194: No Such Thing As An Orange Crocodile

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

My name is Dan Schreiber, and I am sitting here with Anna Chaczynski, Drew Hunter-Murray,

and James Harkin.

And once again, we have gathered round the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days, and in no particular order, here we go.

Starting with you, James Harkin.

Okay, my fact this week is that in 1766, there was a cheese riot in Nottingham

where the mayor of Nottingham was knocked over by a large cheese.

So was the cheese rioting

How did that work?

So what it was is I mean I'm preaching to people who know all about this in Nottingham, I'm sure but this was a goose fair you all know what the goose fair is right

And basically things became tense when some rude lads

engaged several Lincolnshire traders who had purchased up to 600 of cheese.

These are my words, by the way, I'm reading.

And basically, what they didn't want to happen is that those nasty people from Lincoln should come and get all the cheese, and then there's no cheese for people from Nottingham.

So then that kind of started a bit of a riot, and then suddenly there were crowds running around.

They were grabbing cheeses and rolling them down the streets.

So these they're not like little baby bells or slices of cheese like you get now.

They're big wheels of cheese, right?

Although if you released a lot of baby bells, that could knock someone over underfoot by making the ground slippery on the wax.

I haven't thought about this before, but I feel as if I have.

And basically after that, everything kind of kicked off.

So a load of people went down the River Trent to search for warehouses looking for more cheese.

The next day, a guy was shot by a soldier.

He was trying to defend his cheese.

Come on, I still think too soon actually for that.

But actually the soldiers were on his side.

It was like a friendly fire thing

and then the whole thing came to an end when the mob tried and failed to burn down a windmill oh and the mayor himself a cheese what rolled towards him well he was coming to try and calm things down and basically someone chucked a cheese at him right oh chucked a cheese okay cool but and it knocked him over knocked him over mate was he quite a small man sounds like he was a small man i don't know how big he was it was the olden days they were all small they're all small yeah yeah

maybe baby bells were massive to them.

It is an amazing bit of history, which I really heard of before.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Did you guys already know about the cheese riot?

Yeah.

Wait, wait, wait, did anyone not know about the cheese riot?

Ah, you see.

And the cheese riot guys were lying, I think.

Nottingham's got some cool food history.

So did you know that you guys have the Brownlee apple great-grandfather?

And a bunch of Japanese tourists, I think, came to Nottingham about five years ago to visit it, didn't they?

Because so, this is the one Brownlee apple tree in Nottingham from which every single Brownlee apple comes.

And it's so popular now, that variety of apple in Japan, that the mayor of a town in Japan and all the people from his town flew over and visited it.

A few

they chartered 60 planes.

A percentage of the people.

I have a couple of cheese facts.

Oh, yeah.

Historical cheese facts.

Go on.

So the first Eurovision was a cheese competition, Innocence.

And

the phrase Innocence is doing a lot of work in that sentence, but

there was a massive, after Napoleon was defeated in 1815, there was a massive

Congress.

It was called the Congress of Vienna.

And it was working out the terms for all the nations in Europe and the terms of France's surrender.

And Talleyrand, one of the ministers there, he said, why don't we lighten things up a bit with a cheese competition?

And every nation submitted their own cheeses.

Who won?

They all voted for their own cheeses.

So that's how it was like Eurovision, right?

They did give France a special award for the brie, but they basically all said, we think our cheese is best.

I think if Nottingham sort of says, it's that cheese contests don't lighten things up.

They actually made things turn pretty ugly.

I always, there's a sort of famous fact that the Dutch once killed and ate their Prime Minister in a riot.

So this is my favourite riot.

Sorry, this famous fact is famous amongst people like us, isn't it?

Yeah, Masha, maybe it's not famous outside of this stage.

Yeah, there's a fact that my favourite riot is that the Dutch once killed and ate their prime minister.

And this is in the 1600s, wasn't it?

And I always like that they ate their prime minister in order to replace him with an orange.

So, this is when the orange dynasty came in.

Not an actual orange, yeah, sorry.

Because that would have been so crazy because they should have just eaten the orange.

Exactly, but that's kind of what it implies anyway.

Eat William of Orange and leave poor Johann DeWitt, who doesn't even have a name who sounds like food, to rule the country.

Just quickly, this is the first time I've been to Nottingham.

I was unbelievably excited to discover that you guys have a sheriff still.

I mean, that is...

That's so cool.

And I didn't know this, looking into him, he was born on Robin Hood Street.

Yeah.

The current sheriff of Nottingham was born on Robin Hood Street.

Another Nottingham fact, you have a lot of caves here.

Yes!

The truggler diets are in!

There are over 700 caves under the streets of Nottingham, and the man who's in charge of cataloguing them, he had to have confined space training before he could do his job.

And his name is Mr.

Dave Strange Walker.

I have another fact about cheese and caves.

No.

Yes, genuinely.

So in the 1980s, America had a 30 million pound stockpile of cheese in a cave.

There was a massive cheese surplus in America because they had overproduced it and they stored it all in caves in Missouri.

It was worth, by 1983, it was worth $4 billion.

$4 billion.

And the thing is, it's still happening.

There's still a massive dairy surplus in America.

And there's this shadowy body called Dairy Management, which is desperate to get.

It's not like

they're big cheese.

They genuinely are there.

So for example, they're constantly trying to push more cheese onto people.

So for example, they helped Domino's, the pizza company, develop a line of pizzas which had 40% more cheese.

And then they lobbied McDonald's and they said, why don't you put some more cheese on the cheeseburgers?

Go on.

Wow, that's amazing.

The first time the word mammoth was used to describe something big was about a cheese.

Really?

Was it?

Yeah.

Prior to the actual mammoth, it was a description of a cheese.

Well, actually, they called the mammoths mammoths, whether they were big or not.

So even if you had a small mammoth it was still called a mammoth.

Yeah yeah but they never before had referred to a mammoth mammoth until they referred to a mammoth cheese is what James is saying.

So the word mammoth meaning this is massive.

Yeah.

That was a cheese first.

That was a cheese first.

Yeah.

And then they saw a mammoth and they're like, that's like that cheese we saw.

You've sort of got the idea.

It was a famous cheese.

You know about it, Anna, don't you?

Yeah,

it was the presidential cheese, right?

Which president was it that it was given to?

It was Jefferson that was given to.

Yeah, and what it was, is at the time they just found mastodon skeletons in America, in the far west, and they didn't know.

They thought maybe there were massive mammoths living over there.

So it was a big kind of mammoth frenzy in America at the time.

And then they also gave him this cheese and thought, what does that remind us of?

Those things that don't exist.

Of course.

I have a favorite animal-related riot.

Okay, I think.

Do you guys know about the eel-pulling riot?

No.

No.

This was in 1886 in Amsterdam, and

there used to be this tradition where you'd hang an eel.

I don't even know what it was suspended above, but you'd hang an eel above the canals in Amsterdam, and it would be a live eel and it'd be writhing around.

And the point was you had to sail under it on your boat or motor on not motor on it, under it probably, but go under it on your boat, and you had to jump up and try and catch the eel.

And most people fell in the water.

And it was quite comical, and it sounds quite fun.

And it it was banned because it was deemed cruel to animals, which is very forward-thinking for the 1886 people.

And people were so angry about the crackdown because they loved eel-pulling so much that they completely rioted.

And 26 people were killed in 1886 in Amsterdam because they demanded to have their eel-pulling.

But the eel survived, apparently.

That's incredible.

Have you guys heard about the police riots?

This is a thing that happened in New York in the 1850s.

These are so cool.

There was a time in the 1850s in New York where there were two rival police forces in New York.

What could go wrong?

Everything.

Everything went wrong.

The state had created a police force, and that was an official one, but the mayor, who was from the other political party, had his own police force already established, and the state was trying to take over it.

And what they started doing, the two forces, they started stealing criminals from each other.

So they would arrest someone, and then the other police would turn up and say, we're having him.

And then the police would start beating each other up to try and arrest the criminal.

But then, presumably, they have to arrest each other for beating each other up.

They would.

And then the whole thing eventually ended up in a massive brawl between 850 police officers

all the way through the city hall.

Wow.

You know Toronto was shaped by sort of Toronto policing was shaped by a riot between clowns and firemen.

So

well there was this riot in 1855 when clowns were a bit more hardcore

and it took place in a brothel as I think quite a lot of riots did.

Were the clowns in the brothel?

They were all in the brothel

hours.

They'd taken their noses off.

They weren't on the job at the time.

They were on a job, but they weren't on the job.

And they...

I'm afraid it'll be extra to smell your flower, sir.

Ooh, big feet.

You know what they say?

So that happened, and then the firefighters turned up.

And then this fight broke out.

I don't know what what was a rivalry over, but the firefighters just started on the clowns.

Maybe the clowns, the clowns had just come to town, so they were using their prostitutes, maybe.

And this huge fight broke out, and a policeman came to break up the whole melee, and it ended up with a lot of people being really badly injured.

And I think actually they went and met again a couple of days later, so they established this rivalry, like the Jets and the Sharks in Westside Story.

And so they agreed to meet a couple of days later, and the clowns and the firemen met again.

And then a fight started because a fireman knocked a hat off a clown's head, and

everyone got wounded.

And because of that, the police force was regulated, and rules were introduced as to how you put down a riot and how you don't let things get out of hand.

And those rules still remain today.

Do you know what the good thing about arresting a bunch of clowns is?

You don't need as many police cars because you can

at least 20 into each.

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Let's listen in on a live, unscripted Challenger School class.

They're reviewing the American Revolution.

The British were initiating force and the Americans were retaliating.

Okay.

Where did they initiate force?

It started in their taxation without representation.

Why is that wrong?

The purpose of a government is to protect individual rights and by encroaching on individual rights they cannot protect them.

Welcome to eighth grade at Challenger School.

Learn more at challengerschool.com.

Okay, time for fact number two, and that is Andrew Hunter Murray.

My fact is that baby robins sometimes eat so many caterpillars they turn green.

This happens.

There's a new book out called The Robin A Biography.

It's by a guy called Stephen Moss.

Appropriate.

Ish.

They turn green.

Oh, yeah.

You know what I'm saying?

Yeah, yeah.

Moss is green.

It can be light brown sometimes.

Yeah.

Well, they turn green because they eat a lot of caterpillars and the caterpillars are green and so they just change colour.

Not all caterpillars are green.

Do they turn whatever colour the caterpillar is?

This fact has been pedanted to death.

I'll bring you a good fact about robins turning green.

Is it just the breast that goes green or is it the whole robin?

I don't know.

Wait, you didn't even look at a photo of your fag.

It's very hard to find a photo of a green robin.

Suspicious.

Very suspicious.

Although baby robins don't have red breasts, do they?

So red breasts are the sign that you're ready to fight.

So I think robins are really famous for being very pugnacious, aren't they?

You know, anyone comes near their territory, they sing that beautiful song, which means, Get the fuck out of here, and they have that big red breast, which means get the fuck out of here.

And so, baby robins for their first sort of year, they don't have red breasts because that's sort of an invitation to fight.

It's something you display when you're ready to get in the boxing ring.

Yeah, it's true because robins will attack anything that's red, won't they?

If you just give them a little bit of red cloth or something, like a tinyest bullfighter.

Do they really?

Yeah, they do.

Holi!

They do die so much.

They murder each other a lot.

They'll peck each other at the base of the skull to break each other's spinal cords.

They're vicious bastards.

Wow.

Yeah, they are.

I didn't know this.

Redbreast, Robin Redbreast, Redbreast is their surname.

Well.

Explain yourself.

So, okay, in the 16th century, and in the 15th century, sorry, in the 15th century, they used used to give human names to familiar species.

So, it was a redbreast, but then they would be like, Robin, how are you doing?

So, Robin Redbreast.

So, redbreast was the surname.

And redbreast, it shouldn't be redbreast, it should be robin orangebreast, because they have orange breast, but wait, you haven't, sorry, you just befuddled us with changing red to orange and going down that line.

So, are you saying that they used to call birds by human names?

That's true, actually.

Like, I think one of them's Mavis, isn't it?

Like, is it a thrush or something?

They call Mavis in the middle of it.

Really?

And Robin is the only Christian human name that's stuck around in the species that we're talking about.

I think that is right.

Robin Redbreasts?

Yeah.

Mavis thrush.

That was how.

But then what you're saying, actually, the other bit is quite true as well, which is that they don't have red breasts today.

They have orange breasts, but back then in the 15th century, we didn't have the word red.

Amazingly.

We just didn't have the words.

So they said that's orange because that's what they associated as they lumped into.

We didn't have the word orange.

That's why we called them red.

Because

we did have the word red.

Usually I can save that in the edit, but I think it might.

Yeah, no, so the opposite of what I said is true.

You know, they measure the size of the

red slash orange part of robin's breasts because scientists wanted to know whether they grow or shrink or whether they're particularly big when they're trying to mate.

And do you know how they do this?

It's kind of sweet.

So, this is a study in Spain that was done a couple of years ago, and they catch the robins.

And in the study report, it said, We placed it gently on its back on a table, and I imagine then tied it down, because I don't think a robin lies on its back on a table unless you do.

And then they get a bit of tracing paper, and they just put it around the front of the robin, and they trace around the red bit through it.

And then they measured all the bits, and they deduced that male red breasts get bigger with age and females don't.

So that's that's basic science.

You could do that in science class.

That's really cool.

Yeah.

And do you know robins go through puberty every year?

Every year.

Every year.

Imagine that.

Wow.

So towards the summer, when the days get longer, their brains get flooded with hormones, their gonads grow, and the males start learning songs to kind of attract women, not women.

Sorry, I was going back to my own previous gones.

And then in the winter, they go back down again, they go and shrink, and their hormones flush out of their system.

And then every summer, they get this puberty.

God.

It's amazing, that, isn't it?

I mean, women get that once a month, so my sympathy doesn't extend too far, but

they'll nest anywhere, apparently.

So

they'll pick any nesting site.

And I was reading a bit of a review of a book in the Telegraph about Robins that listed a series of nesting sites that they'd made.

So plant pots, a pigeonhole in a desk, the engine of a World War II plane in the body of a dead cat.

Well, that took a real turn, Anna.

That was really sweet.

Right till the end.

That's sweet revenge, I think.

And then there was one that made its nest on an unmade bed while the bed's owner was downstairs having breakfast.

And the owner came upstairs again and thought, that's sweet, and allowed it to nest there and incubate its eggs.

And it didn't tell me this article what the owner slept on for the subsequent, however long it takes.

I think he slept in a dead cat.

I was looking at what would happen whether caterpillars can change colour from eating things.

Oh, yeah.

Okay, I just thought there might be something out there.

And I found a paper on the internet called The Effects of Blue Dye in the Food of Caterpillar Species Vanessa cardui.

I couldn't quite find out which paper this was from, but it's genuinely there.

And they said, our experiment had lots of problems.

First, we did not record all our results correctly.

So, what they wanted to do, they wanted to check whether the caterpillars, when they had the blue dye, whether they'd be blue when they became butterflies.

So, first, they did not record all of the results correctly.

Next, we miscalculated the number of dead butterflies in each group.

Then, we mixed up all the labels.

Next, some of our butterflies fell off their cups and then one of our group members knocked over the bin for the control group.

And then it said, all of these mistakes affected our results in some way.

I read about an animal.

It's a really odd thing.

It's a cave-dwelling crocodile, which crocodiles don't dwell in caves.

So this was quite a big finding.

And they were studying them for ages because they couldn't work out why they were doing it.

And the thing that really stuck out about them was that they were bright orange and crocodiles are not bright orange so they were they were like oh that's two things we need to look at now and the orange thing that they couldn't work out for ages it turns out that there were bats living inside the cave and they would poo into the cave water where the crocodiles were and these crocodiles were being dyed orange by bat poo.

It was like in the water and then the water was dying.

It was like going into like a one of those t-shirt tie-dye things and it was just, yeah, it just dyed them.

And so, for a while, we had this mysterious orange crocodile, but it turns out they're just covered in shit.

Have you guys seen waxwing birds, like cedar waxwings?

So, they're these birds that they have really brightly colored yellow tips on their tails and on some of their feathers.

And so, they've had this forever and ever, as long as we know.

And then there's a cedar waxwing that lives in North America, which has this really bright yellow tip of its tail.

And in the last 50 years, it's suddenly been turning red and this is because a bunch of Asian honeysuckle has been brought into North America and it has these bright red berries and they eat these really really red berries and it's changing the colour of them so the cedar waxwing is changing colour as a species because it's eating all these red berries.

That is amazing.

Imagine.

What the orange crocodile didn't do anything for you?

No.

No, it was good.

I was just imagining the humans all started drinking Sunny Delight or something.

Yes, exactly.

It happens.

It does happen.

So babies sometimes turn orange if they have too much, is it carotene in their system?

Yeah, too many carrots, too much orange juice, and your baby will turn orange.

Yeah.

I've just had a baby.

I don't.

Dan, I do not know what I'm saying.

I've got an experiment coming on.

I just know what the report's going to read like afterwards.

Firstly, we mixed up all the babies.

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

My fact this week is that the Russian communist leader, Vladimir Lenin, spoke with an Irish accent.

Okay.

Oh, the Russian communist leader, Vladimir Lenin.

So

I think we need to specify that this is not him speaking Russian in an Irish accent.

No, no, it's when he spoke English.

He was taught by an Irish tutor, and the way that he spoke, he just carried.

So whenever people...

How do we know that this is true?

Like, is there a recording of him singing Danny Boy or something?

The Russians have admitted to it.

They said that this was...

It's not a crime to speak with an Irish accent, Dan.

It's weird because the Russians admit to so little, and yet they are willing to give it away.

Yeah, I was a terrible investigative journalist when I was going.

Did you do the hacking?

No.

Okay.

The accent thing?

Yes.

Great.

I'm out of here.

No, he was taught.

We also know it because H.G.

Wells met him and they had a conversation and he came away going, that was the weirdest conversation because I was talking to an Irishman, but it was Russian communist leader Vladimir what's his name?

Lenin.

But apparently, Lenin spoke with what's called a Rathmines accent.

And Rathmines, apparently, I've never heard of it, is in a particular area of Dublin.

And he had an accent from this area.

And it meant that not only would people in England have struggled to understand him, but people in Ireland would have struggled to understand him.

Did you guys know that the

posh, you know, the posh American accent that's in all the Hollywood films of the 20s and 30s, like the Catherine Hepburn classic, I can't impersonate it, but like imagine Catherine Hepburn in a film or Bette Davis or someone.

That posh American accent is not an accent.

So no one real had that accent.

That was an accent that was created for Hollywood.

So that kind of American-English hybrid of the 20s, 30s, 40s, and then it was suddenly phased out in the 50s when they thought this was a bit weird,

was they got accent coaches in to train people to speak like that.

And they thought it would make them sound more educated because it had that English vibe.

And the only people who spoke with that voice were Hollywood actresses and actors.

That is amazing.

It's weird, isn't it?

It's really weird.

Yeah, I heard that.

Is that so, as in when you then heard their real voice in real life, it was completely different?

Yeah.

I mean, I think they got voice coaches to teach them how to just speak like that normally.

But

I read Eva Green.

Do you remember she was the,

she was in the Casino Royale reboot with Daniel Craig of James Bond?

She's French, and when she did all the interviews, and I didn't know that when I saw the movie, because she did it with a British accent, but in the interviews, she thought that people are just going to be so bothered by the fact that I have a French accent.

She did all her publicity in the English accent that she did.

And it was really, really convincing.

Yeah.

You wouldn't know.

Did you notice in Bond?

Well, no, I was the same with Dick Van Dyke, actually.

Yeah.

Poor Dick Van Dyke.

Last year, he apologised for the accident for the first time ever.

Oh, I'm terribly sorry, Lily Pumpkins.

He, by the way, he was in the news a few years ago because he...

You love Dick Van Dyke.

Yeah, he fell asleep on his surfboard and he got carried out into the ocean.

Surfboard?

Yeah.

That is a relaxed surfer.

Yeah, and he woke up and he was in the middle of the ocean and he was being carried by currents and he didn't know where he was.

And he said a bunch of porpoises came up and they guided him back to shore.

And otherwise, we would have no more Dick Van Dyke, he would have gone off into the ocean.

Guys, on accents,

do you know, you know, Paddy Ashdown, former Lib Dem leader?

Do you know what his name was?

Patrick Ashdown?

Yeah, so his name is not a funny name, his name's Jeremy.

But he was Irish, and the reason we call him Paddy Ashdown is that he went to boarding school in England, and everyone called him Paddy because he had an Irish accent.

And he said, I just feel comfortable with Paddy now.

Isn't that bizarre?

And he, you know, openly embraced it.

And I suppose it was a different time.

But Panny Ashtown is Jeremy Ashtown, were it not for xenophobia.

Wow.

Well, on that.

So there was a study in 2015 on the way people perceive different accents, because obviously there are dozens of accents all over the UK and they have different, you know, perceptions that come with them.

There was a study that found, of perceived intelligence, that found that the Birmingham accent, this is very unfair, but it found that the Birmingham accent was so low-rated in the study that it ranked worse than staying completely silent.

Do you remember how this fact was about Lenin?

Yeah, yeah.

Did you know, you know, Lenin's body is still hanging around embalmed, looking exactly like he does.

So Lenin's body is there, but he was sort of the first instance of that kind of embalming to make bodies, you know, look exactly like they have looked forever and have a pre-mousy tongue,

yes, yeah, yeah, pre-all of those.

And so now, all other countries who want to embalm their great leaders,

like Ho Chi Minh, for instance,

and in North Korea, Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il,

they've all been embalmed and they get sent to Russia periodically in order to be professionally maintained.

You're kidding,

they don't bring the people there, they physically.

Apparently, they get sent to Russia.

So I certainly know that

the Ho Chi Minh is sent to Russia every few years to get maintained because they're so good at keeping up.

I mean, imagine the Christmas party at that place when you've got Ho Chi Minh there, Lennon here.

There's a lot of good Instagram photos out there.

That's all I'm saying.

Let's be real.

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Let's listen in on a live, unscripted Challenger School class.

They're reviewing the American Revolution.

The British were initiating force and the Americans were retaliating.

Okay.

Where did they initiate force?

It started in their taxation without representation.

Why is that wrong?

The purpose of a government is to protect individual rights, and by encroaching on individual rights, they cannot protect them.

Welcome to eighth grade at Challenger School.

Learn more at challengerschool.com.

It's time to move on to our final fact of the evening, and that is Anna Trasinski.

Yes, my fact is that in Japan, if you make a mistake at work, you can hire someone to get told off by your boss so you don't have to.

This is so weird.

I read this in this incredible article in The Atlantic, and it was interviewing someone who works for a company called Family Romance.

The idea is that you fill the gaps in people's lives, people's personal lives, people's lives generally, that need filling.

And so, in this instance, he said he sometimes gets hired out to people who salary men.

And in Japan, that's quite a big thing.

People work for big corporations, it's quite faceless sometimes.

They don't necessarily know their bosses.

And then they make a massive mistake.

And they're sent to the boss to get told off.

And the boss doesn't know who they are.

And at this point, this man gets hired and he has to go into the boss instead and say, I'm so sorry I did that.

How embarrassing.

And he says in this article, he says, you know, do you know how we apologize?

We have to get down on our hands and knees on the floor and really say, I'm so, so sorry, while the boss hurls abuse at us.

And he's paid to do this.

So the other person doesn't have to.

Is there ever a scenario where like five people are being told off, but that one guy's been hired for every single...

And so he's like, yo, crap, get out of here.

Send the next guy in.

Same guy comes back in.

A series of novelty hats.

Send in the guy with a sombrero outside.

I'm furious.

That interview is unbelievable.

This firm, Family Romance.

So the man who founded the company, his name is Ishi Yuichi, and he is acting, his first success was playing a father for a girl who had a single mother, and the mother wanted the girl to grow up with a father figure in her life.

So he has been playing the father of this girl for eight years.

She doesn't know it.

She doesn't know that this man is not her father.

And he says, if the client never reveals the truth, I must continue the role indefinitely.

If the daughter gets married, I have to be a father in the wedding.

And then I have to be the grandfather.

And

it's a gig for life he's got now.

He's committed to the job.

You've got to say that of him.

It is amazing.

Yeah, Andy and I have read it and do read it.

But one other thing he does that I think is quite funny is that he is hired by wives to apologise to their husbands for having an affair with the wife when the real person who had an affair with the wife has run away.

So when the husband finds out that the wife's having an affair, quite often the man, the other guy says, okay, well, I'm out of here.

And so she'll hire someone to go and apologize to him.

And he says his tactic there is that he goes pretending to be this man who's been shagging the wife.

and he goes and he meets the husband, and he bows very deeply and he apologizes very profusely.

But also, he dresses and acts like a yakuza, as in a Japanese gangster.

And so he says the husband accepts the apology quite quickly

because otherwise he may kill him.

That's the technique there.

But don't Yakuza only have four fingers?

He's a good actor.

He can act only having four fingers.

So there's another thing.

In Japan, Christian weddings are really popular, as in

sort of white weddings, as we know them in Britain.

And 99% of the Christian weddings that they have there are fake.

So if you're a Westerner in Japan, it's often an easy acting gig to pretend to be a priest for a couple of hours, conduct a wedding ceremony.

You're not a priest.

You don't know any clerical rituals or anything like that.

They happen in a fake chapel.

And it's often just English teachers from the West making a bit of money on the side.

And everyone kind of knows it's fake, but everyone goes along with it because they like the ritual.

Wait, so people are getting married in the ceremony?

It's not legally binding, but it is what people do for their wedding.

So you would also have the kind of registry office thing.

I think they have a registry office thing, but the actual, yeah, the sort of big ceremonial bit.

One account from one of these guys who conducted, I think he said he conducted about 900 weddings over the decade.

I know.

He recorded his first ever wedding rehearsal that he'd done, and he showed it to his wife, who I think was Japanese.

And she looked at him conducting a ceremony and speaking in Japanese to the couple, and she said, well, it was good, but you made one big mistake.

Instead of saying, you may now exchange rings, you said, put the ring in her crotch.

And so if you can't afford this guy to, when you're at work, to be told off for you, there's a cheaper version.

For about $65 equivalent, you can hire in Japan an attractive man to come to your workplace and gently brush away your tears while you weep.

The company is called Handsome Weeping Boys

and also in China there's a big thing at the moment with like the uber economy kind of thing so you can kind of get part-time use of washing machines, basketballs, umbrellas.

There was an umbrella sharing company.

In fact, that's in our book, isn't it?

Yeah, they lost all 300,000 umbrellas straight away when they rented them out and forgot to put a tracking system on them and no one returned.

Actually, in China, there was the case this year of a man who got married, had his wedding, and then was arrested because it turned out he'd hired 200 guests to pretend to be his friends at his wedding.

And apparently, the bride and her family became suspicious when none of them could explain how they knew him.

So they were obviously on a very low wage.

I think they were being paid the equivalent of nine pounds each.

So they hadn't been given a backstory or anything.

So the bride just came up up and said, How do you know this guy?

And they said, I don't know, I'm being paid to do this.

But yeah, that when he was arrested.

And the happy ending to that story is that he claimed he was 27.

And it turned out he was 20.

And in China, I didn't realize this, the minimum age at which you can legally marry as a man is 22.

Really?

And yeah, I know.

I had no idea.

So yeah, not valid.

We're going to have to wrap up in a second.

So anything before we do?

A Japanese thing?

There's a Japanese word called nuhara, which means noodle harassment.

And that refers to the hassle that some people get for slurping their noodles too loudly.

This is a big thing in Japan at the moment, apparently, according to the internet.

And someone has managed to deal with it by inventing a musical spoon.

So basically, you have a musical spoon, it plays loads of music, and no one can hear you slurping your noodles.

Oh, no, that sounds much more annoying.

Yeah, what does it sing?

Hey!

Nice.

Well, okay, speaking of our theme tune, we must wrap up.

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, you can find me on at Schreiberland.

Andy?

At Andrew Hunter M.

James?

At James Harkin.

And Anna.

You can email podcast at QI.com.

Yep, or you can go to our group account at no such thing on Twitter.

You can go to our website, nosuchthingasafish.com, where we have links to our book, The Book of the Year.

It's out now, and we're going to give a copy away in a second to someone from our audience.

We've picked out our favorite fact that you guys sent.

Andy, what was the best fact?

This one is from Sam Ward, and it's that the Liechtenstein football team's national stadium is only half in Liechtenstein, the other half is in Switzerland.

So for 45 minutes every match, the Liechtenstein goalie invades Switzerland.

And who is that from?

That's from Sam Ward.

Cool.

Come and collect your book at the end.

Guys, thank you so much for having us.

We're going to be out the back, as I said before.

We're going to be signing our books.

So they're on sale.

If you want to come say hi, please do anyway.

Thank you so much, guys.

We'll see you again.

Goodbye.

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