227: No Such Thing As A More Ambitious Crossover Event In History

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Hey everyone, welcome to this week's episode of No Such Thing as a Fish.

Before we get going, we just want to let you know that this is a particularly interesting episode.

It's what we like to call a crossover episode.

You may be aware of crossover movies.

Take the latest Avengers movie where they had Guardians of the Galaxy involved.

We've decided to do a crossover episode with ourselves.

It's very ambitious, but I think we've managed it.

We screwed up, didn't we, Dan?

We did.

We screwed up.

We were in Wellington.

We were on stage.

Wellington is in New Zealand, and we were recording a show as part of our tour and we've only just found out that the final two facts are missing.

The recording is gone.

Or the final one and a half facts, I think.

And you'll notice, I believe.

Yeah, so what it'll sound like is that all of our jokes are falling really, really flat.

How will listeners tell the difference?

Okay, so listen carefully because you might actually miss it.

We'll do our best to make sure it's flagged up, but if we've done our job well, you won't notice.

Okay, on with the show.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast this week coming to you from Wellington.

My name is is Dan Schreiber, and I am sitting here with Anna Chaczynski, Andrew Hunter-Murray, and James Harkin.

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

And in no particular order, here we go.

Starting with fact number one, and that is Czaczynski.

My fact is that if a lamb starts being born the wrong way up, the farmer pushes it right back up into the womb and gets it to start again.

And

I thought I'd do a fact about sheep because we're here.

And

wow, that is a risky start.

See, not everyone in the room is a sheep farmer.

But on the sides of the laugh, about half of them are.

So, yeah, this is this.

I think I first came across this in a New Yorker piece that was an interview with a guy called James Rebanks, who's a sheep farmer in Cumbria in the UK.

And he was saying, yeah, most lambs, if they're being born well, they come out like a diver.

So it's like head and front legs first.

But if the legs and the head come out in the wrong order at all, you literally have to shove it right back up there and rearrange them in order that they come out the right way.

And so he gave various instances of ways that it could go wrong.

So if the legs come out without a head, then you have to go, that means the head, that doesn't mean it's left the head right behind in the uterus.

It just means the head's a bit bent.

So you've got to return it and rearrange it.

And when you do rearrange it, they have to cup the mouth of the lamb so that the lamb's teeth don't tear at the birthing canal in the uterus.

Crikey.

I know.

It's a combination of extremely sweet and extremely disgusting.

Yeah.

I've not, I'm yet to hear the sweet putt.

He's helping the little lamb get out intact.

Okay, when you put it like that, what does the sheep think as the baby at birthing is suddenly pushed back in like that?

That's got to be the weirdest experience ever.

We don't have any records on what they think, but.

They must be concerned, right?

I read a thing that sheep have an incredible peripheral vision.

Not that incredible that they can see up there.

But they think they can go almost to 360.

They've almost got 360 view with their eyes.

It's almost impossible to sneak up on them.

Yeah.

That speaks a man of experience, doesn't it?

Almost, but not quite.

But they must, as it's being shoved back in, they must.

They must be where they look like.

What are you doing?

Well, they see you.

They're very dappy.

I mean, genuinely, they are quite, I think they're quite crap mothers, at least at the start.

So we're just, I read so many farming blogs, and

turns out ewes are very bad at knowing which ones are their babies, and the babies are very bad at knowing which ones are their mothers, and they're constantly getting confused about this and going off with the wrong parent.

And so a lamb will accidentally pick the wrong parent that won't be able to produce milk, and so it'll starve.

And

there's this weird thing where farmers, sometimes a lamb will be born and be an orphan, so the ewe might die in childbirth.

And this amazing thing that farmers do to trick ewes into believing that another lamb is their lamb.

And what they do is there'll be a ewe that's pregnant with one lamb and it gives birth to it.

And the farmer then needs to trick the ewe into thinking it's about to have twins.

And so what he does, prepare yourselves, is first of all, he covers the orphan lamb in the birthing fluid so that it smells right from the other one and he ties its legs together because often that lamb's a day old or so and they can run away.

And if you're just given birth to something, it's very unusual for it to immediately go gallivanting over the fields.

And then what he does is he sort of puts, inserts his hand into the ewe and pretends that his hand is the second lamb that's being born.

And then the ewe will be convinced that she's having contractions and think that she's giving birth and you keep it in there.

And then you whip it out and then you quickly do the magic trick of quickly shoving the orphan lamb under the you's nose.

And it thinks, oh, that must be what just came out of me.

I've got a fact about

lambing sound effects.

So this is from the long-running Radio 4 show, The Archers.

Oh, yeah.

They have a style guide on how to do the sound effect of a lamb being born.

Wow.

So you have to overlay agitated barring.

That's very important.

So there's barring going on and it sounds stressed.

And then you put a soaking wet towel on your shoulder, it's really heavy, and then you squeeze a huge amount of yogurt through your gloved hands, and then you drop the wet towel onto a bed of old recording tape.

Wow.

Why don't they just use the recording of an actual lambing?

Often they don't sound right, do they?

When you do the actual thing, it doesn't sound like what you expect.

It might happen that if you recorded that, it would just sound like an old towel being dropped after some yogurt has been strained.

I thought I would find out what farmers did, but I forgot to look on the blogs.

I went onto Reddit,

and

there was an AMA with a sheep farmer, and one of the top questions was: why do they have such shitty asses?

The farmers or the sheep?

They were speaking about the sheep.

The guy said, This is true, it's as though they have zero control or awareness of what comes out.

And they actually sell jackets to go over the sheep to protect the wool from getting dirty for those who want super clean wool.

So you get some sheep who are wearing like an all-in-one onesie with a little hole and it keeps them clean.

And will that be made of a previous sheep?

Well, there is one thing that they do.

Again, if they want a ewe to adopt an orphan sheep, they will shave the wool off one of its real offspring and then put it on the other one as a disguise.

So they literally wear the other lamb's clothes.

It's like a sheep in sheep's clothing.

It's a lamb in lamb's clothing.

But yeah, I think everyone gets the idea.

It's very clever.

Did you know that sheep have their own weather forecast?

What?

In the UK, sheep have their own weather forecast.

Oh, they don't.

They do.

It's just been launched.

It's in Bristol.

And it's a traffic light system of warnings which measures weather and it works out the risk of there's a very particular parasite they get called nematodirus.

And if you are a nematodiris, and I've pronounced it wrong, please don't write in.

But it's very useful.

The only problem with it is that they have not called it the sheeping forecast.

Guys?

I think you groaned there when you meant a a supportive heart to chuckle.

So it's a forecast not of weather but of parasites.

Yes.

Well, it's weather which tells you when the parasites are going to be coming in.

Wow.

And it tells the humans, not the sheep.

It's really a forecast for farmers, isn't it?

Or do the sheep gather round at 5 p.m.

every Monday afternoon?

There's going to be a lot of parasites out there tonight.

Look lively, stay sharp.

I was reading a medical report about,

it just gives you viruses, it talks about viruses and parasites and so on that come up.

And these people who are reading it noticed a sort of very odd entry in it, which is that

a few people who were farmers who were involved in castrating lambs when they were born got very ill very quickly.

And there were 12 people who got ill.

But they worked out that two of them got ill because they were castrating with an old method that still goes on these days,

not completely, but in the 1800s all the time.

They castrate using their teeth.

So these are, yeah, these are humans who go...

And two of these guys were castrating these lambs with their teeth and they got very ill.

One of my best friends has done that in Australia.

In Western Australia.

Yep.

Did they get ill?

He's well, he's pretty insane, but he's not sick.

I think he is sick.

Yeah.

And they go by on a conveyor belt, right?

And you lie underneath them and you just whip them off on by one.

What?

Where you come up like jaws?

Like you just can't

bite off their balls.

Is your friend Australian?

He lived in Australia for a year.

Well, he was British.

Yeah, feels like they kind of saw him come in, didn't they?

Yeah, we all do this, mate.

This guy looks like he'll bite the balls off anything.

Do you know how farmers can tell when sheep have mated?

This is an interesting thing.

Well, they wait nine months.

Yeah.

So what they do, well, in a lot of farms, what they do is they draw on the males with crayon.

Okay?

And then, if they come back later, so they they draw on the underside of the males with crayon, and if they come back later, because you can't be watching the sheep all the time,

it's chalk.

It might be chalk here, but in some places, and in the sources I found, it was crayon.

Anyway, if they come back later and the female's got crayon or chalk

on her back, then they know that mating has occurred.

But you wouldn't think that crayon would work, right?

Yeah, you'd.

To Harkin.

Hey, another weird thing that happens to female pregnant lamp, sorry, sheep is that they get really heavy with the weight and their wool gets really heavy.

So sometimes they lose balance and they tip over and they fall on their back like a turtle and they can't get back up.

So they get stuck.

So farmers have to go and sort of like bring pregnant sheep back onto their feet.

Otherwise, they're just stuck there upside down.

Wow.

Yeah.

Sheep spinning.

They are stupid, aren't they?

They are.

Someone sent me a text in the break, and I can't remember who it is, and I've turned my phone off, sorry.

But they said that when it snows, the sheep can't believe that the grass is underneath the snow.

They think it's just disappeared.

And so they'll just starve to death if you don't kind of clear them a little clearing.

Is it another one of those magic tricks they think of happening, like the swapping of the lamb?

And apparently like cows and cattle, they all clear it away.

Wow.

But sheep are just stupid.

They sometimes, so they have to groom their lambs when they give birth to them and sometimes they get so carried away with grooming that they bite their tails off.

Wait, that's just

the mothers.

I thought you meant this was your friend biting.

I think your friend just really likes lamb.

Look.

But yeah, the mothers, they've got to lick off all the afterbirth and stuff, but they get really excited and they'll bite the umbilical cord and then they'll just bite the tail off.

And the farmers don't know what to do because you're not supposed to get involved because otherwise that might separate the mother from the lamb.

And so they just have to watch, sort of going, no stop it stop biting the tail of your child you're like all right

guys we're gonna have to move on shortly to our next fact just one last thing Mary had a little lamb the nursery rhyme is based on a true story

you know that yeah

well there's nothing supernatural in there or anything is it's it's just about someone called Mary who had a little lamb it's quite believable yeah and the sheep followed her wherever she it's a good herder she's yeah it's a very

what's what's your point Andy

Was she famous?

Was she a famous Mary?

She was not.

She was a woman

called Mary Sawyer.

It was in Massachusetts in 1830.

She had a lamb, and it followed her all over the place.

No, no, no, the interesting thing was

its fleece was as white as snow.

And then,

so it went, I've disappeared.

Where am I?

Today, we're exploring deep in the North American wilderness among nature's wildest plants, animals, and

cows.

Uh, you're actually on an Organic Valley dairy farm where nutritious, delicious organic food gets its start.

But there's so much nature.

Exactly.

Organic Valley's small family farms protect the land and the plants and animals that call it home.

Extraordinary.

Sure is.

Organic Valley, protecting where your food comes from.

Learn more about their delicious dairy at ov.coop.

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My children, my family, my community.

All students are students.

All students belong in a great public school.

Let's get ready for back to school at NEA.org/slash back to school.

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

My fact is that the Netflix category, Gory Canadian Revenge Movies,

only has one film in it.

Wow, and what's the film, Dina?

I don't.

I haven't got it written down.

So,

yeah.

Your research today has been very lax.

It consists of reciting nursery rhymes and having half-formed facts.

So,

what the thing that happens is

there are these micro-categories on Netflix, and if you have a Netflix account, you might have seen them.

So, goofy werewolf comedies is one, or sentimental movies about horses for ages 11 to 12.

And some of them, this is the bizarre thing.

Netflix has made 76,897 unique categories, according to the last count done.

And some of them have nothing in them.

So the feel-good romantic Spanish-language TV show, Netflix has none, but they've created the category because some will exist.

Wow.

So for instance, skiing non-fiction, none of those.

Iranian comedies, none of those.

So we're just waiting to discover them, I guess.

It's like when they knew India existed and they tried to find it.

If you pitch a show to Netflix to make, they'll probably be like, well, it's a shit idea, but we need one of those.

You've got the money.

They actually, there was a role that was advertised in the UK for someone specifically to create these kind of categories.

So the idea was they advertised for someone who would basically binge-watch Netflix.

They would just sit and watch movie after movie, and while they were watching, they would think of unique different tags that they could give to each of those movies to create these kind of categories.

But the other thing is, they have professional watchers.

So this fact is from a piece in The Atlantic, which was fantastic.

It was a journalist who ran a script to download all 76,000.

The guys who professionally watch Netflix, they tag movies with all kinds of data.

So it's not just, you know, how rude the plot is or whether there's violence.

They tag how conclusive the plot is, they tag how moral the characters are, and they just analyze everything.

And all they want is to get you to watch more Netflix.

So one of them said you might like what I consider to be horrible movies, but my job right now is to get you to watch all those horrible movies that you want.

And they have thousands of categories designed specifically for that.

But who's specifically looking for things like this?

That's what's so weird.

Who wants a thing that's 80% conclusive with moderately moral characters?

No one's searching for that in Netflix.

That sounds fun.

Yeah, okay, maybe.

Also, I think that there are films and their categorization filling isn't very good.

So one of the ones that has nothing in it is suspenseful time travel movies.

There's definitely got to be some of those.

Like, Back to the Future is suspenseful, right?

Yes, yeah.

Sentimental action and adventure.

There must be one sentimental action film out there.

Yeah, not everything's on Netflix, though.

That's the issue, I guess.

Like, Back to the Future, I don't think, is on Netflix, therefore, maybe they're just waiting to it is Dan, apparently.

That guy at the back watched it this morning

right after birthing his lambs.

So, Netflix released a load of their stats from 2017.

And apparently, someone in New Zealand watched Grown-Ups 331 times last year.

Great movie.

Absolutely.

Great movie, but 331 times in a year.

Apparently, there's a podcast called The Worst Idea of All Time where they tell you to do that, so that's why they did that.

Ah, cool.

There was one viewer in Antarctica who binged on Shameless, and there was one person in America who watched the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie every single day for a year.

Wow.

I'd rather do that than watch the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean movie once.

Netflix has shamed people for this, though.

They sent out a tweet in December last year saying, to the 53 people who've been watching A Christmas Prince every day for the past 18 days, who hurt you?

Oh, that's pretty mean.

It's a combination of mean, creepy.

Just one more thing that they've got about category-wise.

They've got so many things starring the actor Raymond Burr.

Uh-huh.

Yeah.

Yeah.

They've got suspenseful movies starring Raymond Burr.

They've got cerebral mysteries starring Raymond Burr.

They've got understated suspenseful dramas starring Raymond Burr.

They've got about 15 Raymond Burr exclusive categories.

It's very bizarre.

That's so good.

I know Netflix, I guess, from the last, let's say, five years.

I think that's when I started using it.

I had no idea that Netflix has been around since 1997.

It's an extremely old company.

It was extremely old.

It's not General Electric, is it?

It's old for

what I think most people perceive to be a very 2000s, at least 2010s,

something there.

It's kind of that thing.

So I was looking into it, and it's a very interesting backstory.

There's a number of stories that their creator, Netflix founder, Reed Hastings, puts out.

One is that he got a very big bill for a VHS that he sent back in too late.

It was Apollo 13, and he thought there's got to be a better system.

So he created it.

And what it used to be is, like, those things where you would order a DVD off the internet, the difference was rather than getting a booklet that told you everything that was in it, back in 1997, there was a website that would send you a VHS, and so you would just pick it from the website and order it.

So it already had a web presence back then.

But yeah, that's.

I remember when it was just DVDs and they send you DVDs through the post, and that still exists, that business, and it's still making money.

But actually, in 2000, Reed Hastings approached blockbusters and asked them to buy Netflix for $50 million,

the entire company.

And they refused.

And

that did not age well, that decision, did it?

Yeah.

Just one tiny little nugget about Reed Hastings when I was reading into him.

His grandfather was a very famous physicist, and

he was very important in the roles of inventing radar and the atomic bomb for World War II.

And President Roosevelt said of Reed's grandfather that he was a civilian who was second perhaps only to Winston Churchill in facilitating the Allied victory in World War II.

So his grandfather is a seriously important character.

Wow.

Yeah, sort of an unknown name to the general public.

Wow, they've both made equally important contributions, I would say,

to the overall happiness of the world.

The Reed Hastings story about its inception quite amuses me because there is this story he tells when it's asked, How did you come up with Netflix?

He says, I was overcharged for a film and I was charged $40.

It was Apollo 13, charged $40.

I'd lost the film.

He said, I didn't want to tell my wife about it.

And I said to myself, am I really going to compromise the integrity of my marriage over a late fee?

Which I would say is marriage is on shaky ground if that's going to compromise its integrity.

But so then he thought, okay, I'm going to set up a new company that doesn't do this.

But his co-founder is called Mark Randolph, and he just keeps killing this story.

So maybe he's exaggerated the story over time or he's piecing things together that weren't together at the time.

And Mark Randolph, every time he's interviewed, is like, no, it's bullshit.

Read Hasting Story.

No, no, it didn't happen.

But it's a nice story, isn't it?

So I let him tell it.

Wow.

Come on, get your story straight, guys.

So Netflix and chill is a thing, isn't it?

There's an article on fusion.com about the history of that phrase.

And they said that the first use was in January 2009 by at NoFaceNina on Twitter.

And by 2014, summer of 2014, it had a slightly sexual meaning.

And then by October, so a few months later, someone said that Netflix and chill never means Netflix and chill now, these days, lol.

Okay, so that was at it is Isaac

on twitter how many a's is that quite a lot right okay or maybe i just pressed the key too long on my keyboard i'm not sure and then by the end of that year it was all over twitter and then by august 2015 us parents were asking their kids what netflix and chill meant and they were using it and that became the end of the meme so basically

it lasted for less than six years from going from nothing to cool to don't say that anymore yeah

my wife didn't know what Netflix and chill meant, the sexual context of it.

And whenever

you have a baby, don't you?

We do have a baby, yeah.

And we were watching grown-ups for the 50th time when we conceived him.

But we, yeah, so whenever work finished for her, her bosses would be like, what are you up to tonight?

She'd go, I'm just going to be home with my husband, Netflix and chill.

She thought, oh, we're just chilling.

And I told her on a train what it meant, and her face went, what?

But at least she wasn't saying, I'm going home to see my mum, Netflix, and chill.

You know, the husband, that's actually okay.

That's true.

Do you know that Netflix knows exactly when you will get hooked on a series?

This is quite creepy, but it's also quite interesting.

So

it works out the exact point.

The definition of being hooked is, it works out the exact point at which 70% of people go on to finish the series.

So that's their definition of being hooked.

So Breaking Bad, you will be hooked by episode 2, you know, on average.

How I Met Your Mother, episode eight.

I wonder with Breaking Bad if it's quicker to get hooked watching the show

or taking crystal math.

Yeah.

The Big Bang Theory, apparently never.

And for fans of the Big Bang Theory, that was a laugh.

Ow.

We have made a powerful enemy tonight, Sam Targa.

Just on the subject of breaking bad and drugs and being hooked, Netflix actually co-created drugs and released drugs in a way.

It was a really old company, isn't it, though?

No, Netflix co-created a set of cannabis strains based on a selection of its popular original shows.

And they did this.

It was a pop-up event in West Hollywood for the alternative herbal health services.

And the set of drugs that you could buy were called the Netflix collection and they were part of helping to create these.

So you could get ones that were made to tie in orange as a new black, it would tie in with that.

There were ones for arrested development which were labeled the banana stand kush.

Yeah, ideally for a big yellow joint.

That was the thing.

And they did it for the Grace and Frankie TV show as well.

So you can buy cannabis, which is co-created by Netflix, and smoke it while you binge.

And do they do the thing where you have two toques and you go, oh, that's good, and someone comes up to you and goes, I think you might also like this, by the way.

You try this.

Or maybe this one over there.

Yeah, they don't make any profit from it, by the way.

It was just that they just want to get people high.

Cool.

Did you know there is a Spanish platform which is related?

In fact, no, sorry, legally, it's unrelated.

But

it there is a Spanish platform called Napflix, which is T V to fall asleep very easily to.

And it might just be me, but I think all the stuff on it sounds really good.

So there's a Big Bang Theory.

Please,

please edit those jokes out of the show.

Do you have a hope of having a cameo in there one day, Danny?

I just don't want to be killed by an army of nerds.

I just don't.

They've got...

You might like this, James.

They've got a four-hour video of the World Chess Championship 2013.

You like chess?

I do.

I subscribe to a special chess channel.

Do you?

And I'm the one slag enough fans of the big pen.

Yeah.

So Netflix ran a competition to fix its algorithm.

So the thing it does where it recommends stuff that you might like, it has been a massively difficult thing to achieve over the years.

In 2006, there was a $1 million award for anyone who could improve the recommendations algorithm.

So it could actually recommend stuff that you genuinely would like.

And it took three years to be won.

It was won by this collective and it improved the accuracy of the one they had by 10%.

And it's so weird.

So, all these coders were competing for it.

It took three years, and then the people who won and the people who came second only submitted their bits 20 minutes apart.

So, they lost a million dollars by 20 minutes.

But the main challenge for these coders is Napoleon Dynamite.

So,

no algorithms seem to know if someone's going to like Napoleon Dynamite.

That was it, and that was the challenge it was set.

It was like, can you work out if someone will like Napoleon Dynamite?

Because we don't know.

There seems to be no rhyme or reason to it.

Wow.

Yeah.

That's incredible as well, making a million dollars in 20 minutes, which is coincidentally what the cast of the Big Bang Theory do.

We're going to have to move on in a sec, guys, for our next fact.

Did you see the survey that Netflix did last year on how people are watching?

And so two-thirds of people watch Netflix in public now or watch stream in public, which I think is weird.

Do you mean like on the train or on the public?

People on the train, on the commute to work, whatever.

I know I have a phone from 2001, so maybe that's why I don't do it.

But last, so this is last year, and it found that 65% of people have burst out laughing on public transport while watching it.

20% have cried in public and then been embarrassed about it.

But 27% of people who've been streaming stuff in public on public transport, for example, have had strangers interrupt them while they're watching to start talking about the show that they're watching.

Is that a thing?

I once in slightly, okay.

I was in Japan once, I was in Tokyo, and I was on one of the subway trains, and I noticed the phone of the guy sitting next to me.

He was a Western guy, and he was listening to No Such Thing as a Fish.

And I.

No, hang on.

He was, no, wait, the story, hang on.

He was watching QI, and I leaned over to him and I said, I wrote that.

And he did not believe me.

And I know from the way he said, oh, okay.

The next one off at the next stop.

On the flight over from Australia to New Zealand, there was a guy sat in front of me, you, and Anna who was listening to no such thing as a fish, right?

Yeah, that's right.

And we were chatting behind him.

He must have been so freaked out when he took his headphones off.

This has all got a bit more boring very quickly.

We need to move on to our next fact, guys.

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

Okay, my fact this week is that in sacred moche combat, the aim was not to kill your opponent, but to knock his hat off.

And the loser didn't get off that easily, though, because he would immediately be sacrificed.

Oh.

You lose your hat, but fortunately, you won't have a head anymore to put it on.

So the Moche were a civilization from Peru, and I learned this last year when I visited the LACO Museum of Pre-Columbian Art in Lima.

And we know about this because all we know about these people, they're really mysterious, but everything we know comes from their pottery.

And we have kind of, they're like little cartoons of what happens, and so that's how we know about it.

Wow, very cool.

So, what kind of hats are they?

Is it like a top hat?

Because the top hat would be quite easy to knock off, but then a beanie is quite difficult.

That's true.

And a bike helmet, almost impossible.

They were large, feathery kind of feather pieces.

Sounds easy.

Sounds easy.

Yeah, it is easy.

Well, really, they just wanted someone to sacrifice.

I don't think they really gave a shit who it was.

And I think sometimes they also then sacrificed the winner, right?

This is sometimes a thing in Mesoamerican cultures, but they'd sacrifice a guy whose hat got knocked off, but then they thought the gods also deserved their best warriors, so they would sometimes also sacrifice the one who'd won the battle.

It's a real catch-22.

That's terrible, yeah.

Oh, it is.

Imagine the pre-show interviews, like the pre-match interviews.

How are you feeling about the match?

Not good.

Yeah, I didn't know that they made rubber balls.

Yes, they did.

Some of them, yeah.

The Olmecs, especially.

Yes, some Mesoamericans, they made rubber balls, and they could make some much different compounds.

This is very cool.

And some of them had, the scientists believe that they made 16,000 balls a year in special rubber ball factories.

Wow.

Yeah, this is.

Yeah,

this doesn't sound very true, though, does it?

Not factories, come on.

It's got the word fact in it, James.

Is this the Mesoamerican ball game that we're talking about?

I thought thought that was

slightly different to Sacred Mochre hat combat as the later Miso American ball game.

Yeah, they play with these balls and it's a crazy game.

And again, historians are not quite sure whether when the loser and the winner are determined who were the ones that were murdered and sacrificed off the back of it.

They think it might have been the losers who got sacrificed, but actually the gods were more interested in the best blood and the most skillful.

So actually you would probably kill the better team, the winners.

And there was this extra thing where they would chop their heads off, and some historians believe that then they took the heads of the opponents and then used those as like a post-match ball game to then play with their heads.

There are pictures of that happening.

True?

Yeah, you know, the drawings that we have of them doing that.

And they would also drink out of them sometimes.

So the post-match skull would be used as a drinking vessel.

So they would recycle.

It's not a way to drive up the quality of the game, I think, to kill good teams and bad teams alike.

I think that's why we should say they almost certainly didn't do this the vast majority of the time.

I read a really good analogy which was imagine if in 5,000 years people looked at all of the Christian art that we have now and thought wow this is so weird they just crucified people left right and center every time they went to church just because that's the thing that remains the image that remains it probably did happen but probably not that often.

Yeah, they seem to have really disliked a particular look in people.

And if you had a beard and you had dark hair, you'd be crucified.

So they do have really interesting pottery, the Moche people.

And there was an exhibition in Paris a few years ago about it.

It was called Sex, Death and Sacrifice in the Moche Religion.

And it had to have a warning on the way in about explicit content.

Even though this is from how long ago?

2,000 years ago?

Yeah, best part of that.

But have you seen it?

Because it is pretty...

Hardcore.

I couldn't.

I've got some good things on my computer that stopped me having to look at that sort of thing.

Well, Well, I do not have that.

Although, actually, in fairness, I went to this museum.

So, this Laco Museum, they have an annex for erotic pottery.

Erottery?

There's also, if you can't get down to Lima, there's a really good article on Traveller.com about that annex entitled 50 Shades of Clay.

Superb.

But these pots, they're in the museum, they're under different

categories, like Netflix kind of.

And there's the union of animals, fruits, and deities.

Sexual activity of the dead.

It's not a Netflix category.

And if you have that special thing on your Netflix, it doesn't let you watch those.

Intercourse between animals, that includes frogs, mice, dogs, llamas, monkeys, and ears of corn.

Wow.

In that museum, they have a pot of a man receiving oral sex that they call in the museum the Bill Clinton pot.

They were such an advanced civilization, the Moce.

Incredible.

They are.

When these are referred to, they're always referred to as sex pots.

And this is in

archaeological papers and they talk about the Moce sex pots.

And you can't take it seriously at all.

Crossover, crossover.

Oh, my God.

It's a crossover, crossover, yeah, yeah, yeah.

What they can do, what they're gonna do, how they're gonna get it together.

Oh!

Yeah, so the moche are really.

Okay, so where were we, guys?

Adda, you were just telling us about.

I don't know, James, it was three months ago.

You were telling us about sex pots.

Ah, sex pots.

Yes, but actually, I wanted to move on now to talk about knocking hats off.

Can we do that?

This is a fact about knocking hats off.

That's right, yeah.

Right?

So I was looking into the history of that, an easy thing to research.

And I found out that 200 years ago in the Ottoman Empire, if you knocked off someone's turban, it was punishable by death.

Wow.

And I discovered this because I was reading an account in 1799 of a Christian who was taken to court because they were accused of knocking off a Muslim's turban.

And the Christian's explanation, which seemed to be believed by the court, was that the Muslim had been wearing a blue turban, which looked exactly like the turban that his friend usually wore.

So he said he'd knocked it off as a prank because he thought it was his mate.

And then the guy had turned around and it wasn't.

And in fact, he ended up getting off scot-free, and the judge ended up punishing the Muslim for wearing a blue turban when he was supposed to be wearing a green one.

Oh no, that's cool.

I got a couple of hat things just very quickly.

On George Orwell's 110th birthday, it was celebrated in a little Dutch town by these artists putting little hats on every single CCTV camera around there.

Apparently, it's loaded.

Just to make them look cute.

Just to sort of show how his vision has come true, basically, from the book.

I don't remember the hats being in the book.

It was the unedited, unabridged story.

Yeah, the party version.

It's those hats you get on innocent smoothie bottles.

They came originally from 1984 CCTV.

Very sweet.

Yeah.

Here's another one.

Paul Patrol, the cartoon for kids.

Don't know if you guys know it.

No.

No.

Massive cartoon.

It's ginormous.

You're backing me up, right?

It's ginormous.

They had to record.

Dan, who are you talking to?

I was pretending a Wellington audience member was here.

Am I right, guys?

It's massive.

Woo!

There we go.

Shit, one came back with us.

Yeah, Paul Patrol.

they had to recall a firefighting hat that they had because it turned out it was a fire hazard.

Yeah, really.

Yeah, so yeah, I have to recall that.

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okay it's time for our final fact to the show and that's my fact my fact nine weeks ago is that pseudonyms that elton john has used when checking into a hotel include sir binky poodleclip judas fart and the marquis of minge you did that last time time.

What?

It's Marquis.

Marquis.

Because a Marquis is a big tent.

Where you have weddings and stuff.

And a Marquis of Minge is a completely different thing, I think.

I seem to remember the audience in Wellington thought that was quite amusing as well.

I mean, I think, was that an intentional attempt to recreate the atmosphere, or had you forgotten the 10 minutes of ribbing that you got quite initially?

You'd think I'd learn.

Anyway, the tent of Minge, the biggie little clip that Judas fart.

Anyway, he does this when he goes to hotels.

Obviously, a lot of people do that anyway.

Celebrities like to give themselves a pseudonym so that the press can't find them and fans can't find them when they're in town.

He likes to pick these particularly dirty ones because it actually affects the people who are trying to get in touch with him that he knows.

So, for example, he said that his mother keeps complaining to him, saying things like, I can't believe you've asked me to ring and ask for Sir Horace Pussy, stuff like that.

He's also gone for Sir Humphrey Handbag and Bobo Latrine,

Brian Big Bum.

Nice.

You say they're so dirty.

They're like an eight-year-old's version of Dercy, aren't they?

Actually, what I quite like as well is that his name itself is a pseudonym anyway.

Yeah.

He could probably go back to his original name.

Reginald Dwight.

Reginald Dwight.

And he has a middle name.

Yes.

Is it Hercules?

That's right, yeah.

Have you thought?

Elton John and Reginald Dwight, they're all first names.

So both of his names are those weird names where two people have the first name.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Like Steve Martin or David Cameron.

But we can't go on doing this all day.

It's really a fun game to play at home, is to think of people who've got two first names.

Well, actually, of all those names, I would say Elton is the least first namey of all of them, and he's chosen that as his first name.

That's true.

Yeah, you're right.

Ben Elton.

Ben Elton.

Yeah, Ben Elton.

Oh, God.

Honestly, I've got a list of about 30, which I compiled a few years ago.

I remember us all compiling them together.

I like that you've turned this into it being your solo project.

Is that how you'll remember the podcast?

Just to quickly say, Hercules is the middle name of his pseudonym, Elton John, not his real name.

And I heard that he named it after the horse in

that old sitcom, Stepson's Son.

But I don't know if that's true.

I don't know if that's true.

The middle name, Hercules, yeah.

It wasn't the horse's middle name, though, was it?

It was the horse's first and only name.

He only had one name.

It was like Madonna in that respect.

Well, it might not have been.

You just never know a horse's surname because they get very little post.

Very good point.

Yeah.

On musical pseudonyms, Elton John recorded a version of Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds in 1973, and John Lennon played on it.

But lots of the Beatles, when they're recording other things, they use pseudonyms.

And John Lennon's was Winston O'Boogie.

Nice.

Yeah.

Winston, of course, being his middle name, John Lennon's middle name.

Ah, and O'Boogie being his mother's maiden name, I think.

Yes.

I always hate doing Beatles facts with Dan here because he has to pretend to be excited to learn it, but you know that he knows all of them.

I have a test for Dan.

Go on.

A Beatles test.

Oh, hello.

So, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, they only played one gig together as a double act.

It was in 1960 at a pub in Cavisham.

What were they called?

I can't remember.

They were called the Nerck Twins.

Yeah, that's right.

Oh, you should have given him more time.

You shouldn't have given up so early.

There were only three people drinking in the pub, and nobody knew who they were anyway.

It's so easy for you to just say the Nerck Twins now.

The Nerck Twins?

That's right, yes.

Someone else who chooses funny names in order to embarrass people is Kate Beckinsale, who says that she chooses the name Sigourney Beaver when she books into hotels because she really likes, well, first of all, because she really admires Sigourney Weaver and it's her way of saying that, which actually seems like not a way to admire someone.

And also because she says her husband hates it when hotel employees call him Mr.

Beaver.

Which you can understand.

Beaver isn't the first name if you're thinking about that.

No, no.

I get confused by this checking into hotels thing, though, because I think they just ask you for a passport when you check into a hotel.

And no one I don't think Kate Beckinsale has had a passport made up and forged laboriously.

They had to give a credit card or something.

Exactly.

Except Elton John, when he does get to these hotels, he sends his pseudonym ahead.

And they used to make up office stationery for him.

When he arrived in the room, it would have his pseudonym on it, headed paper and so on.

Yeah.

Which is quite cool.

So, you know.

Yeah.

I think you you have to be famous, don't you?

So I think our personal experience, I suppose, is them just looking at your passport or credit card.

But maybe if you're Elton John or John Lennon, they make some, you know, allowances.

We've got a marquee coming to the hotel.

Better give it a big room.

So I'm confused talking of passports.

People seem to book flights under pseudonyms a lot, or they claim that they do.

So Marilyn Monroe apparently booked flights under the name Zelda Zonk.

Again, not a thing you can actually do when you're booking a flight in my experience.

You could in the 50s or 60s.

Johnny Depp says he does it.

Johnny Depp claims that he's always giving himself pseudonyms and he books loads of tickets in the middle of the day.

I reckon that he must take private jets, right?

Yeah.

Isn't Johnny Depp at the moment he's like, basically, he spends all his money on ridiculous things, doesn't he?

Yeah.

Like he shots Hunter S.

Thompson's ashes into space and stuff like that.

So I reckon he's a private jet guy.

But also, actually, Elton John's been in trouble for spending too much money, hasn't he?

Has he?

He was suing someone for not looking after his expenses properly.

And in that court case, they said that he spent £40 million over a 20-month period, including £293,000 on flowers.

Wow.

That's a lot of flowers, isn't it?

And they asked him in court, they said, Do you have any reason to think that these figures are inaccurate?

And Elton John said, probably not.

And he said, really?

£293,000 on flowers alone?

Is that even possible?

And Elton John said, yes, I like flowers.

Fair enough.

He knows his own mind.

Chekhov used to write under pseudonyms when he submitted short stories, and he had really good ones.

So he submitted stories to magazines with names that included Man Without a Spleen, which was his most common.

So he wrote 119 short stories under the name Man Without a Spleen.

He also was Doctor Without Patience and My Brother's Brother, for no particular reason.

He was a doctor, wasn't he?

He was a doctor, yeah, yeah.

I wonder if he took his own spleen out to make him run faster.

Because that's the thing, isn't it?

If you take your spleen out, you run faster.

It's not a common thing, is it?

No,

but it is a fact that james had been trying to get into the podcast for the last six months i think i said it i'm not sure maybe you did crowbar at it in this fact as well in wellington

um i have a fact i didn't say in the wellington show actually this is about musical pseudonyms and musical doubles so have you heard of the band the zombies they were big in the 60s and they're not really big anymore but they only became famous two years after they broke up So that was a problem.

Yeah, the song was time of the season that went really big for them.

But they didn't know they were famous in the USA because they were a British band and communications were much worse then so there was a band from Dallas who just pretended to be the zombies and went on tour as the zombies very successfully and then bizarrely in 1969 there were two separate bands touring America as the zombies being managed by a proper record label and everything and the fake zombies they had a training team do you think that the fake zombies bit the other guys and they became fake zombies

That's amazing.

I know.

Nobody noticed that the lead singer was the wrong sex.

Just completely different sex from the actual zombies.

Do you know actual British zombies ever go to America or?

I don't know.

I don't know.

Amazing.

Yeah, bizarre.

Do you know the person who's acted in more plays than anyone else?

And this is related to pseudonyms.

Is it Garrick?

No.

Is it someone who's got a lot of pseudonyms?

It's actually a pseudonym, not a person.

Oh.

Is it like Alan Smithy or something like that?

It's George Spelvin.

So this is a name that's a credit that's been going on since 1886, which is that if you're you're in a play, if you're doing a performance that A, you're too embarrassed to be credited for because it doesn't suit your reputation, or sometimes if you're playing two roles in the same play and in the programme you don't want to give away that you're that person as well, you call yourself George Spelvin.

And it's been happening, yeah, since 1882.

And there are various different ones in different countries.

So it's Giorgio Spelvino in an Italian play.

It's Georgette or Georgina when it's French.

And yeah.

It's brilliant.

The last one, the last case, actually, was in 1988 in Edwin Drood, the Dick Datray character, which we talked about, that musical, the Edwin Drood musical.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, cool.

That's so weird because the Alan Smithy thing goes on post-production.

So just to explain, that is the same thing but with movies, right?

Exactly.

And it usually is for screenwriters when the screenwriter hates the fact that it's been rewritten so much, they want their name off it, and Alan Smithy is in its place.

But again, that's post-production usually.

Whereas this sounds like

you're in the moment embarrassed of the thing that you're in and all the rest of the cast are going, oh, really?

Actually,

well never mind.

You have to finish that thought.

I know no, I know.

It's going to be your at, isn't it?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sorry, that's what you're going for.

Yeah.

Which nationality will he go for?

So

things in hotels, like what you can ask for.

Yeah.

I saw a website where they asked a load of people who worked in hotels and there was someone in Seattle

who they had someone who came to the hotel who asked for a pillow thought.

And apparently, this happens quite a lot.

But these guys, as well as a pillow thought, they wanted a towel folded in the shape of an elephant and, if possible, a sexy picture of some fruit on the night table.

Did the hotel do it?

They sure did.

Really?

Wow.

How did they make the fruit sexy?

Was it carving or was it positioning?

You think it's just a banana and two plums?

Yeah.

I don't know.

They didn't say what it was.

It's a shame.

So much opportunity to be creative there.

Just on names, there's a guy who's written a dictionary of surnames, I think, a couple of years ago.

He's called Patrick Hanks, and he looked into the most likely meanings for surnames.

And do you know what Shakespeare probably meant?

Just like literally shaking a spear.

Yes, you're going to get there.

Someone in a battle?

Oh, you've gone the wrong direction.

It was a medieval term for masturbator.

Oh, I was so far away.

Shaking a spear.

I felt like you'd pick the right direction.

For once, he went highbrow.

Wow, is that right?

Yeah.

Probably from an obscene medieval term for masturbator.

Was it still known, that meaning when Shakespeare was writing his plays?

He's not clear, but it could well be that, yeah, you'd go and see Romeo and Juliet buy the great masturbator.

He would have worked it out.

He was a great linguist.

He would have.

Yeah, he would have, because he was always doing little double entendres and stuff, wasn't he?

That's true, he was.

There are some very rude ones.

I won't repeat them now.

But does that mean one of his great, great, great, great-grandfathers was a masturbator?

Is that what we're saying?

Yeah, for as a job, I guess.

Smith is blacksmith, masturbator is masturbator.

The medieval high street, not the smithy, the bakery, the masturbatorium.

It's very sad.

We used to have three mastomatoriums on this street.

They've all become charity masturbatoriums now.

Okay, that's it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

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

I'm on at Schreiberland.

James?

At James Harken.

Andy,

where might someone find you on the internet?

Twitter.

At Giorgio Spelvino.

And Jasinski.

You can email podcast at QI.com.

Yep, that's right.

Or you can go to our group account at No Such Thing or our Facebook page, No Such Thingasafish, or go to our website, no such thingasafish.com.

We have everything up there.

Links to all of the previous episodes and every bit of merchandise we've ever made can be found on there.

Okay, that's it.

We'll see you again next week.

Goodbye.

Immigration, can we get this guy out of here?

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