286: No Such Thing As A Banana With Wifi

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Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covert Garden.

My name is Dan Schreiber.

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

And once again, we have gathered around the microphones microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days.

And in no particular order, here we go.

Starting with you, Andy.

My fact is that the first ever ball pit was inspired by a jar of pickled onions.

Yeah.

Amazing.

There's a guy who had a massive jar of pickled onions and his son fell into it one day.

And while they were fishing him out, they noticed, oh, he's having a great time.

So, um, no, it's not that.

It's a guy called Eric Macmillan who invented it.

It was called a ball crawl back in the good old days.

And

he was the subject of a Guardian longread recently.

You know, they do these great long essays.

And it's all about playgrounds and how playgrounds were developed and, you know, the original playgrounds and who first thought of doing all this weird stuff for children to play in because, you know, it had to be invented.

And he was this kind of visionary who invented all these different methods of playing.

And one of the things he was working on was a place called SeaWorld's Captain Kids in San Diego in 1976.

And he and his colleague were looking at a a jar of pickled ideas, and they thought, I think that could work.

So he's seen as the father of soft play, because this wasn't the only thing that he created.

Soft play, I go to a lot these days with my son, and they're amazing gymnasiums of balls and

big...

We are allowed to those gymnasiums.

Seen those in Soho.

I don't know if you should be taking your son.

Yeah, he invented so many things.

So, you know, if you go into, if you see kids playing in a sort of big soft play play bit, there's the hanging boxing bags.

Wait, sorry.

Are they the things that you punch, like punch bags?

Exactly.

Are you taking your son to a gym?

Sounds like it.

Or to a boxing ring.

He looks like a mutant now, just an ink.

He's so buffed.

Yeah.

He's so weird.

You bought a mic for his birthday, didn't you?

But he can't get anywhere on it.

Yeah, so you spend a lot of time in soft play.

The soft play areas have punching bags for children.

No, they're hanging, and you've got to go through them.

You navigate through them.

They're like a forest of punching bags.

Exactly, a forest of punching bags.

Yeah.

They recreate the natural world, don't they?

Onions on the floor and punching bags in the air.

Apparently the balls were originally used for trapping pollutants inside smokestacks,

which I can't quite picture, but I guess if you had a layer of balls in a chimney, then they would, you know, the smoke would kind of filter through and cling to the balls on its way upwards, and so it would take some of the pollutants out.

What, the balls that they use in kids' ball pits now originally...

They originally sourced...

Yeah, those were the people making those plastic balls at the time I don't think they invented the plastic ball that's amazing that's interesting yeah and this guy he he came up with the idea of having soft play because he grew up without the soft play right he grew up in North Manchester in the shadow of Strangeways prison and used to play in bombed out buildings and over like burnt out cars and stuff like that right wow

although bombed out buildings were the inspiration for the best playgrounds in the world.

So the adventure playground, the origin was the bombed-out buildings of World War II in London.

Really?

And kids used to play on them a lot, and people, they were hanging about all over the place.

And people went, well, we should turn these into something a bit less depressing.

And so then they turned them into adventure playgrounds.

And then adventure playgrounds today are more like places where they're like scrapyards, right?

Is that right?

Where you can kind of build things.

There's running machines.

So there's a difference between like the soft play version and a more hard play version, especially in America.

And you get these adventure playgrounds that have got like loose tires, blocks of wood, ropes, hammers, nails.

Right.

I read one place that they can even set fire to things, the kids.

Wow.

I've never seen one of these.

I've never seen them either, but apparently they're more safe than the soft plaything.

And the reason being that as soon as you enter a soft play thing, you go straight for the highest, tallest thing and climb up it.

Because like, obviously, you think everything's safe.

But in these more dodgy ones with lots of like rusty nails and stuff like that, the children kind kind of build their own play area and they start small and they kind of build up to it.

Or they're just quivering in fear in the corner.

Yeah, I think that's a bit of an innovative thing they're doing in America specifically.

It's in New York, isn't it?

And it's called The Yard.

And it's the idea that they want to encourage kids to play with what's around them.

Can we just briefly go back to ball pits?

Yes, please.

I mostly research ball pits at this point.

Okay, yeah.

So

there have been studies done about the hygiene in ball pits because some people are worried.

And there was a spate of stories quite recently.

One guy who worked for a firm called STEM Protect, which is a stem cell bank.

So I don't know why he's sticking his oar into this field of human endeavour.

Everyone's going to have a hobby, mate.

Yeah, so he was saying that 99.9% of ball pits contain levels of vomit and feces, was how it was reported.

Because obviously...

Yeah, it's absolutely believable.

Yeah, yeah.

But I mean, the way he put it, it sounded really distressing.

He said, he's a parent, he said, I've watched some of these places with my professional hat on, and what I've learned has truly disturbed me.

You take your kids to these ball pit play warehouses to have fun, but I've seen kids emerge with their legs covered in poo.

And the worst thing was, it wasn't even their own poo.

How could he tell?

He had his professional hat on.

Everyone knows, as soon as you put your professional hat on, it's poo spotting out.

Swabbing the feces.

There haven't actually been many studies done of this, but there has been a study in Georgia where they swabbed balls from six different ball pits, and they found out what was in there.

And obviously, they found loads of bacteria because there are bacteria everywhere.

You know, that's the whole point.

So there are various ones like meningitis and pneumonia and septicemia and various skin infections.

Yeah, so some of the bad ones were there.

Oh, some of the bad ones, sure.

Some of the ones that you might find in feces, for instance.

Yeah.

But fecal bacteria, as we've said, haven't we, that they're not necessarily bad.

Bacteria, generally.

You know, probably lots of good guy bacteria in there as well.

But even fecal bacteria are not automatically good.

You can't afford some yakle, just lick a ball.

There was one of the one of the dirtiest ball pits that these guys found had an average of 170,818 different bacteria on each ball.

No idea if that's a lot.

I know, because it sounds like a lot.

It sounds like a lot, doesn't it?

Per ball.

But then if you would have to lick the whole ball to get it in...

Like, I don't know about you, but I never licked any of the balls when I was in my ball pit years.

Oh, but you never lived.

What do you mean, your ball pit years?

They still have they have adult ball pits.

That's true, but I've never gone to one.

There's one in London, the ballpit bar in London.

Is there?

It started off as a one-month-only pop-up in Dalston in 2016, but it was so popular that they've opened it full-time.

It's called Bally Ballison,

and every single ball in this place is cleaned by a mechanical ball cleaner that can clean 18,000 balls per hour.

Wow.

That machine is called the Gobble Muffin.

Nice.

Okay.

So

they've made the branding very mature and adult then.

It isn't.

Have you seen how the machines work?

No, no.

I watched a video of a professional ball cleaning machine.

Was it the gobble muffin?

It wasn't.

This was a slower one,

I believe.

But it's basically a great big vacuum tube, and you suck up all the balls, and then they get pushed into this sanitizing bath, and then they get shoved into a drying machine, and then they get blasted back out when they're all dry and nice again.

It's as you would expect.

It cleans the balls.

But it feels like it would be fun to get sucked into that machine, doesn't it?

Right, it does.

It feels like quite a fun ride.

If there was a giant ball pit somewhere where you have to go in one of the balls.

Like a hamster.

Exactly.

Cool, yeah.

That's right.

Why don't they just put a sign-up saying don't shit in the ball pit?

Well, not everyone can read, will they?

Wilfront read.

If this is the adult ball pit, I understand the cleaning for kids, but once you're grown up.

I don't think that the adults who go to Balibalison are shitting in the ballpits.

Well, you don't need to clean the balls.

What's up with this new fangle ball machine?

Don't try and put the gobble muffin out of a job.

Sorry.

So I was looking at the history of playgrounds generally.

And actually, there was this really cool story a few years ago where the oldest swing in the world was found.

Cool.

And it was just in the bottom of someone's garden.

So this was a Wicksteed swing.

So the guy who invented the swing was a guy called Charles Wicksteed.

It was in Kettering in Northamptonshire, and he made this playground and came up with the swing.

And then they were looking for Wicksteed's old playground equipment.

And a random family who lived nearby said, Well, we've got this kind of old-looking swing at the bottom of our garden.

Come and take a look.

And it was his prototype for all of that.

And the kids were still using it.

Well, those are not the original kids.

They were very old by that point.

They were still swinging.

Too old to swing.

They were shitting again by that same time.

How cool is that that the creator of the swing and of the ball pit grew up when we're born, I guess, two hours' drive from each other, Kettering and Sheffield?

Yeah, it's just quite amazing that that bit of the world is.

It's about two, maybe less than two hours.

Well, I looked at it on Google.

Oh, dear.

It's an hour 40 train ride.

Straight up the M1.

Okay.

I find that astonishing we know who invented the swing.

I don't think we do, because I would have thought cavemen were on swings and probably dinosaurs.

I think he definitely invented the.

Hang on.

I'm not even going to get into that.

He invented the modern swing.

He did.

It's always the cop-out, like the modern Olympics, you know.

Yeah.

And also, I'm always, you know, to put on my professional hat, no, my woke hat.

It's, when we say it's a surprising, they're two hours apart from each other, it's not, because I always think these things are so Western biased and so English-speaking country-biased.

They probably had swings in the Netherlands or swing.

They definitely had swings in China probably 7,000 years ago.

I think Darwin made a swing, for instance.

Did he?

Did he make a bullpit?

He didn't make the bullpit, but he e-production.

Another Englishman, of course.

Another Englishman.

He did erect a swing for his kids.

And it sounds like the coolest house ever.

So he was a super fun dad, and he built himself, with the help of a local carpenter he recruited for the purpose, a slide instead of stairs.

So in Darwin's house, you went down a slide instead of the stairs, and then he had a rug go.

Oh, yeah.

You never could.

So you started upstairs, and then you never saw the upstairs again.

Which is a shame because the swing he erected was actually upstairs on the upstairs corridor.

Was it?

Yes.

Just to go back to Wicksteed, Wicksteed, but there is a celebrity link to Wicksteed.

I mean a modern,

quite famous person.

Oh, you mean a descendant?

No, no, no, no.

I mean a modern famous person got their break at Kettering.

Is it James A.

Custer?

It's James A.

Custer, yeah.

He was the only person from Kettering I could think of.

He makes a big thing out of being from Kettering and his very first job was at Wicksteed Park.

Was it?

And he's mentioned it because I think he did a TV show, a sort of like spoof mockumentary about his early life.

And the manager of the park said, we are proud that he worked here and what he has gone on to achieve.

But if he ever wants to come back and help out serving at one of our outlets, he is more than welcome.

Look, Schobe is a difficult industry.

You never know.

Don't burn your bridges.

I was reading that in Germany, Hitler's bunker, right next to it, where his body was cremated, now sits a slide for children.

Oh, there is a children's play area there, isn't it?

Right over the spot.

I think they were thinking of getting rid of it because they thought it was kind of inappropriate.

It feels a bit weird, yeah.

I saw the picture of it.

I mean, they don't have a sign-up or a plaque, do they?

No.

On the slide.

I think that's fine, Dan.

What's fine?

I think it's fine that there's a children's play area.

Oh, it just looks a bit eerie when you know what happened on that spot.

I mean, don't tell the kids.

Like, what?

Campaigning with a big board, a sandwich board.

Bubbling information.

This is a Nazi playground.

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

My fact this week is that bananas are considered such bad luck on fishing boats that many captains ban anyone on board from wearing banana boat sunscreen or clothes made by the company Fruit of the Loom because their logo used to feature a banana.

You can't have anything that's been near a banana anywhere near a fishing boat.

That is so strange.

It's so weird.

And if you go on sort of fishermen's blogs and chat forums, which they all do,

then they all say they all sort of exchange their tips.

And so a lot of them say

how to avoid bananas.

A lot of them say, you know, if you see someone with fruit of the loom underwear or fruit of the loom clothes, I think it is a makeup clothes, isn't it?

Why are you seeing their underwear on that?

Well, I reckon you would have to check everyone's underwear, wouldn't you?

You do.

And then you cut the labels out at the very least, but maybe just rip all the clothes off.

If it's a sexy boat.

Do we know, or Anna, why do you think they weren't allowed bananas on?

There are probably more theories about that than anything.

Strong claim.

So

it could be that I think probably the most likely is that bananas go rotten so fast.

So it dates back to the like 1700s, they were considered bad luck.

And that was a time when the Caribbean was exporting a lot of bananas to continental America.

And if you stop to go fishing, then the bananas spoiled.

And we should say that the bad luck doesn't mean someone will die usually.

It just means that you're not going to catch many fish that day.

And so it's like bananas spoiled.

They also let off a really horrible smell when they rotted and they make other fruit rot around them.

But also there's a theory that they float when bodies don't.

So if a ship sinks.

They think all the sailors have turned into bananas.

Yeah.

It was a mystery for centuries.

Anna, can I just pick you up?

Bodies do float.

Bodies do float.

No, bodies sink at first, don't they?

I'm picturing

Titanic.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Right, the movie or...

The movie.

The movie.

Do you remember at the end with all the bananas floating on the side?

The door is covered in bananas.

She's like, no, I'm sorry, Jack.

There's no room for you on the door.

Oh, but he does sink.

Sorry to use that as a.

He does sink, yeah.

But it could be that he resurfaces later.

Anyway,

the point is, it used to be that when people, when boats sank at sea, they were carrying lots of bananas because they were going to export them.

Then people would row out to try and save everyone, and there'd just be loads of floating bananas.

And so they attributed the cause of the sinking to them.

Fair enough.

Some more theories.

It could be that you get lots of spiders or snakes or something in your banana shipment.

Or it could be that crew members were slipping on the banana peels.

And so obviously that was really bad luck.

Yeah.

Oh, wow.

It's definitely that.

So do we have any more unlucky things?

Yeah.

Let's see.

Redheads are supposed to be unlucky.

That is people with ginger hair.

And

some people say, according to One Maritime Museum,

if you meet one before boarding your ship, the only way to mitigate the bad luck is to speak to them before they can speak to you.

Wow.

This sounds like a plot by Red Turtles to get people talking to them.

I read that whistling is bad luck.

And then in the very same list, I read that whistling is good luck.

So I'm not sure which one to believe.

I would say perhaps don't believe anything in that list.

That's a good thought, yeah.

But the reason for it being bad luck, supposedly, is that they use whistles as commands to each other.

If you couldn't kind of shout, you couldn't really tell them what to do, you might do one whistle for this, two whistles for no.

And so, if you were just whistling a jaunty sea shanty, then it might confuse people who didn't know whether to put their sails up or sails down.

Albatrosses, famously bad luck for sailors.

Yes.

Although not for Captain Cook,

because he was around in the mid 18th century, and they only became bad luck in the end of the 18th century when the Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner came out.

So they weren't bad luck at all before that came out.

It was all because of that.

And actually, they could be good luck.

So, in 1881, there was a man who fell overboard from his boat, and there was an albatross in the water, a dead albatross, and he held onto it and it kind of floated like a banana.

No, if you can imagine that, and it kept him upright for all that time until someone came and collected him.

So, albatrosses can be good luck.

That's amazing.

Any banana stuff?

Oh, yeah.

Well, I've been looking at banana shipping.

Okay.

So I didn't know this, but they have a kind of policy, because obviously they have to be shipped when they're green.

They're cut off the the tree when they're green.

And then when they get to the port they're going to, they're sent into these special pressurized isolation rooms.

And they wait a minute.

Isolation rooms suggest there's only one in each room, but that can't be true.

It's very expensive.

It's amazing, they're so cheap when you think about it.

Sorry, yeah, they go they're going to these kind of forced ripening centers and the air is pumped into the boxes of bananas so that they ripen ripen at a consistent rate and also ethylene which is that chemical they give off they get fake ethylene too so they get them way more ripe but it all happens once they've arrived and there are special banana scientists who control these rooms and i read a great article uh on packer.com which is all about packaging and pecking and shipping and apparently these specialists they monitor the fruit like a mother hen waiting for it to turn and then when it's ready they say right it's ready for asda and they basically are trying to trick the bananas bananas into thinking that they're back in Ecuador or wherever they've come from.

That's amazing.

And the rooms are even pressurized to have the same, like, I guess, air pressure as in Ecuador.

And sorry, I missed the detail.

Is this all happening on the boat or is this once it lands?

Once they've arrived,

special rooms, once they've arrived.

Yeah, yeah.

Cool.

And how do they test the inside pot?

When I've eaten a banana, has it been unpeeled and

laid covered?

No, the syringe has gone in.

You know, sometimes you get a hole in your banana.

Of course,

an air pocket.

Yeah,

that's what it is.

You can squeeze a banana to feel the ripeness, can't you?

That's what I do.

I imagine what happens is they take one banana, test the inside of it, throw that away, and sell all the other ones.

You should be in charge of banana importation because that's much cleverer.

I just had my banana scientist hat on now for a second.

Yeah.

That's so cool.

Do you know Maersk, the shipping firm?

Yeah.

Biggest shipping firm in the world.

Biggest firm most people have never heard of, you know.

But they have 270,000 refrigerated shipping containers, which is

the largest fleet in the world, perhaps.

By a long way, Maersk could be a bigger fleet.

It's huge, yeah.

So these are the worlds.

These are refrigerated, they get called reefers, and the bananas in there effectively have Wi-Fi

because

there is data being taken all the time, remote technology, in each of these refrigerated containers.

And the company is tracking their power status in case one of them stops being refrigerated,

and their temperature and their humidity, and it beams it up to a satellite.

So if there is a malfunction in a shipping container full of bananas in the middle of the ocean, Mares can find out about it and fix it before it arrives.

And they've done that hundreds of times.

I mean, I wouldn't say that that's a banana having Wi-Fi.

They're not surfing the web, are they?

Well, I'm sorry for trying to make it seem a little more interesting than it was.

Cool.

So there's a room with a bit of...

basic technology that most things have there.

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

My fact this week is that Tim Berners-Lee originally wanted to call the World Wide Web the information mine.

Tim, for short.

Yeah.

So I learned this fact.

In fact, we all learned this fact when we were in Geneva earlier this year, being taken on a tour of CERN by a really great guy called James Gillies,

who's a scientist who writes a lot about CERN, who works out there.

And that was one of the things he told us while we were out there looking.

He said there were a bunch of names that Tim Berners-Lee was actually thinking he should call it.

One was Mine of Information.

The Information Mine was another one.

The mesh was another one.

Mine of Information would have been moi.

So that's also about himself.

Yes, exactly, yeah.

And so the reason he didn't go for the information mine is because he thought it would be immodest or he just found a better name or whatever.

Yeah, most sites I've read say that it's because it seemed too egotistical.

I can't really see any source that says...

I thought he said he did a Reddit.

Yeah, I didn't see it on Reddit when I read the answer to that.

Yeah, I sort of read that as someone below commenting on why he said he didn't go for it.

But maybe I missed his proper comment on that.

So did d do we know why why he did go?

No, I I personally I couldn't get to the bottom of it.

Do we know why he did go with World Wide Web?

I guess it's close to mesh, isn't it?

I read that mesh would have been too similar to mess.

Yeah.

They thought it sounded a bit messy.

Which would be quite fitting.

Not necessarily in a derogatory way, but it is a huge mess, isn't it?

It's a huge mess of crap.

The world wide web.

I think you should have started with that.

But he did do this AMA, which was very revealing of a lot of things.

So there's been rumors for years and years that Error 404 came as a result of there being a room called Room 404 in the office that he was working at.

And he said, no, that's absolute nonsense.

Not true at all.

He was asked, is there one thing you never thought the internet would be used for, but has become one of the main reasons that people do use it?

And his one-word answer was kittens.

So he, yeah, he did give some quite fun answers in this thing.

The kittens thing is weird because, you know, the internet, which is different to the World Wide Web, was almost called the Catanet.

Was it really?

Again, how perfect would that have been?

So the Catanet was, this is in 1974, and an internet pioneer, Louis Poussin, wrote this paper where he coined the term Catanet and he said it's going to be a network of networks.

And he said, I bet the world will adopt this.

And he essentially described the internet, said it should be called the Catanet.

And people used that for the internet up until the 80s and then they changed it to the internet and we should probably go back to the catanette given how it's evolved or the porno net but it's harder to say so the web originally was not meant to be read-only.

So Tim Berners-Lee, when he first built it and made it, he wanted it to be an interactive thing so everyone can edit it.

And the only reason it's read-only, so you know, you've got a website, you can't just make changes to the website.

He wanted it to be Wikipedia, basically, is what you mean.

He wanted

every site site to be Wikipedia, right?

Yeah.

But more so than that, you know, might go into a Word document.

Like, everyone's at Wikipedia, there's a process to go through, I guess.

That's it.

So like a Google Doc, basically.

A shared Google Doc.

So you might go onto BBC News and you could just change Boris Johnson's name to Trevor MacDonald if you wanted to.

Yeah.

Don't know why that's the first thing that came into my head.

So weird.

So many insults you could have come up with.

You were lost to the protest on the streets chat.

I was thinking, what's he going to go with?

I bet it's going to be really rude.

I mean, it's really going to get him.

I'm just thinking of what's the most confusing thing you can put out there.

I know.

Why is Trevor MacDonald Prime Minister all of a sudden?

That doesn't make any sense.

I'm now just thinking, I wonder what Trevor MacDonald's up to.

I haven't heard from him in years.

Well, he's retired.

He's pretty elderly now.

Yeah, but what's he doing?

Where is he?

Oh, you know what?

I appreciate him because he's out negotiating with Europe.

So

why didn't that obviously insane idea come to fruition?

It wasn't for any reasons like it being obviously insane.

It was just that logistically, practically, it was too difficult to get it done, the coding and the organization of it.

So it was like, oh, solid it, it's easier to make it a read-only.

And actually, you could argue that's why the internet's got into all the trouble that it has, because it means that all these big companies have power over it, whereas we can't all interact actively.

It could have been such a different thing.

You could have been the worldwide Google Doc.

Yeah.

That's so cool.

And it's so weird that we're calling it Worldwide Google Doc, given that Google is obviously one of the things that's benefited from this huge monopoly that companies have anyway.

I was looking into the earliest transaction, digital transaction, so digital money for a product, and there's quite a few competing theories about what it was.

No one's quite tracked it down, but one of the leading ones is that in 1971 and 1972, the first trans so between that time, a first transaction was made, and it was between students at Stanford University and MIT, and they were selling weed to each other.

Cool.

So the first transaction potentially was a drug deal.

Yeah.

Sorry, I just said cool, like wanting to be cool.

Cool, dude.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I know.

Yeah, like an eighth.

Yeah.

I've got one in my bag right now.

Because there was a lady earlier who'd ordered something by telephone, but that didn't count because she paid in cash when it was delivered to her door.

She predates that, but this is the first digital money transaction.

Very cool.

I don't think it is cool.

It's not cool.

As a cop, I can confirm it's not cool.

Just gonna put my cop's hat on.

Two of you are wearing hats right now.

Dan and James are wearing their hats right now.

Yeah.

It's a new thing.

We're wearing different kinds of hats.

You're from different eras,

judging by the hats.

We're not even going to say what the hats are.

We're just going to let you.

If you send a drawing in of the hats you think Dan and James are wearing at the moment, whoever gets closest will win a small prize.

Send them to Andrew Hunter Murray.

Where did you even get a tricorn?

Do you look?

I don't really think that Ku Klux Klanat is very appropriate.

Oh dear.

Maybe take that off before you go to the soft play area.

I found sort of a precursor to the World Wide Web or in fact Wikipedia, which was the Mundanium, which I can't believe I've never read about.

But this was a thing that was created in 1910.

And it was after this initiative from 1895 of two Belgian lawyers called Paul Octlet and Henri La Fontaine.

And they wanted to create what they called a world palace, basically, all the world's knowledge and information.

They wanted to catalogue it, and so they started doing this.

And it was in the Palais Mondial, so the Palace of the World, I think, in Brussels.

And they got up to 12 million index cards.

So, as a sort of side effect of this, he also invented the index.

Yeah.

And 12 million index cards full of information.

And it was sitting there in Brussels for decades.

And then, of course.

It's just in a big room.

And there's loads of filing cabinets with index cards which has all the information of the world in it.

Yeah.

Wow.

It's impressive, isn't it?

Just two of them.

Probably had a few secretaries, but...

That's amazing.

That's incredible.

Is it still around?

Is it still accessible?

Irritatingly, and I know they always ruin everything, but in 1940, the Nazis rocked up and the Third Reich replaced it with a bunch of Third Reich art.

And some of it was left over, but most of it we don't know where it's gone.

Yeah.

I know that

bastards.

It's always a response to the Nazis doing something, isn't it?

Oh,

God.

For fuck's sake.

I'm going to stop going to that child's play area in Berlin.

On his birthday.

The outfit.

Look, Dan's the one in the hood.

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Subject to change.

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

Okay, my fact this week is that the first known use of the word bellend to refer to a person was for the entire 1992 West Bromwich Albion football team.

Amazing.

I mean, what a fact.

What a fact.

What a bunch of bellends.

So the word bellend, the first, or one of the first uses was the flared end of a trumpet or other wind instrument opposite to the mouthpiece, and that's from 1826.

And then in 1819, it meant the enclosed extension from the main living space of a tent, especially one with a rounded shape.

That was in 1819, did you say?

That was in 1919.

Sorry if I said 18.

And then 1961 it became referring to the penis.

And then in 1992, someone was on a Usenet newsgroup on the 28th of September and said, perhaps you are referring to that infamous collection of bell ends known as WBA, Wind Bugger All.

And they were insulting West Bron, but it was a bit harsh because I looked at their results around this time, and there had been nine games that season, and they'd won seven, drawn one, and lost one, and they got promoted at the end of the season.

Oh, wow.

What a bunch of bell ends.

Interesting fact, the man who wrote that comment was Tim Berners-Lee.

It was the whole reason he'd invented the World Wide Web.

There you go.

It is a very, uh, it's a very British insult, isn't it?

I don't think it gets used in America.

No,

no, you shouldn't think so.

No, it had synonyms.

So when it became used for the end of the penis in nineteen sixty one, as you said, in the Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, then it was synonymous with blunt end and red end, which have fallen out of use, but we could bring back.

Blunt end.

What?

Blunt end.

What a bunch of blunt ends.

But you don't have a sharp end at the other end of a penis.

Well, maybe you should see someone about that.

I don't have two ends.

Oh, you really should see someone about that.

There's only one other word in the Oxford English Dictionary whose first citation references West Bromwich Albion Football Club, and that is the word marksman, referring to someone who scores lots of goals in a football team.

It says West Bromwich Albion are largely relying on James Cookson, the marksman of Chesterfield.

There you go.

That is great.

Who knew there was such a hotbed of neologisms?

It's true,

I looked at Birmingham City Football Club and Aston Villa Football Club, who are both similar local teams, and they don't have a single one.

Wow.

It's the worst problem of the Shakespeare of our time, aren't they?

One insult that is in the Oxford English Dictionary that has a fantastic reference or citation of quotes is dickweed.

And dickweed is a word that got popularised in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure.

Oh, yeah.

So they use a quote from that movie in the Oxford English Dictionary.

And it's a word that I grew up with because I love that movie and used to call people a dickweed, but I didn't know what dickweed actually meant.

And it's pubic hair.

I just had not put that connection together.

I'd never thought of that.

Do you think it's play on the word duckweed?

Which is like a type of plant you get in a pond.

Is it?

Okay.

Do you think it is?

I don't think he was stating that it was, and I doubt that they've thought about it to that extent.

Oh, I reckon it might be, though.

Because

it's not a common word, but it's reasonably common.

Oh, you duckweed.

You dickweed.

Yeah, I think that's plausible.

I'm not saying it's totally impossible.

I just think it's one of those unknowables.

You'll never know.

There'll never be a smoking gun on this.

Bellend is also a village.

And that is, coincidentally, only 10 miles from West Bromwich Elbion's football ground.

And I think, as far as I can tell, that West Bromwich Elbion is the closest English football team to the village of Bellend.

No way!

That is insane.

It's close, but I think it is.

Oh, that's much better than my two-hour journey from Kettering to Sheffield.

I wonder if the person who knows.

I wonder if the person who wrote that comment online in 1992

knows that they are the first use of a word recorded in a language.

No, and of course, it's hard to imagine that he made it up, right?

It feels like lots of people are saying it, but it's just the first written down.

Yeah, because, you know, there weren't many.

It wasn't mentioned in newspapers much.

No, but it might have been in private correspondence.

Maybe in Churchill's letters, he writes to someone else and says, Hitler is such a bellen.

I can't believe what they did to the mundaneum.

Michael Flatley fits into the Bellende story as well.

And I think we might have mentioned this in the book of the first ever book of the year.

Okay, can you explain who he is for the uninitiated?

So sorry, Michael Flatley, the father of Riverdance, Irish dance, not the father, one of its descendants, but he's an Irish dancer and performer.

And, you know, the big thing where they line up and they all dance.

He's very famous for that.

They call him Lord of the Dance.

And he said in

late 2016 that he would perform at Donald Trump's inauguration.

And as a result of that, someone redirected the website, colossalbellend.com, so that when you type that in, it went to Michael Flatley's website.

Yeah.

That's very good.

But it's amazing.

Bell was used to mean penis in 1593.

Yes.

That's the first use of bell to mean penis, and that's from Jonathan Greene's Dictionary of Slang.

And it refers to a young man wagging his bauble and ringing his bell, and it's clearly a knob gag.

And yet it took so long for us to really embrace it.

Well, just for Belle to become Belle End and then for that to become a personal personal thing.

That was in a, what sounds like a great book called The Passionate Maurice.

That sounds like someone's pen pal.

The passionate Maurice.

I'm waggling my bauble as I think with you.

I'm not sure what sort of pen pals you had in the styles.

Mine were considerably tamer stuff.

But he got pickpocketed in the story as he was doing that.

So let this be a lesson to all men.

He fancied this woman in the story.

I assume the character, the passionate Maurice.

And he said he was very pleased by her.

And he showed this with whacking his bauble and ringing his bell while she picked his pocket and cut his purse.

So if you will get your willie out and start publicly wanking, you will be pickpocketed, I think.

Is the moral of that story?

What a bold time to pickpocket someone.

You'd be king of the pickpocketers.

I suppose if you've taken your trousers off to waggle it, then actually it is easier to pickpocket someone, isn't it?

I don't think you'd fully.

I think it's a weird flash who fully takes off their trousers, folds them up and puts them on a nearby seat on the train.

Flashes are a weird bunch altogether.

I'm not saying they're not.

I'm just saying that would require a very organised flashing mentality.

We're going to have to wrap up shortly.

Yep, just a couple of older bits of insult.

This is from a classical dictionary of the vulgar tongue, which was published in 1785.

And you can get it online.

And some really good ones I like in there are what to be dicked in the knob.

I don't think you need to tell us on that.

That could mean anything, couldn't it?

It just means silly.

Guys, it just means you're a silly billy.

Dicked in the knob.

It's a knob meaning head.

Yes, believe so.

Dicky, as in something's gone wrong.

You could also say that somebody is Captain Queer Nabs, and that's if they are an ill-dressed or shabby fellow.

Oh, okay.

Or if you're...

This isn't really an insult, it's just if you're surprised or confounded, you are betwattled.

That's great.

We should bring that back.

We definitely should.

Okay, that is 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 that we have said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter accounts.

I'm on at Schreiberland, Andy at Andrew Hunteram, James at James Harkin, and Chaczynski.

You can email podcast at qi.com.

That's right, or you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing, or our website, no such thingasoffish.com.

Do check it out.

There's plenty of stuff up there from all of our previous episodes to upcoming tour dates.

And that's it.

Okay, we'll see you again next week.

Goodbye.

Let's be real.

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