171: No Such Thing As A Half-Ape Vampire

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

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

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 my fact.

My fact this week is that the Icelandic version of Agatha Christie's Lord Edgeware Dies took over 10 years to complete because the translator couldn't work out how to translate two words.

Firstly, spoiler alert in Lord Edgware Dies.

Yes.

You know, I don't think you understand crime fiction, Andy.

It's not like you have to wait till the end for the big reveal about who dies.

What were the two words, Stan?

Do you know?

I don't know.

So the reason I don't know is I read this in an article on The Guardian by the author, the translator of these books called Ragna Jonason.

And I think for the reasons of not wanting to do the ultimate spoiler alert, he's not included the two words.

Because they're like the ultimate words in the whole story, I think.

Yeah, so this is the thing.

These two words are, it's a bit of wordplay that Agatha Christie used in the book.

It's the clue, basically, to solving the murder.

And in Icelandic, he just couldn't work out how to do it.

And he's been translating Agatha Christie books since he was 17 years old.

And he started with Endless Night.

The reason he picked it was because it was the slimmest volume, but he convinced the publishing house that that was a really good one to start with.

But it was actually, it was just really short.

He's quite a famous author in Iceland, I think.

He is, yeah.

Ragnar Jonasson, was it?

Yes.

And his books have been translated into English

by a guy called Quentin Bates, who's also a writer, but I couldn't see if any of his books have been translated into other languages.

According to him, the hardest thing about translating from Icelandic into English is punctuation.

Because a full stop in Icelandic isn't necessarily the same as a full stop in English.

And I think that's really interesting because you think it's all about the words that you have to translate.

But if you have to translate the punctuation as well, that's pretty hard, right?

Yeah.

Do you know what a full stop is?

I think sometimes it can be a comma

or even a semicolon.

My pet peeve is people who put commas instead of full stops.

And the Icelandics are just doing it all over the shop.

Well, I think it's part of their actual language.

I'll allow it.

I can't believe we're not finding out these two words.

Is the reason you didn't look into what they were that you didn't want the spoiler?

I thought we couldn't actually mention it on the podcast.

I thought

it would be...

Edgware's dead.

Is that it?

No, I think that's translatable.

Okay, fine.

Maybe it's Edgware Road, and the pun is that he's on a horse.

But it also sounds like a tube tube stop because that'd be quite hard to translate into Iceland

well this is the interesting thing about translating though or simultaneous interpreters sometimes if they have a speaker who makes loads of jokes they find it really hard to do

because

puns obviously are a nightmare for them and they hate it and one of one interpreter wrote in an academic article about interpreting puns based on a single word with multiple meanings in the source language should generally not be attempted by interpreters as the result will probably not be funny

I think often puns in your own language, you should not attempt them because the result won't be funny.

I'm not targeting anyone specifically, but

well, in that case, I'm not going to say anything for the rest of the podcast.

One of my favourite translations is the Asterix books, and they're full of puns, aren't they?

Yes, yeah.

So they were full of puns in the original French, and then they were translated into English, and all the puns kind of still work.

They all have names that are puns, basically.

Like Geta Fix.

Get a fix is the druid.

So it's like getting this fix from him.

Anyway, what I didn't know is that that was translated by two people, Derek Hockridge and Anthea Bell.

And Anthea Bell is the sister of Martin Bell,

the politician and broadcaster,

and also the daughter of Adrian Bell, who was the first Times cryptic crossword setter.

Wow.

Isn't that cool?

And you can see the wordplay really working in that family.

Yeah.

That's amazing.

So, guess what the most translated translated work is?

The Bible.

The Bible.

You're absolutely right.

Guess what the next most translated work is?

Or who it's by?

Little Prince by Santec Superi.

Oh, that's really close.

Okay, that one is in the top ten.

Cool.

Okay.

I read recently that that got translated into its 300th language.

That's why I say that.

You're absolutely right.

Yeah, it did.

Okay, the next three books after the Bible that are most translated in the world are all by the Jehovah's Witnesses, the Watchtower Society.

Oh, they know they are.

Seven out of ten of the books are by the Jehovah's Witnesses in the top ten.

The only secular ones are The Little Prince and the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Great read, which is a zinger.

I don't count it if then are they selling them the Jehovah's Witnesses or do they just thrust them on people?

Look, they're translating them into different languages, and that's what counts.

I don't think people are buying those.

No, there's not sales, it's just physical translations.

No, no, no, I know, but you know,

you get a free Bible every time you go to church.

Oh, yeah, that's true.

The Bible should be disqualified as well, too.

Wait a minute.

Those church roofs are all falling down.

On translators,

I read in an article I was reading that when Obama was president, the US State Department received a message for him from the King of Bhutan, and it was in the language Dzongka,

which I think is how you say it.

And they needed it translated, and so they went to their Dzongka translator and said, This isn't the King of Bhutan.

Can you translate what this message says to Obama?

We need to know what the message is.

And the translator says, No, I can't possibly translate that because it's in the royal version of the language and my eyes are not worthy to see it.

And so

they had to look far and wide for another translator.

It turned out the message was to wish him a happy new year.

But it could have been a major diplomatic incident.

I think Thai has a royal language as well, don't they?

But they tend to be not that different from the actual language.

I can't remember if it's like that in Bhutan.

But even if it was only one tiny bit of difference, it's the fact of setting your eyes on it that would be a crime.

You know, it sounds like he could have read it, right?

Yeah, he totally could have read it.

It's just his eyeballs weren't worthy enough.

They would have exploded.

Don't you know?

Happy New Year by Abber.

I wonder if they have a special version for the royal family in Bhutan

that only they're allowed to hear.

Does anyone know about the Icelandic translation of Dracula?

No.

So it was translated into Icelandic in 1900 by Vladimir Asmundsen, and it's a completely different book than the actual Dracula.

And it sounds ten times better.

How is it different?

Well, they have secret half-ape vampires

who sacrifice young maidens in the basement with lascivious glee.

Yeah, apparently, it's much sexier.

We only discovered this really recently in 2014, I think.

But the Icelandic people have known it for ages.

They've had the book.

But they haven't been reading the original.

No, yeah, yeah.

So, this is only when someone went back to check something in 2014, this Dutch historian, and he was like, This is completely different.

He said, I want to check something in the original text.

So, are we saying that no one, Icelandic and English, had ever had a conversation in the last 115 years where they both said, I've read Dracula, what do you think?

Well, I like the half-ape vampires sacrificing maidens in the basement.

Maybe.

You know, when you're a bit ashamed that you've forgotten most of a book that you've read, and you're going to look like an idiot when you go, oh, no.

Oh, yeah, yeah, I love those.

Yeah, I love that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That was my best bit, actually.

But yeah, apparently sexier and much less tedious and punchier.

No, Dracula is quite sexy already.

This is sexier.

Yeah, is it?

Yeah.

I mean, I had to read the original with a cushion in my lap.

But what's interesting about it is that they're trying to work out how much involvement Bram Stoker had in the translation of the book.

And I think the implication is this translator, I couldn't have written something this good.

It must have been an early Bram Stoker version.

It was the alternative that the translator made it up and inserted these guys.

Yes.

Pretty much that he took the original story and thought, I can make this better.

Wow.

But this guy's saying, saying, no, no one except Bram Stoker could have the imagination to come up with a half-ape vampire.

It must have been him.

I think you should read it, Andy.

I will.

Just think all the cushions you'll need.

So Iceland books generally,

really interesting.

They supposedly...

read more books and more books are published there per head than any country in the world.

So one in ten Icelanders are going to write a book in their lifetime.

Yeah, I've read that fact loads of times, and everyone says it's true, and lots of really proper places say it's true, and it almost certainly is true, but I still don't believe it.

I know, it's hard to believe, isn't it?

One in ten.

Well, there are only 300,000 of them.

Yeah, I think it's quite plausible.

And you can get some real crap published these days, don't you?

If you've checked out the Sunday Times bestseller list, well, the BBC did a feature about Iceland's book world, and they interviewed one novelist called Kristen Eyrichs Gadottia, and she said, it is difficult, especially as I live with my mother and partner, who are also full-time writers.

But we try to publish in alternate years so we do not compete too much.

But they're in a constantly stressful household with people up against publishing deadlines.

I guess so.

So I guess they hate each other anyway.

Yeah.

That's where we're going to be when we publish our book in two months' time at the hating each other stage.

So it makes sense slightly of this Icelandic publisher, which I'm sure we all know about, Tunglio.

Oh, yeah.

So Tunglio.

These are the ones that they publish their books only on a full moon, the night of a full moon.

They publish in batches of 69,

and if there are copies that are left over at the end of the night, they burn the copies.

So it's this odd publisher where it allows for people to sort of get their book out, but also not crowd the market.

They say they take a lot of care and respect with the burning of the books.

They fuel the flames with French cognac, and it's all done very classily.

Or wastefully, depending on your perspective.

Yeah, they hate cognac as much as they hate books.

Did you know George Orwell, Orwell, when Animal Farm was translated into French, it was called Les Animaux Partout, which is animals everywhere, but he wanted it to be called Union des Republique Socialiste Animale, which is what it sounds like, I guess, the Republic of Socialist Animals.

That's because it would be shortened to U-R-S-A, which is French for bear.

And of course, that would be a nice another reference to the Russians.

That's so cool, but they didn't go with it.

They went with Animals Everywhere, exclamation mark.

Which sounds like a fun romp.

It does.

It sounds like a kid's book where there's a mistake at the zoo and animals get everywhere.

Yeah, is there a bear in Animal Farm?

No.

It's mostly farm animals.

Is there a half-ape vampire?

Lots of those, yeah.

Atlantic version.

You can't move for them.

I have one final thing about translation.

It's really tangential, though.

But there is a thing called the Crew and Equipment Translation Aids, which is on the International Space Station.

It's a miniature train.

There's a a miniature train on the outside of the International Space Station.

Yeah,

I know.

And it's also called the Mobile Transporter.

And NASA say that it is simultaneously the fastest and slowest train in the universe.

Wow,

because it's spinning around the Earth.

Exactly.

And slowest because it takes 10 days to get to the next person.

Yeah, it moves at one inch per second top speed.

Well, have they not heard of Southern Rail?

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

Okay, my fact this week is out of the 360 million camemberts made every year, less than 1% are actually camembert.

That's not the fact I've got down here.

No, for what you sent out.

What have you got?

Out of the 360 million wheels of camembert produced every year, only four are actually camemberts.

Oh, well, that would be less than 1%.

But it would be a a lot less than 1%.

So, this, that was my original fact, admittedly.

And I read it in the Independent, and I think when they said just four are true camembert, I think they meant four million.

Yes.

A disappointing discovery we all made this morning as we started researching.

You would have four unbelievably expensive cheeses on the market every year.

Yeah.

If you just have four small wheels of camembert produced.

So, what it is, is the French have a protected designation of origin label which they put on real camembert.

And in order to be a real camembert, you have to have used unfiltered raw milk.

Your cows can only be fed grass and hay from local pastures.

You're not allowed to move the milk more than a couple of fields before you make the cheese.

You need to ladle it by hand and the milk has to have a fat content of at least 38%.

And if you don't follow any of those rules, you can still sell camembert-like cheese, but it's not the official camembert stuff.

And I thought when I first read it that only four cheeses managed to do that, but actually it seems about four million, which is still only one percent, which means more often than not, if you're buying a random camembert cheese, it's likely to not be the real deal.

So would it somewhere on the package subtly say that?

So the stuff which doesn't have that label is usually labeled Camembert Fabrique on Normandy.

But it is

like a lot of places, you know, you can't use the actual name of something unless it's made in the place it was made or in a certain way.

But it is Camembert, all this other stuff.

It's just not made the Normandy way that Camembert makers in France think camembert should be made the proper way.

It's not the real deal.

It's not the real deal.

I can't believe cheese generally in shops isn't the real deal.

I had no idea until I started looking into this.

What do you mean?

It's all ham.

It's all ham.

The sort of regulations of what can be labeled as cheese means that only 51% of the product needs to be cheese.

The rest of it can be something else.

But if 51% of it is cheese, then you can call it a cheese.

So what if people just sell smaller blocks of cheese just next to some wood?

Because people wouldn't buy that, would they?

I guess they wouldn't.

That's why my little shop closed down.

There was a

kind of cheese war over the camembert thing in 2007.

When I say a war, I mean a minor legal dispute.

But all the big producers wanted to say proper camembert is the stuff we're making, even though the milk is pasteurized and the cows actually have come from elsewhere and they're eating grass from somewhere else still and all of this stuff and it's not 38% fat.

It was a big legal dispute and the courts came down on the side of the little guy who's only making 1% of the cheese.

Good for the courts.

They're always the good guy, the courts.

Yep.

Do you know there was only one family making camembert until around the 1870s?

And they were the direct descendants of the lady who invented it, supposedly Marie Harrel.

They were good PR people, so I think her grandson or maybe grandson-in-law met Napoleon III and brought a big wheel of cheese

to a show.

So then he became the Imperial supplier, so then Camembert was a big deal there.

And they also made it, in 1813, they made it an honorary citizen of the city of Cayenne.

The cheese.

Yeah.

So Camembert became an honorary citizen.

Pepper must have been pretty pissed off if that hadn't been there.

They give it the cheese to the city.

Very good.

Nice, yeah.

Very strong.

Guys, have you heard of the Mondial du Fromage?

No.

Okay, strap in.

This is the world's greatest cheesemongering competition.

Oh, yeah.

This is to be the best cheesemonger, okay?

It happens in France, and this year the first ever American got a medal.

I think an American came third in the competition.

But it's held every other year, and it is so hard.

It starts with a 20-question written exam, then there's a blind taste test.

You have to get the name, how it was made, the region, the milk used, and how long it was aged.

Wow.

Then you have to cut four identical 25 gram pieces of cheese by hand with no measuring tools.

You have to cut four identical sized pieces of cheese.

Then there's a five minute speech where you have to present a cheese to the judges and say why it's good.

Then there's a swimsuit round.

That's the first morning.

Then there's more in the afternoon.

And one 2015 competitor said the afternoon is the four hardest hours of cheese you can imagine.

You have to make a cheese plate for the judges.

and then do a carving out of cheese and then do a large cheese board and you have to justify all your decisions.

And what do you get at the end when you've done all this?

I don't think there's a big.

Yeah, there's probably a small medal or a cash prize, or not a big cash prize, but you just get the honour of being the greatest cheesemongers in the world.

That's great, yeah.

That sounds really fun.

They do take it, they take it very seriously, don't they?

They've got a Brotherhood of the Knights of Camembert Tasting, which is like a Mason society for camembert tasters.

And they all have this huge fancy dress festival once a year where they dress up like masons and they have this really solemn.

Come on.

Yeah, you would go as a bit of cheese, of course you would you can't go as a bit it's a serious festival

fancy dress it's fancy dress fancy like masons dress fancy dress brackets but be a mason i'm not inviting you to our fancy dress party oh she's come as a mason again which cheese would you go as James I think I'd go as a baby bell that's a good one with the wrapper on or off

on actually in hot wax I would I would paint my face red

half of it and then I'd shave my hair and the top top of it would be the open bit of the baby bell, and the bottom bit would be the closed bit.

Oh, so it's just your head that's the baby bell?

Yeah, and then the rest of my body I'll shape like a plate.

Oh, that's a good idea.

This is one of the rounds in the Mondiel de Fromage.

I think I'd go as a Swiss cheese.

Would you?

Yeah.

How would you make the holes?

I'd fill a sheet with holes, and then I'd wear the sheet.

A yellow sheet, obviously.

Would you wear anything under the sheet?

No.

You better be careful where you put the holes.

What would you go, as Anna?

I don't know.

I can't think of any a cheese string, maybe?

A cheese string.

Yeah.

Peel bitters off myself as the evening went on.

That's great.

You could put all your hair up straight and then slowly take the strand down.

Slowly take it down, yes, because I was actually thinking of having to peel off my entire skin, which would have been a real hassle, a sacrifice.

Dan's going to get a lump of cheese, which is 51% bigger than him.

Just stand next to him.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I was going to go as a leg of ham.

Charles de Gaulle once said, How do you govern a country which has 246 varieties of cheese?

What was the answer?

It was a rhetorical question.

But the answer is you sort out a massive competition to work out who's the best cheesemonger.

And actually, you just reduce the numbers of cheese.

So they've got far fewer cheeses than when he would have said that.

I think they've lost 50 cheeses in the last 30 years.

And there's something called the Slow Food Organization, which is trying to save endangered cheese and other endangered foodstuffs, actually.

But yeah, it's like lots of artisan cheeses have disappeared.

Britain has more cheeses than France now, don't we?

Yes.

And they're better.

Well, are they?

No, they're not.

I don't like any of them.

Got, so are they actually extinct cheeses, or can we reproduce them?

As in, have the recipes been lost?

No, no, no, the recipes will be there.

It's just like how everything, when it starts being done on a large scale, you know, the little artisan producers get lost.

But the other thing is, a lot of these rely on certain strains of bacteria, so it could be that those strains have gone.

Oh yeah they might have gone extinct you're right.

And even if you get it back you don't know whether you've got exactly the right one anymore.

Unless there's like a super old guy in the village who remembers the taste of the extinct cheese and you bring it to him and you let him

sound.

I think there is one of those in every French village actually.

They just keep one old guy.

Yeah.

The cheese taster.

Do you guys know about the world's most dangerous cheese?

Ooh, no.

Is it the cheese rolling people?

Because they're always injuring themselves, aren't they?

In Gloucestershire, they always run down a hill after some cheese.

Oh, yeah, and you're saying that cheese is the world's most dangerous one that they're chasing after, yeah.

It's not the cheese's fault, admittedly.

That's like saying foxes are really dangerous, because a lot of people get injured on fox hunts.

You know, it's not actually the fox's fault, is it?

No.

Anyway, it's not that.

Is it something that's not pasteurized and might make you sick?

Is it like the one that's full of maggots?

Yeah, Kasumazu.

Have we talked about that before?

I don't think so.

It's great.

So it's from Sardinia.

It's actually illegal.

I think the EU banned it a few years ago but that you can still get it on the black market um and yeah the the way you make it is you infest pecorino cheese with maggots with these cheese fly maggots and they eat the cheese and then they excrete it while they're inside and that's what adds the flavour so apparently it's really kind of creamy because their excretion of the cheese and the way they processed it is tangy and aromatic um you have to eat the maggots you do eat the maggots yeah because they're inside but it's quite a hassle picking them out i think they they jump out at you if i remember rightly that's what people say how lively are these maggots i don't know you've got to be careful of not getting hit in the face.

So, why is it dangerous?

Do people die?

On the EU decided on hygiene grounds.

I don't think there have been any deaths related to it, so it's probably just health and safety gone mad.

I would be the fusspot sitting there picking out every single maggot.

You could just eat around the maggots.

Yeah, actually, I just want to eat the maggot excrement.

Thank you very much.

I think I'd go for a slightly less flavoursome cheese, but without the maggots in it.

I'm willing to put up with a slightly less flavour.

I think that's a good idea.

Yeah,

I like cheddar.

I'll just have cheddar.

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

My fact is that Norway's coastline is so long that if you took a piece of string along it and then stretched it out, it would run around the whole planet two and a half times.

Okay, so it needs to be quite a long piece of string.

Yeah, you don't get balls of string that big, I don't think, in your local

few and then tie them together.

Yeah.

I was dreaming about this last night, actually.

Weirdly, it was genuinely in my dream.

I thought, what if you had a long enough string that could go around the world, which would be shorter than the string you need for Norway, right?

Because you need

two and a half of those.

If you managed to get that kind of string and you tied it to the coast of, let's say, England and you just set off, could you wrap the world in that string if you went completely around?

I suppose in theory you could.

But here's something for you.

Imagine you added three feet of string to that one that's going all the way around the world and then you made it tight.

How much above the surface of the earth would it be?

Oh, I don't know.

Don't you know what I mean by that?

Yeah, yeah.

Hold on,

so that you could lift it a bit looser if you added three feet.

Dan's holding a piece of string.

I carry it all the way around the world,

and then give him the other end.

And then we add an extra...

Three feet of string to it.

Yeah.

How much higher would it go?

I would say it will basically not be higher at all.

Yeah, like a fraction of a millimeter.

That's what you think.

The actual answer is 5.7 inches, about 6 inches.

And it's basically maths and the circumference of a circle.

And this 6-inch difference is the same whether it's the size of the earth or whether you just put it around your stomach, for instance.

No.

If you had the three feet, it would just move out by that amount.

Wow.

That is amazing.

That is really cool.

That is an old paradox, which was originally, the earliest I found of it was 1702.

Oh, cool.

Book by William Whitston.

I don't really understand that, but I'm very impressed.

Yeah, super cool.

So, just on Norway, quickly,

this was sent to me actually by a guy on Twitter called at YPLAC.

He used to work for a ferry company in Norway.

For a string company.

He's got shares in them.

And he said that he learned if you took a piece of string and ran it along Norway's coastline, you could run it from London to Bangkok and back again.

But that might have been before there was a recalculation of the coast of Norway by some geographers in 2011.

And the basic point is that Norway is one of the most complicated coastlines on the planet because it has all these fjords where instead of going straight north to south, it goes in for 100 miles and then out for 100 miles again.

So you've added 200 miles to the coast, even though you're only 50 meters further along it.

So Norway is unbelievably crinkly.

Yeah, I think they added,

if you leave out the fjords, it's 1,573, and if you include them, it's 18,000 miles of coastline.

Wow.

It is unbelievable.

But that's I was looking into the biggest coastlines in the world by numbers and Canada is number one.

But what Canada you'd be able to go around the earth five times?

Yes, yeah.

And what kind of shocked me was that Japan is ahead of Australia.

Which doesn't make sense when you think about it because if you look at the sizes of the two places, Australia's got way more coast, but what Japan has is all these tiny islands which constitute being Japan.

So when you add all of them up, they're ahead of Australia.

It's nuts.

Yeah, this is why this fact is strange, right?

Because actually, every list could be different, right, in terms of the longest coastline, depending on the way that you're measuring it.

So, a coastline can be infinitely long.

So, imagine you've got a meter-long ruler, then you're only measuring a contour every meter, and so it's going to be much, much shorter than if you go around with a one-centimetre measure, and you'll measure much more lumps and bumps.

It's like if you've got a 30-centimeter ruler with some lumps and bumps in it, and then you actually ran a string all the way in and out of the lumps and bumps, that piece of string would be much longer than 30 centimeters.

So, actually, Norway's coastline could theoretically go to the end of the universe and bang.

Well, it's not quite infinite because there's a minimum length that you can have, which is the Planck length.

You can't measure anything smaller than the Planck length, but that is really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really small.

It's mini.

So, if we measured the coastline of me, for example, just around my body, if we went super close,

if we worked our way around all of your individual hairs,

and then all of your cells and all of your paws,

you could wrap around the world.

That's awesome.

But you know that that's you know, that's just logic if you think about it, isn't it?

Stop trying to talk it down.

This is an amazing fact that everything is nearly infinite.

But no one really knew this until the 20th century, the mid-20th century, when and the first person to really work it out was a guy called Louis Frey Richardson, who wanted to work out whether the likelihood of two countries going to war depended on the length of their border.

Okay, so he looked at a load of different borders, and for instance, when he looked at the spain portugal border he found that spain thought it was 987 kilometers but portugal thought it was twelve hundred and fourteen kilometers and they they immediately went to war over why have you stolen 300 kilometers of our border bastards

yeah and then it was picked up by mandelbrot and all the mathematicians who did all this fractal stuff yeah he was amazing mandelbrot so i hadn't really heard of him before this but he was a mathematician and he wrote an academic paper which was called how long is the coast of britain and he said it's impossible

for the same reason that the closer you look the more crinkly something gets

but Norway is special so Norway has a larger what they call a fractal dimension than other countries really just is more crinkly yeah yeah okay so on the fjords yeah the fjords the deepest fjord this one was actually also said to me by white black the deepest fjord is so deep that if you got to the deepest point of the deepest one, right?

You know the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world.

Yeah.

You could strap the Empire State Building to the top of the Burj Khalifa and drop the whole thing into the deepest fjord, and it would still be more than 100 meters from the surface.

It's a lot of effort just to prove that point, isn't it?

And also, you won't be able to see it because it's underwater.

Yeah, I don't know.

I think I just believe it.

And also, the Burj Khalifa is very pointy at the top, and actually,

you should probably put the Empire State Building at the bottom and then the Burj Khalifa on top.

No, because you've got a very pointy bit at the top of the Empire State Building as well.

They're both pointy at the top.

It's not going to work.

Are you counting the pointy bit at the top of the Empire State Building?

You know the bit that they used to attach blimps to.

Oh, right.

It's probably 96 meters from the top.

If you don't count the bit they attach blimps to.

But you could.

If you put the Empire State Building at the bottom, then you could use the spike to impale the other one on top of, and that would be how you welded them together.

You could do the same the other way around, though.

You could impale the bottom of the Empire State Building.

Yeah, no, you're right.

Thank you for coming up with the solution.

Yeah, I think it's a good idea, really.

I think we should do it.

I reckon just like normal measuring equipment equipment like sonar might be better.

Yeah.

I'm so sorry for reading out a fact that someone sent me, which is a very, I think, visually creative means of

telling me the depth of a fjord.

Imagine if we did measure stuff using skyscrapers.

Every time we had to measure something new, we had to take down the skyscraper and drop it in an ocean.

If we measured the coastline of Norway with the Burj Al Khalifa, it would be a lot shorter.

Yeah.

That's a very good point.

So we should do it.

Just one more thing on Norway's amazing engineering feats.

There's a little town called Rukken.

So R-J-U-K-A-N, how would I say it?

Ryuken.

Ryuken.

Oh, my God.

So, yeah, there's a little town called Rajuken.

And it's got 3,400 people there.

And the problem that this town has had forever, really, is that it's in amongst a mountain range and it's constantly in shade.

So for a lot of the year, they just don't see sun.

They can see sun at the top of the mountain hitting the mountain, but they're just covered in shade.

And it's been a massive problem.

And there's been tiny things to sort of try and fix it, like a service, a cable car service was started.

So you could pay a small amount, go up the cable car, and just experience some sun and then come back down again as a little ride.

So they've recently fixed it.

This is a few years ago now.

An engineer came up with an idea of creating three massive solar-powered mirrors that now reflect the sun into the valley.

and now they live in sunlight again and it tracks where the sun is going throughout the day so the mirror moves towards it to make sure the sunlight is always pushing down.

So this town that was in permanent shade is now sunny all the time.

It's now being constantly fried by incredibly concentrated beams of heat.

If you want to kill an ant, go to Ryuk.

That is amazing.

It's cool, eh?

I mean what a solution.

But then you also think, why build a town there in the first place?

Yes, exactly.

I guess it's easier than moving the town to the top of the mountain yeah but it's not like 50 years ago that town would have been in sunshine no you're right maybe the mountain's grown you know how everest has grown a bit or shrunk a bit perhaps the mountain's grown by 100 meters or so everest has shrunk by one inch yes i think so perhaps the exact same thing has happened except in reverse and to a much greater faster extent

also my lawn is growing at the moment and a bit of it isn't growing very well because it's in the shade a lot because it's next to the vents so where can i get these mirrors a mirror store, I'm guessing.

Oh, you want the solar-powered ones?

Yeah, really.

I mean, that's going to be better, isn't it?

You need to go to Ryuken and steal one.

The village has been left in darkness due to one Englishman's whim.

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Okay, it is time for our final.

We say fact,

and that is Anna Chasitski.

My fact this week is that, now prepare yourselves for this, you've got to focus.

Beef Stroganov is named after the great-grandson of the person who brought human chess to Russia.

It's a great fact.

It's the Stroganov part of Beef Stroganov we're talking about.

Or was it not Mr.

Beef?

He was constantly getting into fights with people.

His crest was a big cow and the words, what's your beef?

What's the beef?

It was the Stroganov family.

So, this was a big noble family in Russia from I think about the 16th century, but certainly well into the 19th and early 20th century.

And so, there was Count Alexander Stroganov, who in the very early 19th century decided to turn his townhouse lawn into a chessboard, a giant chessboard, for fun.

And he had his servants beat all the pieces and he dressed them all up as the different pieces.

And then he had the game be orchestrated by chess players.

So, there was one that was, there were two grandmasters of the time, or I don't know if they had grandmasters, but players of the time called Count Ivan Osterman and Lev Nalishkin.

And they told the servants where to move, and they moved.

And that was introducing chess to Russia.

Human chess.

Human chess.

Human chess.

And then, fast forward 100 years,

his great-grandson is called Pavel Sergeyevich Stroganov.

And he apparently had a chef who came up with Stroganov the dish and named it after this family.

And now there are some stories that say that it was his grandfather Pavel who initially inspired it and it had been the family for years.

So maybe it was named after the chess guy's son.

But our first mention of Stroganov that we have is from the 1880s, 1890s and named after Pavel.

I think we think that probably isn't named after him, right?

It's one of these could be apocryphal.

Yeah, it'll be named after the family, yeah.

Anyway, I just love this connection.

Also, I just spent a long time reading about the Stroganov family.

It is a connection between two things that you wouldn't say are household items, really, would you?

It's not like the guy who invented the fork is the grandson of the guy who invented dogs.

I play human chess.

The fork came before the dog.

I'm saying it's not that.

It's the other way around.

The grandson of the guy who invented the dog invented the fork.

Wow.

I have a couple of human chess pieces in my house.

Do you mean humans?

Yeah, I do.

So actually, you know, I just call that a household item.

that's a good point

i didn't really think much about it until starting researching this fact i didn't realize that it was a big thing in for example russia and there's a there's a there's a festival in italy every two it's not a big thing

no actually i don't think you'll continue thinking about it after we've researched this fact yeah but it is a thing that happens sometimes so there is a place in italy which has one massive match every two years and they dress up in historical costumes and i think they actually act out a particular chess game oh yeah yes they do.

It's one that was written about in a novel.

This is in Marostica, isn't it?

Yes, it is.

Isn't it the story of a famous match played between two knights who were both wanting to court a princess, and the winner was allowed to court the princess?

What?

Yeah, I think that's the story behind it.

Neither of them could get to her because they could only move two steps forward or one step to the side.

Wait, hang on.

That's the story of how we got a human chess.

No, the story of the game that's played every two years, the exact game.

In Marostica.

that's what they're celebrating.

Supposedly, the original game that they are following the moves of were played by two knights.

Who played a game of normal chess?

Normal chess and

it's in a story.

It's written about in a fictional story in the early 20th century.

Yeah, so none of it's real.

Have you heard of Chess City?

It's in Russia.

No.

Okay, it's in one of the southern provinces.

It's southwest Russia.

And it's in a town called Elista.

And there's an enclave in that town, which is a mini-chess city.

And it was built by our old friend, Kirsan Ilyumjinov who and yeah who until 2010 was the leader of this province and he is also the head of the International Chess Federation he's the one who claims to have been abducted by aliens and he thinks that sweet corn and chess are from outer space or something exactly and in 1998 to host the 33rd chess olympiad he built chess city which has a chess museum a large open-air chess board and a museum of buddhist art wow because there are a lot of buddhists living in uh illista um mars Incorporated are one of the biggest pet food companies in America.

They might be the biggest, actually.

And they make beef stroganoff for pets, for dogs specifically.

Why don't they call it beef dogganoff?

Because that would be like cannibalism.

Yeah, that's confusing.

You know what?

You don't want to eat like an Andy lasagna, do you?

But these

Tigreen Murray.

Anyway, these kind of things, they make $100 million in annual sales, these kind of human-like pet foods.

Wow, that's so weird.

I really want to verify this.

There are books on chess history that say that Charles Martel, who was Charlemagne's grandfather, is the person who invented human chess originally in the world.

And they claim that he played a game of living chess, I think, in the 8th century when he was at war with Arab forces and they introduced chess to to them, and he had his servants play it.

If anyone has any first-hand evidence that that happened, I'd really enjoy reading it.

First-hand evidence.

I want Charles Martel's exact words.

There's actually one really old guy in every French village who was part of that game.

My grandfather was a porn.

Okay, that's it.

That's all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

If you'd 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 Shreiberland, James, at Egg Shapes, Andy, at Andrew Hunter M.

Anna, you can email podcasts at qi.com.

Yep, or you can go to our group account, which is at qi podcast.

We can also be found on our website, no such thingasafish.com.

It's got all of our previous episodes up there, it's got all of our tour dates up there, and it's also got a link to our book coming out in November, the book of the year.

We'll be back again next week with another episode.

We'll see you then.

Goodbye.

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