gdnow and look legit with godaddy.

That's godaddy.com slash gdnow.

Again, go daddy.com slash gdnow.

There's never been a better time to choose the domain and email that's right for you.

New customer purchases only, products auto-renew separately.

See terms on site.

Go daddy.com slash GDNow.

There's nothing like sinking into luxury.

At washable sofas.com, you'll find the Anibay sofa, which combines ultimate comfort and design at an affordable price.

And get this, it's the only sofa that's fully machine washable from top to bottom, starting at only $699.

The stain-resistant performance fabric slip covers and cloud-like frame duvet can go straight into your wash.

Perfect for anyone with kids, pets, or anyone who loves an easy-to-clean, spotless sofa.

With a modular design and changeable slip covers, you can customize your sofa to fit any space and style.

Whether you need a single chair, love seat, or a luxuriously large sectional, Anibay has you covered.

Visit washablesofas.com to upgrade your home.

Right now, you can shop up to 60% off store-wide with a 30-day money-back guarantee.

Shop now at washablesofas.com.

Add a little

to your life.

Offers are subject to change and certain restrictions may apply.

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.

Oh, Spooky.

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

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

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

Yeah.

He's a good time guy.

Yeah.

That's Mosch Butts.

He was

an unemployed architect.

He was a sacked architect in depression era America, so early 30s.

And

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.

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.

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.

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.

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,

and so on.

And so,

and you know the rest, yeah.

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.

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.

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,

Mrs.

Butts.

She once scored 234 for Quixotic against him.

Yeah.

Apparently.

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.

I've got to invent some game.

Okay, here's a game.

Whoever has the most stupid name wins.

They've still got comes funny hands.

Oh, for fuck's sake.

They've still got the scorecard.

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...

Because I tracked down Marsh Butts' nephew.

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.

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.

If you're framing your victories over your husband.

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.

Set up.

Do you know who is the best Scrubble players in the world?

Which country?

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?

Despite not being able to speak French.

Yes.

But no, it is Nigeria.

Oh.

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.

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.

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.

So he's still just owning it.

That's really how many people are competing.

It's a biggie, I think.

Is it though?

It's Scrabble, isn't it?

Let's face it.

Do you know who our Scrabble champion is?

No, no.

He's a great guy.

He's called Alan Simmons.

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.

That is scrabbled champion of the UK.

Wow.

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.

Really?

Yeah.

He was done for holding the bag too low.

That's great.

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.

Yeah, that makes sense, right?

Because a blank would just be a flat surface.

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.

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

They're more sophisticated than that.

That's what I mean.

You can do it, huh?

Yeah, it's no blank.

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.

Yeah,

your mind's averages.

Yeah.

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.

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

Winning.

Winning.

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?

I do, actually.

Do you?

Why?

Because isn't one of the things about Scrabble that you're not allowed acronyms.

Okay.

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.

What does it stand for?

Oh, well, there we go.

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.

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

But it was.

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

Okay

to you.

Yeah.

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.

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.

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

What letters are you?

It's OW.

Oh, oh, oh, God.

It's all misspelled.

It's part of the satire, guys.

Comedy was different.

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

People will constantly be asking me if I'm all right.

Are you okay?

Ow.

All right.

Yes, that's what it stands for.

Crazy.

Have you heard of coffee housing?

No.

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?

Like we all do in a coffee house.

Where's your connection to that?

It's frowned upon.

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

Yeah, it's true.

Is it frown upon it?

Because you can feel that on the tiles in the bag, can't you?

You can.

He's a bit of an ass.

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?

That's actually much better than what it is.

That's a lovely explanation.

Coffee housing is just distracting your opponents with chat about their day or anything else that.

Can I even put up your ass recently?

That's quite good.

That's a good idea.

That's amazing.

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.

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

and the person who runs it is called Minnesota Stan.

And they play a game of Scrabble, which I think is really good.

They do a few different things.

First of all, double bagging.

Hannah.

Frowned upon.

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.

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.

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

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

That's so good.

I just think it's a more friendly game.

It is, isn't it?

It's more coffee housy.

Yeah.

That is good.

I think I would play Scrabble more if I was allowed to do those things.

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.

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.

You're ready to play Scrabble with me.

That was my dream.

Get led into the Scrabble team.

I have a few things on Poe.

Oh, let's go.

Should we go Poe?

Ow.

All right.

Wow.

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

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

So Poe had,

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

it was a dark and stormy night

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.

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.

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

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?

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

That's incredible.

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

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

He reviewed a collection of poems by William W.

Lord in 1845, saying the only remarkable things about Mr.

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

Wow.

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

He had his struggles in life.

He died aged 40 of

drink, really?

Drink and poverty.

He was incredibly broke.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

So they looked like they were a different person.

But

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

None of this stuff was true.

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

a full-on guy.

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

The poem?

God, it's a short poem.

It's a long novel.

I don't know what it is.

Novel to James.

Well, this is more than two pages.

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.

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.

Very strong.

Yeah.

Well, it will be by the time I've edited it.

Okay, that's it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

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.

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.

Goodbye.

Time for a sofa upgrade?

Visit washable sofas.com and discover Anibay, where designer style meets budget-friendly prices with sofas starting at $699.

Anibay brings you the ultimate in furniture innovation with a modular design that allows you to rearrange your space effortlessly.

Perfect for both small and large spaces, Anibay is the only machine-washable sofa inside and out.

Say goodbye to stains and messes with liquid and stain-resistant fabrics that make cleaning easy.

Liquid simply slides right off.

Designed for custom comfort, our high-resilience foam lets you choose between a sink-in feel or a supportive memory foam blend.

Plus, our pet-friendly stain-resistant fabrics ensure your sofa stays beautiful for years.

Don't compromise quality for price.

Visit washablefas.com to upgrade your living space today with no risk returns and a 30-day money-back guarantee.

Get up to 60% off plus free shipping and free returns.

Shop now at washablesofas.com.

Offers are subject to change and certain restrictions may apply.