292: No Such Thing as a Blatant Plug for the Book of the Year 2019

Transcript

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Speaker 21 Hello, and welcome to an extra special edition of No Such Thing as a Fish. This time, we are celebrating the release of our new book, The Book of the Year 2019, The World's Weirdest News.

Speaker 21 My name is Dan Schreiber. I am sitting here with Andrew Hunter Murray, Anna Chacinski, and James Harkin.

Speaker 21 And once again, we have gathered around the table with our four favorite facts from our new book, which is out now and in no particular order. Here we go.
Starting with you, James.

Speaker 21 Okay, my fact from the book of the year 2019, the world's weirdest news,

Speaker 21 is that Greta Thunberg's middle name is Tintin. Amazing.
So good. Isn't that great? Now, you can argue this isn't technically true because

Speaker 21 glad we opened on this one. Immediate climb down.
Well, she has five names in total, and Tintin is the second one. I'd call it a middle name.

Speaker 21 So she is called Greta Tintin Eleonora Ernman Thunberg. Wow,

Speaker 21 middle name Tintin.

Speaker 21 That's an incredibly professional way of you to caveat that fact, James, because any other person would have just said, her middle name is Tintin, that's fine.

Speaker 21 But you said, well, technically, it's one outside her middle name, but it's not a first or a surname. Yeah, we kept editing that sentence out of the actual book, though, in the end.

Speaker 21 I reckon that any name which is not your first name or your surname is technically a middle name. Definitely.
Yeah, absolutely. Agreed.

Speaker 21 Like, if you're in a family of ten people and you're the ninth child, you say you're one of the middle siblings, don't you? Yeah. Sure.

Speaker 21 I think you only get to single yourself out if you're the first name or the surname. I would say I was the penultimate child.

Speaker 21 You do, don't you? You're an only child, which is bizarre.

Speaker 21 She's not the only person with a fun middle name to appear in our book. Okay.
Just very quickly, Lucy Bronze, the footballer for the England football team. Her middle name is Tough.

Speaker 21 Yeah, very cool. That's a great name.
Tough Bronze. That's good.
But why is Greta Thunberg's middle name Tintin? Do we know? I don't know, actually. I can only assume her parents were fans.
Yeah.

Speaker 21 Or she has a white dog? She could, although she wouldn't have had it when she was born. No, you're right.
I have no other tint in references, so I can't think of any other reason.

Speaker 21 She's a sort of young adventurer going around the world having adventures. That's true.
It's true. But she wasn't when she was born.
No, again. No, you're right.

Speaker 21 She is still very young to be adventuring, though, isn't she? I'm always surprised that she's 16 still, I think. She's amazing.

Speaker 21 And she's currently, so she took this trip to the US and then going on to Chile to attend these conferences.

Speaker 21 and she's still as we speak traveling down through the US on her way to Chile and I don't know who she's with does she have any parental yeah you know guidance I think is it not true that if you're traveling under the age of 18 your parents can drop you off and then someone can pick you up at the airport and actually you're fine I think that's probably what she's doing yes should we just quickly say she isn't doing that by the way

Speaker 21 she's definitely would never go by airplane anywhere. No, no, absolutely.
I was just going to say, we should say there might be a few people out there who genuinely don't know who Greta Thunberg is.

Speaker 21 You know, she's one of the biggest names of the year, but the way we've been talking about it, it sounds like she's an adventurer.

Speaker 21 So she's the environmentalist campaigner who has been causing huge storms of the good kind. Into climate change, which is causing the huge storms.
I keep mixing this up.

Speaker 21 She's trying to fight storms wherever she goes.

Speaker 21 She started off sitting outside, was it her Swedish parliament building? Swedish Schreichstag, yeah. Yeah, and

Speaker 21 she was skipping school to do that, and that turned into the huge school strike movement.

Speaker 21 But her initial leaflets that she handed out said, I am doing this because you adults are shitting on my future, which is a great phrase. It is, yeah, terrible misbehaviour.

Speaker 21 So she skyve school and then use foul language to abuse strangers. Okay, you have to stop reading the Telegraph.

Speaker 21 No, she is great, and she led what were the biggest climate protests in all history.

Speaker 21 So I think in the space of one month, she led two, which were attended by four million people, which is just extraordinary, isn't it? Amazing. Do you think they'll look back?

Speaker 21 Like, we look back now at Joan of Arc, who was, what, 14 years old or something, and can't believe that she managed to have the whole of the French army behind her.

Speaker 21 But now there's this 16-year-old who's got 4 million, more than that, let's be honest, people behind her. It's just insane.

Speaker 21 But Greta Thunberg isn't using those people to throw the English out of France. We should say that.
There's been a lot of stuff thrown around about her.

Speaker 21 There is one conspiracy, this is a very mad conspiracy theory about her, that says she's actually an Australian actress called Estella Renee, who is working for the deep state and deliver it's not clear why the deep state would be

Speaker 21 amazing if you looked back at old episodes of neighbors and she just pops up

Speaker 21 do you know the foundation for this rumour no cool incredibly weird people on the internet yeah i mean it's it's it's really really loco because we know who her parents are we know where she was born we there are records of her all the way through yeah look i wasn't suggesting it might be true i just wondered if there was any logic to it like maybe someone thought she had a tan that maybe she got from Australia or I believe you Andy, don't worry.

Speaker 21 Well there is another one which is it's slightly less mad but it's still completely mad if you know what I mean which is that she's got an IMDb page and she's listed as an actress because she once did a voiceover.

Speaker 21 So that's some people that's the evidence for some people saying that she's therefore not real. Okay well her mum was in the arts wasn't she? She was a performer of some sort.
Yeah opera singer.

Speaker 21 Yeah so okay that makes sense. You might have your child appear in something at a young age without their consent.
I think it's a climate thing that she did a voiceover for, for, actually.

Speaker 21 No, it's like, I mean, Donald Trump is listed as an actor on IMDb, so being on IMDb does not mean that you're not a person. Well, he is.
No, he is, though. He was in Home Alone 2.

Speaker 21 Yeah.

Speaker 21 2016.

Speaker 21 He's an actor. He's an actor.
He was brilliant in that, I thought.

Speaker 21 No, I haven't seen it. Yeah, her mother, it's quite interesting.
Her mother is a woman called Milena Ernmann, and she was a famous opera singer, a really famous opera singer in Sweden.

Speaker 21 And she gave it up because of Greta. So Greta convinced her to cancel her entire career because all the international travel is so bad for the environment.

Speaker 21 Oh the travel I was thinking like because you do so much singing and you're kind of breathing a lot. All the carbon dioxide that comes out.

Speaker 21 That's what I was thinking but yeah. I read this is a bit of a it must be very hard trying to get everything right when you're trying to do your best to stop a carbon footprint.

Speaker 21 So her going across to America in a boat

Speaker 21 I read that unfortunately in order to get the boat back they had to fly out two of the boat pilots to America in order to bring it back.

Speaker 21 They could have have just sent them off in another boat. Exactly.
Or why weren't they in the boat?

Speaker 21 What's going on? Where were they? They did, but they said in response to that that their whole flight was carbon neutral. So they, you know, what's it called when you can't offset the carbon of that?

Speaker 21 It's tricky though, because offsetting is a thing which some people say doesn't really work. You can't really suck up carbon in the same way that...

Speaker 21 I think the argument mostly is that by doing it, people think that it's okay to fly. Right.

Speaker 21 And so if you think, oh, I'm going to offset it, then you might be more inclined to do more short-haul flying. Yeah.

Speaker 21 The protests, the environmental protests, have been pretty interesting.

Speaker 21 There was a really good fact that one of you guys found, I think, which is that the levels of pollution on Oxford Street fell by 45% due to the Extinction Rebellion protest because they stopped all of the cars going there, which is really cool, I think.

Speaker 21 That's like immediate action. And also, I found this

Speaker 21 protest in Australia, which was pretty cool. It was on Manly Beach near Sydney, and 150 protesters buried their heads in the sand.

Speaker 21 That's a great actual pictures are amazing.

Speaker 21 They look like they're praying, you know, they're right on their knees with their heads down and stuff like that. That's very funny.

Speaker 21 Did they have guards to stop people just running around kicking them all up the ass one after the other?

Speaker 21 I didn't see anything.

Speaker 21 Look, I support the protests. I just want to make that clear.

Speaker 21 We didn't assume you didn't.

Speaker 21 Well,

Speaker 21 we did when he implied that he was going to rod along the beach of protesters, kicking them all in the ass.

Speaker 21 I think the implication was you support the protests, but if you see a big row of asses in the air, you have to kick them off. You gotta kick them.
Yeah, that's where I went.

Speaker 21 You could play them like bongos. You could play them like bongos.

Speaker 21 It's not quite as violent, but it's still funny.

Speaker 21 One of the first things Extinction Rebellion did was to occupy the offices of... Guess where?

Speaker 21 So was it in Sweden?

Speaker 21 No, I think it was here, actually. In London.
Okay, the offices of Shelf. It was Greenpeace.
Was it? Yeah.

Speaker 21 They sort of handed out flowers, but they also gave out leaflets saying, we're going to be much more assertive about this than you guys have been. Wow.

Speaker 21 Greenpeace do their share of, you know, stunned protests and things. Yeah, yeah.
But Extinction Rebellion were just, you know, marking their territory. God, I think of Greenpeace as quite assertive.

Speaker 21 They do as well.

Speaker 21 They also had this thing in July where hundreds of environmental climate demonstrators picketed the headquarters of Drax, and that's Drax is a big energy and gas giant, and they were picketing them over a new gas power plant that they were planning in Yorkshire, I think.

Speaker 21 Anyway, they hadn't done the research.

Speaker 21 Drax moved moved out of that building over a year ago and they instead chained themselves to this block in Moorgate, which is now occupied by Europe's leading renewables generator.

Speaker 21 You can't win them all.

Speaker 21 I love the headline that we actually have for the Extinction Rebellion article in our book is a woman glued her breast to the road to protest against climate change.

Speaker 21 And this was just the most wonderful. The glue was just fantastic.
They were gluing their bums to the windows in the Westminster. They were gluing themselves on streets.

Speaker 21 A guy did it on top of a plane the other day. Did you see that? What glued himself on top of a plane?

Speaker 21 As part of this new Extinction Rebellion sort of revival, he was getting on a plane from the steps on the outside and he climbed on top and he glued himself to the top.

Speaker 21 And so, yeah, disrupted this flight. That is amazing.
I know, I do, there's a bit of me that wish that they just pranked him, just closed the door and started heading down.

Speaker 21 Andy really behind the plane trying to kick him in the ass.

Speaker 21 I just want to say I do support the whole. Thank you.

Speaker 21 There were the people who glued themselves to Corbyn's house, weren't there?

Speaker 21 I think it was four protesters, glued themselves outside Jeremy Corbyn's home. But you know, a lot of these people are very nice people, the climate protesters.

Speaker 21 So they admitted they felt absolutely terrible about upsetting his wife, who was indoors at the time, and they had flowers and Easter eggs delivered to the house to apologise for the inconvenience.

Speaker 21 I think sort of while they were still glued. I think maybe one of them with their toes dialed the flower delivery service or something.

Speaker 21 One protester was arrested while dressed as some broccoli. There's a great

Speaker 21 video of that.

Speaker 21 He looks very, very good because they've been very creative with the costumes and everything. And as he was arrested, he was heard to be shouting either give peas a chance or give peas a chance.

Speaker 21 Not clear which he was shouting. Right.
Why was he a broccoli then? Because broccoli is good for you. You should eat less meat.
You know, this kind of stuff. Yeah, it's green.

Speaker 21 Oh, I get that, but dress as a pee if that's going to be your line.

Speaker 21 What about broccoli leave fossil fuels in the ground? Very nice. He could have done with you.
But I do support what he did.

Speaker 21 Just can I just say my favorite group of people who are protesting climate change is drug users and drug dealers with them. So this was the news this year.

Speaker 21 This is in our book that cocaine is now being sold in environmentally friendly pods.

Speaker 21 This was an interview that was done, I think, in the Birmingham Mail, the Birmingham Post, and they interviewed a drug user who said that he thought this dealer was joking when he gave him a reusable container with his cocaine in it.

Speaker 21 He was like, what on earth is that, mate? And the dealer said, basically, we're not using the plastic Ziploc bags anymore, we are using these reusable ones.

Speaker 21 And if you want a refill of cocaine, you're gonna have to bring back your reusable container. You know what? I'm gonna take it up again.
That's

Speaker 21 that was always a deal-breaker for me. And

Speaker 21 finally, they could have just introduced a 5p charge for a small plastic container of drugs. That would have been amazing.

Speaker 21 Oh my god.

Speaker 21 We are going where Back to school shopping.

Speaker 21 This is the playoffs for parenting, aka getting ready to get back to school.

Speaker 21 As we get ready for back to school, doesn't matter your income, your race, your background, whether you have a disability or not. Our public schools are a place where all kids feel like they belong.

Speaker 21 My child.

Speaker 20 My children, my family, my friends, kids, my community.

Speaker 21 All students. All students.

Speaker 20 All students belong in a great public school. Let's get ready for back to school at nea.org/slash back to school.

Speaker 21 Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is Andy. My fact is that you can now be pulled over for drink driving by your own car.
Where did you read this fact, Andy?

Speaker 21 Did you read it in a book? Oh, yeah, sorry, I read it in the book of... No, I wrote it in the Book of the Year.

Speaker 21 The World's Weirdest News. You've read it since, though, right? Of course, it's my bedside reading.
But...

Speaker 21 Sorry, just check. I just wanted the citation in there.
What an aggressive and unhelpful start to a fact.

Speaker 21 Sorry.

Speaker 21 I'm so sorry. I read it on a newspaper website, probably, and then I wrote it down in the book that we've all just written between us.
Sorry, what's that book?

Speaker 21 It's called The Book of the Year, 2019, The World's Weirdest News.

Speaker 21 Title, when's it out?

Speaker 21 I don't know. Now, Andy, now!

Speaker 21 It's out now. Mandy, have you missed the point of this podcast?

Speaker 21 We're just trying to get you to say the name of the book. Got it.
It's out now.

Speaker 21 Okay, so anyway. As you are.

Speaker 21 Volvo have developed this car, or they have announced they are developing a car, which can tell you off for drink driving if it detects that you're drunk. I'm sorry, it just tells you off.

Speaker 21 It doesn't make you stop or anything. It just says, you naughty boy.

Speaker 21 I think it actually can pull over to the side of the road. It's still in development, so this is not a standard in new Volvos that you buy.

Speaker 21 But I think it detects from the way you're driving if you're driving very, very, very drunkenly.

Speaker 21 What if, for instance, not saying I'm like this, but what if you're just a very bad driver?

Speaker 21 You'll never drive again, I'm afraid. Even if I'm sober.
I'm afraid not, no.

Speaker 21 Actually, a bit better after a few drinks, so I don't skip it. Can I just say that is not a true?

Speaker 21 You don't support the drink drivers.

Speaker 21 That's very clever. So it was a car that detects if you've driven through your own kitchen window or something, basically.
Yeah.

Speaker 21 In Ort Volvo also had some other interesting technology that it announced this year, didn't it? And that was that its cars will warn each other if you're driving on icy roads. So cool.
So cool.

Speaker 21 So I believe this is still in development. But yeah, it'll be automatic detection.
If you're on an icy road and your car detects sort of a lack of friction, it will tell all the other Volvos nearby.

Speaker 21 So the people driving them will get warnings. And if you don't drive a Volvo, then I guess you're buggered.
That's very cool. While we're doing an advert for Volvo.

Speaker 21 The great thing about Volvo, I always thought, was the fact that they invented the seat belt, right? The modern seatbelt that we have, which is kind of a 3.1.

Speaker 21 It kind of comes across your chest and your waist. They invented it and they never patented it.

Speaker 21 So it meant that everyone could use it for free because they realized that it was so good for safety that it would be better to be in every car and they didn't want the money for it.

Speaker 21 But one thing that they are working on at the moment is a self-driving car seatbelt.

Speaker 21 Okay, because when you're in your self-driving car, you're probably not going to want to sit there at the front looking out of the windscreen.

Speaker 21 You might want to be having a lie down, or you might want to be kind of playing, you know, video games or something like that.

Speaker 21 And so they have come up with a seatbelt blanket.

Speaker 21 So you kind of lie down or kind of like lounge a little bit, and then the strap goes across your whole body, about across your legs, across your chest, and everything like that.

Speaker 21 But it's not really, it's not like you're being strapped down because you're in a

Speaker 21 hospital or something like that. Yeah, because you're making it sound like you're sort of mummified into the car.
It's not quite that.

Speaker 21 It's supposed to not feel restrictive, but it does kind of cocoon you. That's brilliant.
And that's a new thing that they're working on. Wow.
Very cool. Yeah.

Speaker 21 When you said a self-driving seatbelt, I thought it was if you'd driven off without your seatbelt, your seatbelt at home would remember and it would drive up to the car and catch up with you and then get into the car.

Speaker 21 I've got another car development thing here. It's not Volvo.
Oh, well, I'm not interested, though. I stupidly took a sponsorship from Ford,

Speaker 21 which are fantastic cars.

Speaker 21 But this year, and this is in our robots article, Ford have developed a robotic bottom,

Speaker 21 which they test on their car seats.

Speaker 21 So this is the idea of testing for wear and tear in your car seats. They've had that for a while, haven't they? Yes, they have.

Speaker 21 But what they've added to it this year, this is the 2019 edition, it now has sweat glands, so it can mimic the behavior of someone with a very sweaty bottom.

Speaker 21 You know, you're driving on a hot day. Yeah.
And you've taken your trousers off to drive, as I always do. See? But your self-driving trousers are on the way.
They'll get there eventually.

Speaker 21 I think that's a real shame, because you're putting a lot of real-life human bottom testers out of work, aren't you? That's very true. Very true.

Speaker 21 It's a thing that's dealing with a real issue. Why don't they just find people with sweaty bottoms? That's what I'm saying.
Oh, gotcha.

Speaker 21 I remember when I was at school, and they were telling me what kind of job I might have in the future. And they did check how sweaty my bottom was.

Speaker 21 And they did think I would be able to do this as a job. I think that guy's been reporting to the authorities, actually.

Speaker 21 Just because this is about sort of new robotics technology, especially new robotics.

Speaker 21 One of my favorite stories in the book was the extreme advance in shoes, which is that Nike has invented self-lacing trainers. Yes, wow, Brilliant.
So, these trainers are $300.

Speaker 21 They fit your foot shape automatically. So you try them on, they fit any foot shape.

Speaker 21 They're self-lacing, so they don't actually have laces because the robots don't need laces, they just tighten and loosen automatically.

Speaker 21 And the idea is that it would be good in something like basketball, where sometimes you need some looseness for flexibility to increase blood flow, then sometimes you need it to tighten up when you need more, you know, more grip.

Speaker 21 And the problem is, it's a total failure on Android phones. So

Speaker 21 people tried it on Androids, and it often broke after a few days. There were complaints that it only worked on the right shoe.
So for some reason, the left shoes just constantly weren't responding.

Speaker 21 And often the app would also say it's already connected to another pair of trainers.

Speaker 21 So can you just make people fall over as they're walking by you?

Speaker 21 You connect your app to their shoes. That's like the modern equivalent of tying someone's shoelaces together.

Speaker 21 Speaking of as we were self-driving things,

Speaker 21 there is a self-driving wheelie bin that has been developed this year. It's called Smart Can.

Speaker 21 And the Smart Can creator, who is called Andrew Murray. No.
Yes.

Speaker 21 He said we want to help people eliminate unnecessary chores from their daily lives. And what happens is basically when it's bin day, the bins take themselves out.

Speaker 21 Isn't that great? That's amazing. That's really amazing.

Speaker 21 So it's not a thing where if you can't afford a self-driving car, but you can afford a self-driving bin just get under the bed and go to work it's not like

Speaker 21 drill a pair of eye holes in it

Speaker 21 my other car is a smart camera

Speaker 21 there's other um car technology um so um there's a great company ford who have designed

Speaker 21 give it a rest mate the car in front is a toyota

Speaker 21 uh they've developed something not for cars but for the bedroom and this is in our book it's a mattress that nudges you away from your partner if you start getting too too near to them in bed.

Speaker 21 What? Yeah, it's a mattress. Like a chaperone mattress.
It's exactly if you've got your mother-in-law mattress. Yeah, you keep your hands off her.

Speaker 21 God, I hope your mother-in-law is not going to be saying that to you.

Speaker 21 Does she come into your bedroom every evening? You keep her in the cupboard, don't you?

Speaker 21 Yeah, you've got to sort that relationship out. But back to the facts.

Speaker 21 So it's a mattress, and the idea is

Speaker 21 the reason that Ford have been able to make it is they've been using the lane-keeping technology that they have in their cars, which is it nudges the car away from a lane by taking the steering wheel and moving it, and they've applied it to the bed.

Speaker 21 And it's only at prototype stage at this point, but yeah.

Speaker 21 I mean, I'm not familiar with whenever I'm driving a car and slightly go off course, then my car gets tipped off the road. But do they do that for

Speaker 21 the best? Oh, right.

Speaker 21 Do they have displane?

Speaker 21 Self-driving cars in the future will have things that keep you in the lane. Got it.
So this isn't technology that they have in existing Ford cars.

Speaker 21 Because that's one of the two main struggles when driving, I found. What? Is the left and right of the lane.
Staying on the road. Staying on the main one.
Yeah, it's the main one.

Speaker 21 And then you've got the forward and backwards one of how close you are to the car in front. And you've got the left, right one of

Speaker 21 very much a two-dimensional

Speaker 21 chance, isn't it? You're not going up in the back. Yeah, it takes care of itself.

Speaker 21 It doesn't help that your mother-in-law's in the back going, Andy, for Christ's sake.

Speaker 21 I just have one more bot of the year that I quite liked that's trying to help humans out in the future. This is Irony Man.

Speaker 21 Based on Iron Man, name-wise, but in nothing else, this is a sarcastic robot, and it has a useful purpose, which is that apparently people trust robots more when and they seem more natural and trustworthy when they're being a bit sarcastic, because humans are sarcastic or ironic.

Speaker 21 And so, when robots are just giving you direct answers all the time, people don't trust them.

Speaker 21 So, they've invented Irony Man, and it does things like it will pair a really deadpan expression with a humorous facial expression, a deadpan words with humorous facial expressions, or it will add sarcastic emphasis.

Speaker 21 So it will say something like, I'm delighted you spilled your pint of beer on me.

Speaker 21 And then, you know,

Speaker 21 smashes you in the face for the exactly violent irony.

Speaker 21 It has a slight problem, so it's sort of to help.

Speaker 21 vulnerable people or older people who you know people get robots to care for them around the house but it can't tell when's the appropriate time to deploy irony so in really sensitive situations, it is currently saying things like which you might get with older people.

Speaker 21 Indeed, oh, good, you've fallen over

Speaker 21 that sort of thing. Well, we got just while we're on robots, we've got a fact in the book about the robot hotel in Japan where they fired all of their robot staff and replaced them with humans.

Speaker 21 And James, you just went there. I did, I stayed there deliberately, as people will know from our last podcast when I deliberately went to this town in the Netherlands just because I read about it.

Speaker 21 I deliberately booked into this hotel instead of going to a nice hotel,

Speaker 21 dragged my wife along to this place. And yeah, they have robots at the reception, but I didn't see any other robots in the whole building.
Really? I'm afraid. So no cleaning robots.

Speaker 21 I believe so. But we left quite early that day and the cleaners were there.
And they were either extremely realistic robots

Speaker 21 or they were humans. Oh, really? Because there was one problem was that they could only reach a quarter of the rooms, I think.
Was that right? In the hotel? They couldn't get up certain stairs.

Speaker 21 And also whenever a robot met another robot on the corridor they didn't know how to pass each other

Speaker 21 I have that problem a lot as well where you go left and they go left and yeah it's a nightmare

Speaker 21 actually the only other thing that I did see was they had these amazing cupboards I don't know if you guys have seen these before but it's like a cupboard and you put your clothes in and it's like a washing machine but I don't think there's any water and you leave it on for 45 minutes and it freshens up your clothes.

Speaker 21 Wow. So it doesn't wash them, which I learned because at this stage I've been on the road for two weeks and didn't have many clean clothes, and I thought, maybe it'll wash them.

Speaker 21 But it does make them a lot fresher. And I think, like, maybe business people use them because, obviously, in Japan, you work long hours and stuff like that.
And so it just freshens them.

Speaker 21 Do you know how it freshens them? I think it's through air, and maybe it's damp air.

Speaker 21 Wow. I think.
But you basically hang something up and then close the door and some magic happens. And you open it up and it smells quite nice.
Wow. But it's not clean.

Speaker 21 That's very cool.

Speaker 21 I just have one last thing. This is a technology bit of news from the book, and it's that the bass player from Blur, who's also a cheesemaker, Alex James, has been this year turned into cheese.

Speaker 21 It's going to affect the reunion tour pretty badly, isn't it?

Speaker 21 This was quite exciting. This was done as part of a VNA Museum exhibition in London.
And what they did was they took celebrities and they turned them into cheese.

Speaker 21 So they took bits of bacteria off of them and made them. So Alex James was turned into a block of Cheshire.
Professor Green, a musician, was turned into a sort of form of mozzarella.

Speaker 21 The madness singer Suggs was turned into a block of cheddar. You can go visit all these celebs as cheeses.
It's like the weird Madame to Swords.

Speaker 21 Do you know where on their body they got the bacteria from to make the cheese? Because I think it would affect whether I was going to beat the cheese or not.

Speaker 21 I don't think you should eat the exhibits.

Speaker 21 Oh, no.

Speaker 21 So

Speaker 21 it's not cheese that's being sold. They didn't do it en masse.
No, no, it's just it's part of a museum. Oh, what a waste.
Yeah. Let's break in.

Speaker 21 Well, the thing is with cheese is it gets better the longer you leave it. Some cheeses, anyway.
So maybe once the exhibition is finished, we can all go with a few crackers and

Speaker 21 eat Alex James. Yeah.

Speaker 21 Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is Chaczynski. My fact this week, taken straight from the book of the year 2019, available from all good bookstores and online.

Speaker 21 That was really professionally done, Anna. That is how you do it.

Speaker 21 Thank you very much, guys. My fact is that in a country of 1.3 billion people, a polling station was set up in the middle of the jungle for one single man.

Speaker 21 So that can only be India or China. And it's one of them, take a pun.

Speaker 21 Well, which one has elections?

Speaker 21 And you've narrowed it down. Yeah,

Speaker 21 this was in India. India had an election this year, of course, a mammoth election.

Speaker 21 And there was a priest, a holy man, called Dar Shandas, who he takes care of a temple, which is in a wildlife sanctuary very deep in the jungle. It's 70 kilometers into the jungle in Gujarat.

Speaker 21 And he wanted to vote. And so five election officials travelled the 70 kilometers into the jungle, set up a polling station specifically for this guy, and he could vote.

Speaker 21 Although, weirdly, and I couldn't find out why this was, they set it up a kilometer from his house.

Speaker 21 So they went all that way, and then they couldn't quite have gotten to do the last kilometer to his front door. I think you've got to make the effort to vote, don't you? Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 21 Like you've got to go. He might want to think about who's going to vote for during that one kilometre what.

Speaker 21 They probably put placards on the trees on the way, sort of trying to convince him to sway the vote. Yeah, you're right.
But this wasn't the only polling station for just one person. Was it not?

Speaker 21 Amazingly, so there was another one at a place called Maligam and the team travelled 300 miles with the polling booth. That must be cumulatively.
It must be.

Speaker 21 And there was a big interview with them, and I think the Washington Post it was, went along.

Speaker 21 And as they were setting up the voting machines, one of them said, there is both excitement and nervousness. If the one voter turns up, there will be 100% voting.
But if she doesn't, it will be 0%.

Speaker 21 And they got there, and the locals nearby said, oh, yeah, she's left the area.

Speaker 21 Oh, wow. And

Speaker 21 they thought, no, we hope she turns up. They still have to have it there just in case, I assume, right? Right.
But it's so demanding.

Speaker 21 So they had to, at 5 a.m., wake up and carry out a mock poll with 50 mock votes, even though there's only one voter coming to the polling station.

Speaker 21 And then, thankfully, the woman in question was called Tai Yang, and she turned up. She had been 125 miles away looking after her ill mother.
She came all the way back to vote here.

Speaker 21 She arrived at 8.30. She still had to queue up because there was a problem with the machine.

Speaker 21 She voted. And then they had to stay open until 5pm.

Speaker 21 Oh my God.

Speaker 21 So if you've ever overslept and missed a council election or something, you should feel incredibly guilty. I hear that story.

Speaker 21 Considering the polls usually close close at 10 o'clock i think if you've overslept

Speaker 21 come on james we've all been students

Speaker 21 do we know if the uh original person that we're talking about with this fact voted dajanas did vote uh we are not sure who he voted for uh because it's it's well there's a lot of people to vote for because there are thousands and thousands of thousands of people who take part in this election yeah because there's 1.3 billion people as we said in india and anyone who doesn't have a criminal conviction can stand in the election so you have so many thousands of people.

Speaker 21 There's only 543 seats. And in the last election in 2014, we didn't have the

Speaker 21 figures for this year yet. But 90% of the 8,200 people who were going for election forfeited their deposits.
Oh, I know. So everyone's getting like 0% and 0.1% and stuff like that.

Speaker 21 There's a guy from Tamil Nadu who has contested and lost 201 elections.

Speaker 21 Oh, wow. How old is he? He must be pretty old.
Or maybe, like, like you say, council elections, local elections, stuff like that.

Speaker 21 And there was another guy called Fakad Baba who is currently on his 17th time running for the national election. And his guru has predicted that his victory will come on the 20th attempt.

Speaker 21 So he's got so annoying having to go through all 20. Yeah, only to not win on the 20th attempt.
Did you say it's if you're not convicted of

Speaker 21 not been convicted of a criminal offence? but I know there are a lot of people who have been charged.

Speaker 21 Yeah. So

Speaker 21 we found out something about this in our research for the book, which is that of the MPs elected, actually elected, 43% are facing criminal charges of some kind.

Speaker 21 And of those, 18% are either charged with murder or attempted murder. So it's about 8% of all elected MPs in India are charged with either murder or attempted murder.

Speaker 21 And the reason is, of course, because in India, they have an unbelievable backlog of cases, which I think we might have mentioned mentioned before.

Speaker 21 Like there are millions of if they did one every day or you know or a hundred every day they won't clear it up for something like a thousand years or something like that.

Speaker 21 Yeah, I think we have discussed. And in fact, there's one story in the book.
I think an Indian man was imprisoned this year for he stole something like 20 rupees in 1979. That's right.

Speaker 21 So it's been 40 years waiting to get through and he pled not guilty and then he sort of disappeared in 2004. They finally caught up with him, arrested him, put him in jail.

Speaker 21 And then I think they exonerated him. He spent spent three months in jail, and then they were like, actually, you're not guilty.

Speaker 21 I don't know how much evidence you can collect for this theft of this. They released him, and then they said, don't do it again, I think.
They did, but they found him not guilty.

Speaker 21 You're not guilty, but also don't do the thing you're not guilty of again. That's very lucky it was only three months, because presumably the waiting list to revisit cases must be equally long, right?

Speaker 21 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 21 That's the thing in the Scottish courts, isn't it?

Speaker 21 They used to have that, I don't know if they still got that verdict, not proof, is guilty, not guilty, and not proven, which means not guilty, but don't do it again, is the old line. Yeah,

Speaker 21 just we should say how amazing and undertaking the Indian election is. So it's held in seven different phases because India is so vast.

Speaker 21 As you say, it just shows how swollen our parliamentary system is because they have about 100 fewer seats than us in parliament and they manage to rule this massive country.

Speaker 21 But it lasts from it lasted this year from 11th of April to 19th of May.

Speaker 21 What voting? Yeah, voting. So they do it in seven different sections and it's across 20 states.
And of course, Narendra Modi won won in the end.

Speaker 21 Just in sort of political news that we have in the book, one of my favourite stories was about the Prime Minister of Bhutan.

Speaker 21 We found out this year that he likes to unwind from his very stressful job by going to a hospital every Friday and operating on someone.

Speaker 21 There's a quote. He says, some people play golf, some do archery.
I like to operate. Which he is qualified to do, isn't he? Well, no, but he doesn't do operations he's qualified for.

Speaker 21 That's the amazing thing. He takes a random patient and he picks a random procedure and he just does it.
It's very impressive. The The things you can get away with in public office.

Speaker 21 For a long time, so before he was prime minister, he was the only urological surgeon in Bhutan. And he used to have a TV show.
He used to go on on the BBS, which is Bhutan Broadcasting Service.

Speaker 21 And the public would call in and he would give advice over the... Oh, like embarrassing bodies, basically.
Yeah, but live, I guess. Okay, embarrassing bodies live.
What do you want?

Speaker 21 I've actually seen it. I don't know what that show does.

Speaker 21 That's really interesting. They didn't have TV in Bhutan until the 80s or 90s as well.
So he must be like like one of the biggest TV stars in history. Yeah, actually, do you know what?

Speaker 21 It's possible this is radio. I just realised I haven't actually put that detail down.
Oh, so like any questions on Radio 4? But live. Oh, sorry, any answers on Radio 4.

Speaker 21 That's the one where you ring in. But it's normally ringing in saying what you think about Brexit.
It's like Gardner's Question Time. Yeah.
But not about gardening. But about urological place.

Speaker 21 Please don't call up either Gardner's question time or any questions with your weird bodily problems. Okay.

Speaker 21 Jonathan Dimbleby will not appreciate as much as that. Hello, is that embarrassing bodies?

Speaker 21 No, this is Gadner's question time. Oh, can I tell you about my problem anyway? I'll go into the garden.
Hang on. The rash on my penis is still there.

Speaker 21 Now the neighbours are shouting something.

Speaker 21 Other political news from the year? Yeah.

Speaker 21 So

Speaker 21 there was the election of Zelensky, president of Ukraine, who's recently come into his own by getting involved in American politics.

Speaker 21 But this, he was a film star, so much like the Bhutanese guy, he was famous before he became president for other reasons. Or Greta Thunberg.
Or Greta Thunberg.

Speaker 21 So he started.

Speaker 21 He starred in a series called Servant of the People, and it was an extremely popular series where he plays a man, the lead role, where he plays a man who accidentally becomes leader of the country.

Speaker 21 And so he thought, I'm going to try that for real. And so he set up a party called Servant of the People, because why waste that name?

Speaker 21 And yeah, he he smashed it. It's insane.
It's so bizarre. I mean, I can't think of a I guess it's like the stars of the thick of it, isn't it? Actually becoming Prime Minister.

Speaker 21 Or, you know, like the star of the apprentice becoming President of the United States. Yeah, true.

Speaker 21 I guess the thick of it, yeah, they are exactly leaders.

Speaker 21 Did you see the recent news about Zelensky, which is too recent for the book actually, aside from the fact that Trump's obviously in a small bit of trouble for asking him to look into his rival.

Speaker 21 But Zelensky also just broke the world record for the longest ever press conference.

Speaker 21 This is a

Speaker 21 few days ago.

Speaker 21 It lasted from 10 in the morning until just after midnight.

Speaker 21 It's a long press conference. Oh my goodness.
And what was that? Questions and answers? It was questions and answers.

Speaker 21 And apparently he largely did it to try and deflect attention because he's getting in trouble in Ukraine for having got involved with Donald Trump in this questionable way.

Speaker 21 But at eight hours, so I guess at 6 p.m., someone came up and announced that he'd broken the existing existing record, which was set by Belarus.

Speaker 21 So presumably everyone thought, oh, thank God, we can go away now. He went on for another six hours.
That is amazing. It's impressive, isn't it? Wow.

Speaker 21 Oh, and he also said that he had special surgery done or a special treatment done on his vocal cords to make them stronger, had injections to strengthen his vocal cords.

Speaker 21 Oh, yeah, you can get Botox in your vocal cards, can't you, to make them stronger? Oh, it must have been that. But wouldn't that seize them up like it does with your face muscles?

Speaker 21 It would seize them up, but then the amount that you put in depends on how much they're seized up, right?

Speaker 21 And actually, looking at it now, some of the questions were, why are your vocal cords looking so sexy? So I think it was the Bosox thing.

Speaker 21 Well,

Speaker 21 there was who I would have liked to have won the Ukrainian election, because then they would have been speaking to Trump on the phone and discussing Joe Biden, is the person who was called Darth Vader.

Speaker 21 who ran for a seat in that election.

Speaker 21 Darth Viktorovich Vader. Wow.
So you just want to hear his heavy breathing voice on the phone, you're saying. Look.
You take away from the mouth.

Speaker 21 But no, I just like, I just love the idea of instead of Trump being in trouble with Zeletsky, being in trouble with Carthagin. That would have been hilarious.

Speaker 21 Trump turns out to be his son after his fifth term in office.

Speaker 21 One of my favourite facts of this book.

Speaker 21 So

Speaker 21 there was a kid who became quite famous globally, known as Eggboy.

Speaker 21 Eggboy became famous in Australia because he threw an egg, well smashed an egg rather, on a far-right politician called Fraser Anning during a live TV interview and Anning punched him and so he became famous.

Speaker 21 But it's just a tiny detail that I think James, you found out, that Eggboy, who got given the nickname Eggboy for the thing that he did, in later interviews he revealed that at school he is already known as Eggboy because he used to bring hard-boiled eggs to school and classmates complain that they smell.

Speaker 21 So he used to be Eggboy in a bad way and now he's Eggboy the hero. That's good though.
He's taking back control of the name Eggboy really is what you're saying. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 21 Two things have happened in his life. Taking back control.
Anna, you have to stop reading the telegram. Seriously.

Speaker 21 There was one more Aussie politician. He got caught replying to his own Facebook post, but under another name.
This is Angus Taylor MP.

Speaker 21 He was a Liberal MP and he posted a video announcing extra parking spaces at train stations. Fine.
Fair enough.

Speaker 21 And then he immediately replied to it, but under his own account name, saying, Fantastic, great move, well done, Angus.

Speaker 21 And everyone spotted this, and they immediately also started replying, fantastic, great move, well done, Angus.

Speaker 21 So actually, he got what he wanted. Lots of supportive responsibilities.

Speaker 21 It's the egg ball, um, egg balls. It's the egg balls.

Speaker 21 Egg balls is something you need to see that urologist about

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Speaker 21 Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is my fact.

Speaker 21 My fact this week, taken from the Book of the Year 2019, is that a Canadian man who threw his speeding ticket out of his car window was then given a ticket for littering.

Speaker 21 So he lost twice.

Speaker 21 That will teach you. It's the opposite of Eggboy, basically.
And two wrongs don't make a right, do they? The speeding ticket didn't undo his

Speaker 21 littering. No, two wrongs in murders.

Speaker 21 Did an even number of murders. Yeah.
So many people have been ruined by that misconception. It's such a shame.
Yeah, there was a lot of funny, weird crime stories this year, wasn't there?

Speaker 21 A lot of kind of fitting ones, a bit like that. So one of the stories in the book is that five guys were arrested at a branch of five guys,

Speaker 21 the burger chain. This was in Florida.
And they got into a fist fight.

Speaker 21 It was an out-and-out brawl. And I think we like to think that there were only four guys involved, and the police just asked the fifth guy, Do do you mind if we arrest you as well?

Speaker 21 We've got to make this work.

Speaker 21 There was a British fugitive who got arrested. He fled Australia on a jet ski.

Speaker 21 I really like this guy.

Speaker 21 Where was he going? New Zealand must be. He was going to Papua New Guinea,

Speaker 21 which is 120 miles. And I think he stopped for fuel at an island on the way.
However, he ran out of fuel three miles short of Papua New Guinea.

Speaker 21 And he was wanted, I think, for some pretty bad stuff.

Speaker 21 He was armed with a crossbow as well. And when he arrived at this remote peninsula to refuel with his jet ski, a witness told the Brisbane paper, the Courier Mail, that he stuck out like dogs' balls.

Speaker 21 That just reminds me, the Australian jet ski guy, of a story that we had in, I think it was the first book of the year, still available, still very readable.

Speaker 21 Remember the guy, I think he was the musician who had eaten way too much at a restaurant, a seafood restaurant. He jumped into the ocean to escape the police.

Speaker 21 And his tactic for escaping the water jet, the water ski riding police, was to hide underwater. Yeah,

Speaker 21 I can't remember his name. He had an amazing name.

Speaker 21 He was a rapper. Yeah, that's what he was.
I was going to say self-made cash, but he's from this year's budget.

Speaker 21 He is, because self-made cash is the rapper who has got done for credit card fraud, right? That's right.

Speaker 21 What was it?

Speaker 21 And I think the judges, when they condemned him this year, said self-made cash, because he's actually written all these songs where the lyrics kind of talk about how you can do a good fraud or screw over the authority.

Speaker 21 Do a decent fraud, mate. And so, I think when he was sentenced, the judge was like, Self-made cash thinks that he is really adept at credit card fraud.
He is not.

Speaker 21 Yes, if a judge is saying that to you, you probably know that you're not very good at credit card fraud already, don't you?

Speaker 21 Can I give you a crime story which wasn't in the book this year?

Speaker 21 This is kind of serious, but also quite amazing. So, there was a man who was arrested on suspicion of stalking a female pop idol in Japan.
But the way that he stalked stalked her, this is incredible.

Speaker 21 She took photos and selfies and stuff and put them on social media. And he looked at her pupils and looked at the reflection in her pupils of what she was looking at.

Speaker 21 And then he used Google Street View to find out where she lived.

Speaker 21 Wow. Isn't that unbelievable? Oh my God.

Speaker 21 I mean, that is terrifying. It's terrifying.
It's not a fun story, but it's an amazing story. But it's useful because it means that we should all start walking around with our eyes closed, I suppose.

Speaker 21 I think just whenever you take a selfie, have your eyes closed. Yeah.

Speaker 21 But if you really want to be safety conscious, Anna, just go around with your eyes closed constantly. I think so.

Speaker 21 There was a similar story, though, that is in the book, which was about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Speaker 21 Do you remember the thing about the fact that she was in a bath and it was a nude photo of her in the bath? And you could see in the faucet at the end, you could see a reflection that looked like her.

Speaker 21 And she was insisting that this wasn't her. And they couldn't really prove it.
But someone eventually got to the bottom of it.

Speaker 21 And and it was someone who uses the website WikiFeet, which is where feet are posted up of celebrity women all over the world. You rank them and you look at pictures of their feet.
Do you?

Speaker 21 Only sometimes.

Speaker 21 But this guy is the person who exonerated her for the fact it wasn't her because he was able to show that it wasn't her feet.

Speaker 21 And he said, I've sucked enough toes in my life to recognize when something doesn't look right.

Speaker 21 Yeah.

Speaker 21 I mean.

Speaker 21 He becomes a hero for doing that, and then immediately in the same sentence becomes the creepiest person alive.

Speaker 21 There was another, weirdly, another story related to that as well, which was about Taylor Swift using facial recognition at her gigs. So what is it?

Speaker 21 When you arrived, I think there are lots of booths around and if you look into the booth you sort of you can get snapped or you your photo is taken or there are cameras all around at her gigs and then those are those images are uploaded to a sort of central command post and then they're cross-referenced with images of people who are known to have been stalkers of Taylor Swift or have, you know, been, you know, too creepy.

Speaker 21 And

Speaker 21 then. Is that a crime?

Speaker 21 I think being too creepy is a crime. Yeah.
Oh, yeah, too creepy. Too creepy.
Too creepy.

Speaker 21 And so then the people can be slung out of the gigs. Yeah.
I read, just on the facial recognition thing,

Speaker 21 that in China, they've literally just come up with this new technology which can facially recognize an entire stadium of people.

Speaker 21 That's what it is. It's a really, really high megapixel camera.
So this is one of the most clear cameras that exists in the world.

Speaker 21 And you can get an image of 10,000, 20,000 people and it can facially recognize all of them.

Speaker 21 Wait, so if those exact 80,000 people are together again somewhere, it'll know that they're the same ones who all attended the Sholton game. That's not the reason.

Speaker 21 Sorry, did you say 80,000 people in a bolted game?

Speaker 21 That's my takeaway from that story. That was where that fell down.
Sorry.

Speaker 21 No, it's like to look for stalkers or criminals or whatever.

Speaker 21 The purpose is not to have a comeback gig for an audience.

Speaker 21 I just like the phrase that it could recognise an entire stadium of people.

Speaker 21 It needs to see that one stadium exactly composed that way. It would be an amazing game of Spot the Difference or Where's Wally for an AI machine, wouldn't it?

Speaker 21 That would be fantastic if you could cajole the 20,000 people to come back again. Apart from one person who can't make it.
Yeah. And then just replace them with someone in a red stripey jumper.

Speaker 21 Amazing. I mean,

Speaker 21 if you want really good facial recognition, it helps to beat an authoritarian state like China because they are way out in front with it. They are.
They know what they're doing. That's good advice.

Speaker 21 I think.

Speaker 21 But on facial recognition,

Speaker 21 we should also talk about bodily recognition, which has a big feature in our book.

Speaker 21 And this is specifically the story that a Swedish police officer recognised the naked body of a criminal when he was sharing a sauna with him.

Speaker 21 Wait, did you recognise the face of the woman? We don't see see the face. He doesn't say.

Speaker 21 He said we recognised each other. We don't know which part.
I know that rash.

Speaker 21 What a hero though. That is amazing.
Because obviously saunas bigger thing in Sweden than they are here. Yeah.
And so he arrested him. He made a naked arrest.

Speaker 21 They were both naked in the sauna together. And I hadn't realized that they did recognise each other.
So it sounds like their eyes met across the steam room. Went, oh God.
Do you think?

Speaker 21 I reckon if I was a criminal, I'd quickly put a shitload of water on the coals so it got really, really steamy and then you could make your own stakes. That's brilliant.

Speaker 21 That's why I'd be such a great super criminal.

Speaker 21 We had just a bit of behind the scenes on the writing of this book.

Speaker 21 Obviously, for all the articles, there was a lot of sort of back and forth about what we thought was a funnier way to put things or a better way to write them. Massive arguments, just put it as it is.

Speaker 21 Massive, just absolutely life-shattering arguments. We're not yet talking to each other, fully, again.

Speaker 21 No, but one of my favourite moment was actually an argument that I had with Andy about the drawing for this article, which was of a man that Adam Doughty drew for us sitting in a sauna with handcuffs around him.

Speaker 21 Adam Doughty is our cartoonist, by the way. What do you call him? For all three parts, our illustrator, yeah.

Speaker 21 And he drew the criminal in the sauna with a towel on, sitting on a towel and handcuffs on. Andy wanted the towel removed because he wanted to see the man's bottom.

Speaker 21 Yeah, but probably because in Scandinavia they don't use towels. Thank you, James.
I wish you'd been in the room for this argument. Yes, but we...

Speaker 21 Oh, no, I would have still come down on that side of that.

Speaker 21 But he was in handcuffs, so obviously something had happened whereby handcuffs were grabbed. Most likely a towel was grabbed as well.
That was your internal logic of the way that scene played out.

Speaker 21 Please write in with your votes.

Speaker 21 Who do you want to leave the show forever, Andy or Dan?

Speaker 21 Or both. Hit an option C.

Speaker 21 I've got one fact which didn't sadly make it into the book because, again, it happened too late. But this is another arrest, and it's a man in a place called Mold in North Wales.

Speaker 21 Oh, yeah, I know it, really. Yeah.
So he was arrested after he tried on some jeans in a shop, okay?

Speaker 21 But he then left behind 31 wraps of heroin in the pockets of the jeans that he'd tried on. Say really well.
I just want to say,

Speaker 21 wow, that is amazing. And then, absolutely ballsy ass, he went back into the shop to say, oh, I've left my medication behind.
It was these 31 little wraps of white powder.

Speaker 21 Oh, my God.

Speaker 21 I think I would do that as well, because they are probably going to track you down at that point anyway. How will they track you down? Oh, CCTV, I suppose.

Speaker 21 If you've gone in and paid for your dry cleaning, they're going to have your details. Well, it's a clothes shop.
He was, he was.

Speaker 21 He did try. He tried on some.
Wait a minute. He's taken his trousers off and left them in the clothes shop.
I've missed this. Sorry.
It wasn't entirely clear to me. I think he's left the clothes shop.

Speaker 21 He tried the trousers on, but then he was holding the heroin and then he put them in the trouser pockets so he could admire himself. Why would he put the...
Is it the

Speaker 21 same? Maybe he was testing the trousers to see how they fit with 31 wraps of heroin and them to see if they made the pockets look bulky.

Speaker 21 I think I have done that in clothes shops, not specifically with that substance, but with other Class A drugs. Yeah, because you do.

Speaker 21 Well, you put things in the pockets, you know.

Speaker 21 The pockets aren't too tight, I think, if you're

Speaker 21 crafty.

Speaker 21 There's an example actually in the book.

Speaker 21 So we have an article which is called Unusual Suspects where this actually happened where a drug dealer, suspected drug dealer in Manchester, left a rucksack stuffed with drugs on a tram, and they found him because he had his full name and address on the bag.

Speaker 21 So it does happen that you can.

Speaker 21 Yeah, criminals are idiots. Another good weird idiot criminal story was, I think this is my top five stories in the book.

Speaker 21 It's that the owner of the Smugglers Inn Hotel was charged with people smuggling.

Speaker 21 And this is a place in Washington state, it's near the Canadian border, and its owner, Robert Boule, really embraces the smugglers' theme. So, you know,

Speaker 21 he's not trying to hide, he hasn't tried to hide the fact before that he's into the smuggling theme. Every room is named after a famous criminal, you know, all the Dacora is smuggler themes.

Speaker 21 Next star is the heroin dealers in.

Speaker 21 And yeah, he just went one step too far and has been charged with 21 counts of inducing, aiding, or abetting seven people who are entering Canada illegally. That's amazing.

Speaker 21 But the thing I love about this place is, I think this is the thing that you found, Dan, but that in a more unbelievable coincidence, in 2012, the Smuggler's Inn was the scene of a crime when police arrested three people there for smuggling drugs in a car, coincidence one, and the license plate was smuggler.

Speaker 21 Yeah. Well, this was the thing we mentioned on the podcast years ago.
Yeah.

Speaker 21 Just when we were writing this. I don't think it was my fact, but I recalled that we'd mentioned it.
I thought, it can't be the same place. And it is.
What's the guy doing? Same place. Smuggling.

Speaker 21 Yeah.

Speaker 21 We should wrap up soon. Anyone got anything before we do?

Speaker 21 Just one other nice little crime story. This is that a man in Salisbury had to excuse himself from jury duty.
Do you remember this?

Speaker 21 He was excusing himself on the grounds that he was scheduled to be the judge in the case in question.

Speaker 21 That's awesome. This was Judge Keith Cutler.
And he said, you know, I can't really be on the jury because I'm judging this case. He's resident judge of Winchester and Salisbury.

Speaker 21 And so he wrote to ask for an exemption and he was rejected. He was told by the authorities that he had to apply to the resident judge if he wanted an exemption.

Speaker 21 And he wrote back and said, I am the resident judge.

Speaker 21 All he needs to be is also the executioner.

Speaker 21 He's an idiom in himself.

Speaker 21 Okay, that's it. That is all of our facts from our new book, The Book of the Year 2019.
It is out now. We would so appreciate it if you guys would buy a copy.

Speaker 21 We're incredibly proud of it. It's very funny.
It's so interesting.

Speaker 21 And sorry, can I just say, like, you might think, having heard this, you've heard everything in the book because we've done so many facts from it.

Speaker 21 But honestly, there are a thousand more facts, two thousand more facts. Yeah, and it's really, this one's really fun.
We've all written individual articles about things that we're passionate about.

Speaker 21 James has written about how to make the ultimate betting move to win a lot of money. You've written about the Mueller report, Andy.
Yeah, my main passion. Yeah.

Speaker 21 Andy got a sausages article in, finally. Finally.

Speaker 21 Genuinely my main passion. Yeah, I interviewed the mayor of Uranus in America.

Speaker 21 There's a lot of us in the book this time, and it's a great book. It is out now, and it would mean the world to us if you would buy it.

Speaker 21 If you'd like to get in contact with us to ask us about the book and anything that you've read in it, we can be found on Twitter. I'm on at Schreiberland.
Andy. At Andrew Hunter M.
James.

Speaker 21 I can be found at amazon.com if you search for the book of the year 2019 or in Waterstones

Speaker 21 or at James Hacken. And Shazinski.
You can email podcast at qi.com. Yep, or you can go to our group account at no such thing or our website, no such thingasofish.com.

Speaker 21 We have lots up there, all of our previous episodes, upcoming tickets to tour dates, and you can also find a really exciting behind-the-scenes documentary that we made on our last tour called Behind the Gills.

Speaker 21 Okay, we'll see you again next week. Goodbye.

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