Merry Fishmas!

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Merry Fishmas!

Everybody.

What?

Nothing.

No, it's good.

You don't like Fishmas?

I don't love it.

Okay.

I like it.

It's very nice.

Well, it's happened now.

It's there.

It's there.

Merry Fishmas, everyone.

I hope you've had an incredible day.

And you're probably thinking, hey, it's not Friday.

What's going on?

This is a bonus episode.

Is it a present from us to everybody?

It is.

That's exactly what it is.

Very nice.

What this is, is the first chapter of our audiobook of the year.

We spoke to the people at Brandhouse.

They really kindly said, go for it.

Give them the first chapter of the audiobook.

That's what this episode is.

It's the entirety of A.

And what we did is we sat in a studio, the four of us, we read out the book, and we just jumped in and interrupted each other along the way, like a classic podcast.

And the other present is for everyone in North America because we weren't going to be able to sell the audiobook of the year in the USA.

And now we've just had the news from the publishing company that we are going to be selling it there.

Yeah, it means that it's now available.

So it's over nine hours long.

You're only going to hear about 30 minutes of it.

So if you want to get it, do go to Audible.

It's available on Amazon as well or wherever you get your audiobooks from.

And it's not just North America.

Vanuatu, we're available to you now.

Pitcairn Islands.

Tuvalu.

Nauru.

I mean, it's everywhere.

It's in Australia, it's in New Zealand.

It's also in massive countries like all of Europe as well.

Oh, yeah, all of Europe.

So, yeah, I hope you enjoy it.

Have a Merry Christmas, everyone.

Listen out at the end for a couple of outtakes that James has managed to track down.

And we'll see you in the new year.

Merry Fishmas!

I knew you liked it.

I do like it.

A.

In which we learn how Brexit was triggered in a space egg, whether computers or humans are better at Pac-Man, why Australia is airdropping kangaroo sausages, which King doubles as an airline pilot, and who's invented an underwater warehouse?

Aardvarks.

A zookeeper performed mouth to snout on an aardvark for an hour.

Only five aardvarks were born in Europe in 2016, so when one was born in the Polish city of Rocklav this year and struggled to survive, the head of the small mammals division at the zoo there, Andrei Mijazzka, did all he could to keep him alive.

We spoke to Raklav Zoo and asked how you perform CPR on an aardvark.

This is what they said.

Mr.

Mijazzka acted on instinct.

He cut the cord, placed the baby on his fleece jacket and started rubbing it vigorously but gently with a towel.

He then placed the baby's snout in his mouth and blew the air in.

At the same time he was doing chest compressions using his fingers and continued rubbing with a towel.

After a few rounds the little heart started beating but the cub still wasn't breathing so Mr.

Miozzko went on with the mouth to snout ventilation.

Altogether it took about one hour after he came out.

I am so glad you didn't do the accent there.

I thought we were going to start on a big Polish accent.

I like the idea that to do mouth to snout on Arvok you have to hold the end of the Arvak snailed, and then basically you can get both your hands around the rest of the Arvak snout.

For people listening, Andy is doing the mime.

Like playing a trumpet.

Exactly.

Yeah.

This reminds me of a story, actually, that happened quite a few years ago in China.

There was a small monkey that had eaten a peanut, and it wasn't allowed to eat the peanut because its stomach couldn't digest it.

So someone had thrown it into the cage, and it laid on its back in the cage, dying.

And it was such a rare little monkey, they couldn't actually operate on it.

So no one knew what to do.

All these zookeepers were going, how are we going to save this monkey and suddenly zheng bang shun who was the veteran zookeeper at that zoo stepped forward and said i know how to save this monkey and he went up to the monkey and he didn't perform mouth to snout or mouth to mouth even on the monkey he performed mouth to bum bum he

i'm sorry

can you spare us this technical mumbo jumbo

he looked he licked the monkey's butt for over an hour, sort of drawing the peanut through the system.

Kind of like, you know, if you drop a ball in a pool pool and you have to do that little wavy thing at the corner to bring the wave, to bring the ball back to you.

He licked for an hour this peanut out of the monkey, and the monkey survived.

There must have been a point about 45 minutes in where the other zookeepers were saying, Zhang Banchan, what are you doing?

I think I'd say it earlier than that.

I think he would have looked at them and went, Give me 15 more minutes.

I also think we've gone off topic really early in this game.

So, meanwhile, in South Africa, scientists finally caught Arbax having a drink 250 years after the species was first described.

It had long been assumed that they got all the water they needed from the juicy bodies of termites, but a zoologist at Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University in Port Elizabeth, Graham Curley, and his team, announced that evidence exists for aardvax drinking from puddles.

So we've never known them to drink before.

This is huge news.

Feels like we just haven't been watching them hard enough.

I mean, surely if they're drinking from puddles now, they've always been doing it.

It's not like puddles are new, are they?

Puddles have been around

as long as water.

This wasn't the only puddle news from the year, by the way.

Researchers in Australia found that koalas are now getting their water from puddles.

They used to think it was just from eucalyptus leaves, and they've never seen it before, but they think because of climate change, they're now drinking from puddles.

It's a bad year if you're a puddle.

Suddenly, there are two new massive threats to your existence.

James, is there any advice for people who want to drink like our bucks?

There is.

If you can't find a puddle, there's a bar in Exeter that's selling an Advait cocktail.

It's served with real ants.

The drink's made with rum, lemongrass, and lime, and it's served with an ant chaser.

The bar owner Patrick Fogarty describes it as crunchy yet satisfying.

Abdications.

The Japanese Emperor wanted to abdicate but wasn't allowed to tell anyone.

Japan's Emperor Akihito is banned from making political statements, including any that suggest that he wants to abdicate.

As a result, he had to make a speech very delicately hinting at his concerns about being able to fulfil his duties.

The government eventually worked out what he meant and allowed him to step down.

I wonder if they said to him, so do you want to abdicate?

And he said, well, I didn't say that.

Pretty much, yeah.

But he had to be so subtle about it.

So I'm feeling pretty old, guys.

And then eventually they sort of figured it out.

But there is still a problem for him, which is that he has a distinct lack of heirs.

Once the new emperor takes over, there will only be three heirs in total, because emperors have to be men, although there is now some debate about this.

Some experts are worried that if the youngest heir, Prince Hisahito, has no sons, the 2,600-year-old imperial line will be broken.

Although Hisahito is only 11, so it is a little early to tell how this will...

And it's a lot of pressure on him, isn't it?

A huge amount of pressure.

That must be the smallest royal family in the world, is it?

Well, actually, I think that the Vatican is technically a one-man elected monarchy, and that is a royal family of one, but I know you disagree, James.

I do disagree, yeah.

What about Saudi Arabia?

They have a lot, don't they?

I think that's the largest royal family in the world.

They've got 4,000 princes.

Whoa.

I know.

So, just back to Akihito.

As a young man, he had a list of 800 candidates for marriage prepared for him.

Wow.

And he rejected every single one of them in favour of someone he met playing tennis.

And he's quite an interesting guy.

His main interest is marine biology, and he is an expert on the Gobi fish.

And when the Gobi equivalent of an emperor, the dominant male, dies, he is replaced by the next in line.

But if there are no males, then a female will change its sex and take the emperor's place.

Abkhazia.

A country that most of the world doesn't think exists, had an election that assumed most of its population didn't exist.

Abkhazia is a self-declared republic that's trying to break from Georgia and is currently recognised only by Russia, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and, bizarrely, the tiny Pacific island of Nauru.

Still, despite the lack of more general recognition, parliamentary elections were held there this year.

Technically, elections in Abkhazia are deemed invalid if less than 25% of people vote.

But although only 21% of the population voted on this occasion, the election was still declared valid as it was decided that any citizens who hold Georgian passports should not be regarded as Abkhazian nationals.

The country was also the subject of a critically acclaimed Romanian documentary this year called Uale Loui Tarzan or Tarzan's Testicles.

So this was the story of the world's oldest primate center, the Institute of Experimental Pathology and Therapy in the Abkhazian capital of Sukhoumi.

The institute provided the monkeys that the Soviet Union sent into space in the 1980s and it was founded by a man called Ilya Ivanov, whose lifetime obsession was creating an ape-human hybrid.

Advertising.

The advertising for the newly opened Trump International Hotel and Tower in Vancouver claims it is six floors taller than it actually is.

Trump Hotels claim that the building is 69 stories high when actually it is only 63.

They arrived at their total by including below-ground stories, which are mostly used for parking, in their calculations.

In the course of his career, Trump has claimed that a 67-story tower has 78 floors, that a 43-story building has 46 floors, that a 44-story building has 52 floors, that a 31-story building has 41 floors, that a 70-story building has 90 floors, and that he lives on the 66th floor of a 58-story building.

He needs to get his story straight.

Meanwhile, the Trump International Hotel and Tower in Toronto paid a reported $6 million

not to advertise itself as a Trump hotel.

The hotel decided to part ways with the Trump name following many years of construction delays, lawsuits, and more recently because it had become a gathering point for protests against the president.

The agreement they reached allows the management to remove all of Trump's branding from the 65-story building, which, incidentally, has only 57 floors.

AI.

The world champion of the ancient Chinese game of Go was beaten by a three-year-old Brit who then immediately retired.

Intriguing.

What could that mean?

Considering I said it was about AI.

One way or another, it's been a pretty bad year for humankind.

We've been defeated by artificial intelligence at No Limit Texas Holden Poker and the fighting game Super Smash Bross.

But perhaps the most crushing defeat came when AlphaGo, an AI program developed by Google's Deep Mind Technologies, beat the world champion China's K

3-0.

AlphaGo was born in 2014 and was classed as British in the Go rankings as the team behind it is based in London.

After beating the world champion, champion, it immediately retired.

DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis said that winning these games had been the highest possible pinnacle for AlphaGo as a competitive programme.

Owing to its incredible complexity, Go had been one of the final games at which humans could still beat the machines.

KG later said, last year it was still quite human-like, but this year it became like a god of Go.

James, I've never played Go.

Yeah.

Can you quickly give me an idea of what we're talking about here?

Yeah, sure.

So you have a board with lots of squares on it, and you put pebbles on it to win territory.

And it's extremely complicated.

There are ten to the power of ten to the power of one hundred and seventy-one possible combinations of move, which is pretty hard to imagine, right?

Can you put that in some kind of metaphorical context for me?

Yes, I can, Anna.

Oh, how convenient.

If every grain of sand on Earth each contained the number of stars in the Milky Way, and each of those stars had a hundred planets, and each of those planets had ten billion humans, then the number of cells in all those humans would be fewer than the number of zeros in the number that we're talking about.

Wow.

You know that famous story: there's a chessboard and each has a grain of rice, and it doubles and doubles, and suddenly he's got all the rice in the country.

Do you think in this scenario he'd be like, I've gone way too far?

This is a lot of rice.

Yeah.

But that interview with KG, actually, Chinese fans didn't see the interview because China, presumably for reasons of national pride, wouldn't allow the match to be shown on television or streamed online.

Airdrops.

Australia is dropping sausages over its outback.

They come in two flavours: toad and kangaroo.

I will take kangaroo, please.

They're not on offer for you, I'm afraid.

So, for years, Australia has had this problem with cane toads, which aren't indigenous to the continent.

So, many of its native animals eat them, and because the toads are toxic, they tend to kill their predators.

So, to combat this, scientists are dropping cane-toad-flavoured sausages laced with a chemical that makes predators feel sick over the outback in the hope that it'll deter them from biting the real toads in future.

A bit more brutally, the Aussie government is also dropping poisoned sausages to deal with their feral cats, who are also partial to a bit of kangaroo wiener.

Still fancy that kangaroo wiener, Andy, now you know it's poisoned.

This year, Canada also combated an environmental issue with airdrops, this time of pregnant bison.

Banff National Park has not had any bison for more than 100 years, and the ecosystem suffers from their absence.

Conservationists collected pregnant bison from the nearby Elk Island and took them to the pastures of the Rocky Mountains.

They spent the last 25 kilometers of their journey packed into shipping containers, dangling underneath a helicopter by a rope.

Their horns were covered in plastic hoses to stop them injuring each other in transit.

Aliens

11 promising alien signals were reported this year.

Unfortunately, they all turned out to be from mobile phones on Earth.

This is the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, which listens for radio signals that might indicate signs of intelligence from 692 of the nearest stars to Earth.

It turns out, however, that the signals that aliens might send are very similar to those given out by mobile phones.

This wasn't the only alien mystery that may have been solved this year.

The WOW signal was named in 1977 when an anomaly was found in a list of data and astronomer Jerry R.

Ehrman was so impressed that he circled numbers on his computer printout and wrote the comment, Wow.

Antonio Paris, an astronomy professor at St.

Petersburg College in Florida, has now suggested that the signal didn't come from an alien life form, but from a couple of comets that were passing by at the time.

Not everyone is convinced, though.

Alan Fitzsimmons, a scientist at Queen's University Belfast, has described the theory as rubbish.

There were a lot of names in that paragraph, James.

Antonio Paris, Alan Fitzsimmons, can I throw another name into the mix?

Sure.

Former frontman of Blink 182, Tom DeLong.

Okay.

He was named UFO Researcher of the Year this year at the 2017 International UFO Congress.

And he got this because it turns out he's secretly been emailing high-level security people in America to talk to them about the alien threats.

Okay, like who?

Well, last year when the pedestri emails were leaked, he was the campaign manager of Hillary Clinton.

That was part of the big wiki leaks that was happening that ruined her campaign largely.

Amongst those emails were emails from Tom DeLong, Blink 182's former lead singer, and he was saying, I want to talk to you about all the stuff that I believe is going on and that you have knowledge of on the inside about alien life and our contact with them.

And as a result of all his digging and all of his expertise, he is officially the UFO Researcher of the Year 2017.

And the rest of us missed the big story about Hillary's email leaks, it turns out.

What are the awards like?

Are they a sort of golden probe that you win at the UFO awards on the wiki?

Can I just, I always thought it was was blink 182, but you said blink 182.

I've always said blink 182.

Does anyone say blink 18 too?

So the hunt for ET moved up a gear this year after the 500-metre aperture spherical telescope, also known as FAST, the world's largest, joined the search.

FAST is so vast that you could fill its dish with enough cornflakes to supply every person on Earth with one bowl's worth every day for a year and still have some left over.

It's sited in in Guizhou Province, southwest China, and it hasn't proved universally popular.

Its construction involved the forcible displacement of 9,000 villagers.

Amazon

The founder of Amazon.com became the world's richest person for just four hours.

A surge in Amazon's stock on the 27th of July increased Jeff Bezos' net worth by $1.1 billion,

which meant that he overtook Microsoft's Bill Gates, who's worth a measly $90.7 billion.

However, by the middle of the next day, Bezos' stock had fallen back, and a few days later, he was down to third place behind Amancio Ortega, the owner of the fashion company Zara.

Amazon's stock performance was largely thanks to increased sales.

In the early days of the company, a bell would ring every time there was a sale, and staff would gather around to see if they knew the person who had made the purchase.

They don't do that anymore.

If they did, then on their biggest sales day in 2017, Amazon Prime Day, 11th of July, a bell would need to be rung more than 80 million times.

Sorry, would you mind putting that in some kind of context again for me?

Okay, I'll just rustle up something on the spot.

That is the equivalent of every church bell in England being rung 2,400 times.

Hang on, how many church bells are there in England?

Well, you can work that out if you divide 80 million by 2,400.

I'm not sure I can, James.

I'm going to leave that as an exercise for the reader.

Each second is very very important to Amazon.

They've calculated that if their pages loaded just one second slower, it would cost them $1.6 billion in annual sales.

Amazon expanded beyond the online sector this year, opening a physical bookshop in New York.

The company recognizes that people have a habit of browsing in shops before buying their books online, and so registered a patent to stop customers in Amazon shops from checking out competitors as they look around.

It's not the only patent application that Amazon has filed in the past few months.

They've also invented an underwater warehouse in which everything is stored in watertight boxes at the bottom of a lake.

Each is assigned a unique sound, which, when triggered, inflates a balloon that floats the box to the surface.

The idea is that this will be more efficient than having people or machines fetch the packages, because they'll be transported by the water buoyancy instead.

Amazon also holds a patent for a flying warehouse.

Antarctica.

The Foreign Office warned Britons to look out for terrorists in the Antarctic.

The population of Britain's 660,000 square miles of Antarctic territory may be only 250, but as the Foreign Office points out, you can never be too careful.

According to official guidelines it issued in May, although there's no recent history of terrorism in the British Antarctic territory, attacks can't be ruled out.

Visitors should therefore be vigilant, but they will probably be fine.

The last crime to be committed anywhere on the continent was back in 2003 and involved computer hacking.

And even that wasn't homegrown, it was done remotely from Romania.

One Briton who braved the terrorist threat was Patrick Bergle, great-grandson of Ernest Shackleton, who made the first ever crossing of Antarctica by car.

It was a month-long, 3,600-mile trip, sponsored by Hyundai, in a normal family car, although it was adapted to run on jet fuel.

I'd argue that isn't a normal family car, then.

An almost normal family car, I'd say.

And to avoid littering, the team had to drag all their excrement behind them in a huge fuel drum.

Again, not the same as my family car.

So when he was first asked to make the journey, Bergel hadn't even taken his driving test.

He modestly insisted that, compared to what my great-grandfather did, this was one thousandth as hard.

I would say that's less modest and more just accurate.

I think his great-grandfather would agree that his job was harder.

So as if going on four wheels wasn't hard enough, Canadian Hank Van Wielden attempted a 700-mile bike ride on a custom-made 10,000 pound bicycle across Antarctica.

He was meant to complete the journey in 30 days, but after six days of pulling a 90-kilo pack in minus 40 degrees Celsius temperatures, he dropped out.

He later said, I got a taste of it, and I got my ass kicked by it.

Apps.

If you want to make an emergency confession, there's an app for that.

A new app developed in Spain and called Confessor Go tells you where your nearest priest is for confession and maps the best route to him.

Handily, it also tells you the priest's name and the year he was ordained.

In addition, it includes the Ten Commandments to prompt you to recall what you might need to confess.

So if you've coveted your neighbour's ox or anything.

Unlike Uber, the priest doesn't come to you, but on the plus side, he doesn't charge extra at busy times.

What is a busy time for sins?

Oh,

Christmas, I imagine.

Do you think so?

Yeah.

You're always coveting people's oxen.

I think you've got time on your hands.

Right.

Also, are priests available 24 hours for confession?

I don't think so.

Yeah, I assumed that there was a sort of time that they get in that photo box.

You know, it's like the confession booth.

The confession booth.

They should combine that with passport photos.

So you look really happy once you've got everything off your chest.

You have a nice big smile.

So there have been other other apps built recently for various different things.

So there have been apps built that will help you if you want to find a celebrity look-alike partner.

The dating app Badoo has added a feature that allows users to look for celebrity look-alikes.

Soon after launch, there were 1,405 people on the app who supposedly look like Ed Sheeran.

According to them?

According to the app, I think.

There are other apps which can help you find where the nearest iceberg is, providing you're in Canada.

And there's one app that can stop you from buying things while drunk.

So once you've consumed alcohol up to a self-imposed limit, the app stops your bank card from working.

Unfortunately, for the app to take effect, you need to be sober enough to tell it that you've been drinking.

If you're talking to a machine, you're drunk, I think.

Not if the machine can respond to you.

I mean, sure, if I'm talking to my washing machine, then that's a bit weird.

Like, if I'm talking to Siri, I think that's okay.

While we're on smartphones, Donald Trump has only downloaded one app on his phone.

It's Twitter.

But he has inspired 250 apps and more for Android alone, including one that measures how many times a man interrupts a woman, one where you can draw your own executive order, and a third one, DJ Trump, which uses a huge archive of words that Donald has said to enable you to make the U.S.

President say anything you want.

Arrests.

Human.

A mafia boss famous for having a permanent erection was caught in Spain after seven years on the run.

Francesco Castriotta said his priapism was thanks to his out-of-control cocaine habit.

As he sat in court during a previous hearing with a bag of ice on his aching groin, one policeman remarked that he could expect a stiff sentence.

Sorry, his name is Castriotta.

I know.

I didn't notice that until I read it just now.

No, me neither.

It's very exciting, isn't it?

It's like his name is begging out for his penis to be removed.

Other notable arrests include a man in India who was arrested for trying to create a fake ID card using the name Osama bin Laden.

He even uploaded a blurred photo of the former al-Qaeda leader as the profile picture.

Police discovered the man's real name was Saddam Hussein.

A woman in Bangladesh who believed that she was her husband's third wife had him arrested after discovering she was in fact his 25th.

of 28.

Police arrested him at the home of his 27th wife.

And lastly, a man was arrested by New York State Police for driving under the influence of alcohol.

This only came to international attention because Joseph Talbot didn't want anyone to know about it.

After learning that his local paper, The Times of Wayne County, had covered the story, he tried to buy every copy of the relevant edition to stop people finding out.

Unfortunately, the fact that he managed to purchase around 900 copies became a story in its own right and then spread.

Art.

A giant snow globe was made using the confetti meant for Hillary Clinton's election night.

This was designed by an artist called Bunny Burson, whose former works include collages made from Chads, which are the punched-out pieces of ballot paper that famously decided the year 2000 presidential election in favour of George W.

Bush.

It took Burson two weeks to find the confetti that had been loaded into Hillary's victory cannons ready to celebrate the election result last November.

And when she did, she got the company who produced it to write a letter of verification.

She then placed the confetti in a glass case with the slogan, and Still I Rise, which she took from a poem by Maya Angelou, who was a close friend of the Clintons.

In a less overtly political act, a French artist called Abraham Poincheval attempted to live like a chicken and successfully hatched nine eggs.

He sat on the eggs in a glass case in a Paris museum for a month.

They were underneath his bottom on a laying table, which had a dugout section in it to stop the eggs from being squashed.

Point Cheval said that his work, Egg, raises the question of metamorphosis and gender.

Despite animal scientists saying that the task was nearly impossible due to humans' lower body temperature, after 21 days, nine of his original ten eggs had indeed hatched.

The chicks were sent to a farm.

He is an amazing guy, Poinchaval.

Yeah.

So in February this year, he spent a week in another museum inside a 12-ton limestone boulder.

It had a hollowed-out section which was only slightly bigger than he was, and he was sealed within it.

Wow.

Yeah, and he had little niches where he stored his food and drink and also his excrement.

Do you think that maybe he has been kicked out of his flat and he's just looking for museum celebration?

He did live inside a stuffed bear for a while, too.

So actually, there is a lot behind that theory, I think.

Yeah.

Another artist that hit the news this year was a Russian artist called Fyodor Pavlov Andreevich, who in America faced potential charges of public lewdness, criminal trespassing, and disorderly conduct after he was arrested for having himself delivered naked inside a clear plastic box to the exclusive Met Gala in New York.

This is the fifth time he'd had himself sent to an art event, his aim being to donate himself to institutions that have difficulty understanding or accepting performance art.

In a statement, his friends clarified that the box had also been arrested.

In their view, the charges were ludicrous.

They said even the policemen were showing signs of having fun.

Ashes.

Carrie Fisher's ashes were placed in an urn shaped like a massive Prozac pill.

The giant pill was one of her favourite ornaments.

At her funeral in January, her brother said of it, We felt it was where she'd want to be.

This year, people have also chosen to have their ashes sprinkled in the toilet of a baseball stadium.

The ashes of New York plumber and baseball fan Roy Regal have been sprinkled in baseball stadium toilets all over America by his best friend, Roy MacDonald.

MacDonald said he has sometimes used the toilet at the same time as scattering his friend, but that I always flush in between.

Ashes have also been sprinkled over a ferry.

A ceremony on an Australian ferry went wrong when the ashes were blown back on deck and over the passengers.

The daughter of the deceased said it was her mother having the last laugh.

It could be worse.

In late 2016, a man tried to scatter his opera-loving friend's ashes at New York City's Metropolitan Opera.

Other members of the audience, however, assumed he was a terrorist who was trying to spread anthrax.

He apologised, saying it it was a sweet gesture to a dying friend that went completely and utterly wrong in ways that I could never have imagined.

Anyway, they've also been sprinkled in a hockey penalty box.

Hockey player Bob Probert had his ashes sprinkled in his team's penalty box, or the sin bin, because he had been involved in 200 mid-match fights in the course of his career and had therefore spent 3,300 minutes there.

And finally, they've also been sprinkled in separate places.

A survey of Britain's funeral directors revealed that they're now agreeing ever more frequently to split ashes up to stop angry families arguing over them.

Article 50.

The letter that we ended up sending to activate Article 50 was six pages long, but it was nearly 100 pages long.

That's a big edit.

Well, they didn't start with 100 pages and then just whittle it down to six.

The government sources said there were two options, but they eventually picked the six-pager.

I think they may have thought that sending 100 would have been excessive.

Yeah, and so who wrote it?

Was it Theresa May?

Well, she definitely had some civil service assistance, but she did definitely sign it.

She gave it a wet signature, i.e., with pen and ink, but unfortunately, she signed it with a parker pen that was once manufactured in Britain, but is now made in France.

Oh, really?

That's weird, because also Article 50 was ratified in Norman French.

So, as a law passes in the House of Lords, the Lords have to say the words La Reine le vaulte, which is Old Norman French for the Queen allows it.

Another thing about the letter is that it was delivered by Sir Tim Barrow, the UK's permanent representative at the EU, and he took it from Britain's embassy in Brussels to the EU headquarters, which is known as the Space Egg.

Space Egg.

Well, that is just a nickname.

It's a futuristic oval building set inside a cube made from recycled window frames from across Europe.

But the location's pretty interesting.

The back of the building was a Nazi headquarters during their occupation of Europe.

Ah, speaking of Nazis, I read that Article 50 was put in place partly because of right-wing politics.

The guy who wrote it did so at a time when Austria had this far-right politician called Jorg Haider and people were really worried that he might be elected.

So Article 50 was basically written partly to make it easier for a country to storm out of the EU.

Yeah, that's right.

And the guy who actually wrote Article 50 is called Lord John Kerr.

And what I love about that is that in Spain his name would be Juan Kerr.

But they wouldn't understand that in Spain because they all speak Spanish.

Oh yeah.

Apart from the British people who live in Spain and they're not going to be there for long because of Brexit.

So in a few years no one will get that joke anymore.

So it's not just expats.

We also need to work out what to do with the words United Kingdom in the Lisbon Treaty.

So the Lisbon Treaty is the document that underpins the whole of the EU basically.

And there are 12 mentions of the UK in it.

And at the moment they think they're just going to leave them in because it's going to be too much bureaucratic hassle to actually go through removing every mention.

Is it true that Article 50 was given a lot of fake routes on its way to the Space Egg so that when Sir Tim was delivering it, it would confuse potential saboteurs?

It's possible.

It did definitely have an armed guard when it was on the Eurostar on its way over.

And the Daily Telegraph reported that his path to the Space Egg was kept secret in case ultra-remainers grabbed the letter from him.

Wow.

I mean, I wouldn't call myself an ultra-remainer, but I did go on Google Maps and I did the journey from one place to the other, and it is extremely short.

So I don't think there's much space for alternative routes.

No, it was about 300 meters.

Yeah, or 328 yards as we're gonna have to call it after 2019.

Aviation.

The king of the Netherlands revealed he's been secretly moonlighting as an airline pilot.

Since ascending the throne in 2013, King Willem Alexander has been co-piloting commercial flights twice a month without telling passengers.

He only ever pilots short haul flights though, and makes sure to always return home on the same day, just in case he's suddenly needed as king.

Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, two MPs went one better and took control of a plane they weren't even on.

After learning the MPs had missed their flight from Kabul to Bamiyan, supporters of the pair apparently organized a team to stop the plane from landing at Bamiyan airport by blocking the runway.

It was therefore forced to fly back to Kabul, where it picked up the two politicians.

According to Al Jazeera, one of them, Abdul Rahman Shahidani, said, Everyone will now know who I am and what my power is.

Shahidani added that he hadn't asked his supporters to force the plane to return to Kabul.

Another MP embroiled in an aviation scandal was Indian politician Ravindra Gaikwad, who admitted to hitting an air steward 25 times with his slipper and breaking the steward's glasses.

His excuse was that he had been given an economy seat rather than business.

Air India explained that Mr.

Gaikwad had been placed in economy rather than business because there was no business class on this particular all-economy flight.

Avocados.

The world's first avocado restaurant where every dish contains avocado opened in New York.

It ran out of avocados on its first day.

Once all the kinks ryaned out, the restaurant became very popular.

They went through £650 of avocado a week, helped, no doubt, by the fact that diners who particularly like avocados can double the amount of avocado on their dish for an extra $2.

So avocados reached peak hipster this year.

Millennials were told the only reason they can't afford houses is that they keep spending their money on avocado on toast.

Avocados are dangerous, too.

They were blamed for a rash of brunch time hand injuries to people ineptly trying to cut them up.

The British Association of Plastic, Reconstructive and Aesthetic Surgeons demanded that warnings should be placed on all avocados.

To go back to the avocado restaurant, you know where you can double the amount of avocado on your plate for an extra $2.

Presumably, you can only do that once.

Because, like with the rice on the chessboard,

if you do that eight times, that's already more avocados than Mexico produces in a year.

So, MS are going to be lasering barcodes into their avocados because, at the moment, they obviously have those little stickers on them with the barcodes, and by replacing those with lasers, they're going to save 10 tons of paper and 5 tons of glue every year.

And they did some early trials, although they lasered them too deep and I think cut through the actual avocado.

So, did they call them avocarcodes?

Yeah.

They've also said that they're thinking about lasering pumpkins for Halloween.

But there was no pun involved, so

they've given it up.

So, demand for avocados has increased, but supply has fallen this year, and that's because avocados are an alternate-bearing crop, which means that every other year the harvests are smaller.

If you add that to the flooding in Peru and the worker strikes in Mexico, you have what America's national public radio has dubbed the guacapocalypse.

And with President Trump planning large tariffs on goods coming from Mexico to pay for his wall it may be that avocado lovers will soon be waiting even longer to get on the housing ladder

Joe died on the 14th of February in Beijing January was that wrong the January

no what did I say you read February did I yeah unbelievable you read it twice sorry I'm really tired no no that's just amazing yeah

Jo died on the 14th of February.

Oh, God.

Jo died on the 14th of January in Beijing in a hospital called Peking Union.

Terrible on Valentine's Day as well.

While statisticians were advising against putting glitter in envelopes, doctors were,

sorry, I've just remembered this bit.

While statisticians were advising against putting glitter in envelopes, doctors were advising against putting it in vaginas after a product called Passion Dust appeared online.

It's a glitter-filled capsule designed to be inserted into the vagina where it gradually

showing this.

You do the crime, you do the time.

Don't write anything you're struggling to read out.

Oh my god, it gets worse.

Oh, I think about awful things, right?

We all are

rather than fabulous things.

It's a glitter-filled capsule designed to be inserted into the vagina where it gradually dissolves and spills its contents.

According to the website, this generates

according to the website, this generates a sweet-flavoured spark.

I'm really sorry.

According to the website, this generates a sweet-flavoured sparkly substance called magicum that will liven up the user's sex life.

Is that a Latt word?

I think it comes up in the Aeneid.

Multiple gynecologists strongly advised against using the product, saying it could

lead to bacterial infections, thrush, and inflammation.

Phew.

Let's be real.

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