104: No Such Thing As A Herd Of Koalas

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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 live from Dave's Leicester Comedy Festival.

My name is Dan Shriver, and please welcome to the stage. It's Anna Chaczynski, James Harkin, and Andy 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 my fact.

My fact this week is that when something thought to be a meteorite actually turns out to be an ordinary rock, it's called a meteor wrong.

How cool is that?

So we were sent that fact in by someone called Molly Christie. She listens to the show, she sent it in.
I was looking into it.

It's not obviously an official scientific terminology, but if you look into it, I've read AMAs on Reddit with meteorite experts. They all call it the meteorong.
Yeah, it is quite a common thing.

I went to the Natural History Museum a few years ago, and there's a kind of a department there that if you have any weird stuff that you find in your garden or whatever, and you're not sure what it is, you can send it to them.

They do call them meteorongs, and they think that actually when people think they find meteorites, it's almost always a meteorong. It's very rare that you actually do find a real one.

So the Natural History Museum has a room of meteorongs which are basically just rocks

in their gardens.

Yeah there was a guy who was saying that so he's at a University of Minnesota in America and he's called Calvin Alexander.

He's a university professor and he's been asking people for I think 30 years to come to him if they've found a meteorite, if they think they found a meteorite.

And he says he's seen thousands, more than 5,000 meteorongs. He's retiring next year.
Never yet has someone brought him something that's turned out to be a meteorite

until this year.

A couple found a thing in their garden that they'd actually found a couple of years ago and they said, actually, this looks a bit weird. Brought it in.
There you go.

It was his first ever meteorite a year before his retirement. That's really cool.
We should say what a meteorite is because I wasn't sure. So a meteoroid is a chunk of rock flying through space.

And then if it enters the Earth's atmosphere, it's a meteor. But then if a bit lands, then that becomes a meteorite.

Yeah, so it can be three different things depending on where it is. Yeah, and we get about uh 44 tons of meteorites falling on the planet every day, so you'd think there would be more.

We do, there's a ridiculous number. I think it's four billion a year land on Earth.
They're mostly, I think, really, really small, but it's a lot.

Do you know how you can tell if you're out in the wild looking at rocks, trying to find meteorites if it is one? Um, no,

so they're magnetic. Okay, yeah, so if you have a little magnet with you, a little fridge magnet or something, if there's a magnetic pull against it, that doesn't, it still might just be a rocket.

Well, it could be like a radiator or something. There's lots of things that are.

But that's the thing, though.

There are a lot of rocks that are just normal terrestrial rocks that are also magnetic. So don't just go around with

a magnet trying to find one.

So it was, because I got really excited when they said, yeah, if it's magnetic, then it's definitely a meteorite, except for the fact that a lot of rocks are magnetic, so it may just turn out to be a rock.

However, if it's not magnetic, it could be a rock from Mars or from the moon which is even rarer however it could also just be a rock so

it doesn't sound like they've cracked the perfect method i once wrote to a meteorite expert a few years ago and asked him what you should do if one lands because there's a common misconception that meteorites are hot when they land but they're not because they've just gone through space which is really cold and then they have gone through the atmosphere so warmed up a bit but they should have had plenty of time to cool down so you could actually conceivably get a frostbite from touching a meteorite

on the inside But when I wrote to this guy and said, what should you actually do? He said, whatever you do, don't touch it.

You want to get kind of a plastic bag and then put it down because just you touching it could contaminate it and mean it's not very good for science. So don't touch those meteorites.

I met an explorer over Skype called Charles Brewer Carias, amazing character, quite controversial character. The explorer in UP was said to be based on him.

You know, in the Pixar movie Up, the guy living in the Venezuelan mountains, said to be based on him.

He's famous for a number of things, a lot of discoveries, including he told me that he discovered what he thinks is the lost city of gold, and he did it while he was having a poo in the woods.

And he said to me, I looked in between my legs and saw something spectacular.

These Skype gates of yours, John.

But he also told me that he's discovered this glowing coral. glowing coral, which is the oldest life form on this planet.

And he said that it arrived via space, meteorites, and so it's now living on Earth, an extraterrestrial. Is this uh how trustworthy is this guy?

Is he friends with your Yesi hunting friends and your ghost-seeking friends? I don't know.

He said he was like, a biologist came in and said that this is definitely the oldest form of life, and actually, it feels like it's from out of space.

And then I emailed the biologist, and she said there's about as much exobiology in it as there is in my foot. So he must have heard it wrong, kind of thing.
But

potentially in the hills of Venezuela. I thought that she had an amazing foot full of aliens.
Yeah.

I don't think

Do you know what the Cambodian thing you shout when a meteorite arrives is. Star Pooh, is what you say.

Arch Pakai. That's what happened when one landed in Cambodia in 2014.
Is that what they call them? Well, loads of the people shouted, the local Khmer people shouted Star Pooh.

So I don't know if it's an official scientific name.

Wow.

There was a the RNLI launched a really big search and rescue operation last year, I think, because of a meteor flying through the sky, and they thought it was a distress flare being sent out by a ship.

There was an emergency operation. This is off the Cumbrian coast, I think.

And I think, you know, it takes quite a lot of money.

And they went out there, and then gradually reports started coming through from the rest of the country saying there's this flare going across the sky everywhere.

And it turned out, yep, no one's dying, which is actually good news

in a way.

Yeah.

In the late 18th century in France, they didn't think that the Académie Francais didn't think that meteorites could possibly exist.

Supposedly, what they said was, there are no rocks in the sky, therefore, rocks cannot fall from the sky. And they decided.
That logic is actually infallible.

Yeah, it's true, but that's apparently what they said.

And apparently, it meant that they didn't do any kind of studies on possible meteorites because if someone said they found one and saw one land, they were like, well, duh.

Obviously, not real.

But then in 1803, more than 2,000 meteorites fell in a single village in Normandy.

So they had to kind of change their mind a little bit. Wow.
Wow. Yeah, apparently that's a story.
I don't know if it's true. It's very cool.

There was a meteorite that fell through the roof of a house owned by the Comet family recently.

I think it was two years ago. That's nice, isn't it? Comet.
I think they're French. You didn't read anything more on that story, did you?

No, why would I?

It's only going to get worse from there.

We need to move on quite soon to our next fact. Anyone have a question? Can I do just a quick thing, a news story that I read?

A Bosnian man had his house hit five times by meteorites in less than six months a few years ago.

Experts at the local university were like, well, maybe there's like a magnetic anomaly or something like that. But he thought that he said, I am obviously being targeted by extraterrestrials.

I don't know what I have done to annoy them, but there is no other explanation that makes sense. The chance of being hit by a meteorite is so small that getting hit five times has to be deliberate.

Okay, it's kind of embarrassing how bad I am at budgeting. Let me see your charges.

Fine. You spent over $600 on takeout last month.
I can't cook. You know this.
Yes, I have had your disgusting food, but you're literally paying for a meal subscription on top of that.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait.

That can't be right. Look, just get Rocket Money.
It shows you all of your expenses in one place and even tracks your subscriptions.

And if there's a subscription you don't want, which for you, there are a lot you don't need, you can just cancel right in the app with a few taps. So you mean I don't have to call anyone to cancel?

Nope, no hold times or anything. And they'll even try to get you a refund on some of the months of wasted money, which is a lot of money for you.
Okay, okay. And if you thought I was done, I'm not.

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Okay, let's move on to our second fact of the show, and that is Andy Murray. My fact this week is that brown falcons commit arson.

Okay,

so these are Australian birds, they're a kind of falcon, and there are two species, brown falcons and black kites, and they've been observed picking up, when there are wildfires, they've been observed picking up smoldering bits of branch and twig and carrying them to new locations and starting fires in new areas, which then makes all the little creatures in the undergrowth run out so that they can kill them and eat them.

So this is deliberate fire starting as a way of getting food.

And it's all, so far, it's not been observed, it's not been filmed, and it's anecdotal evidence from park rangers, Aboriginal Australians, and Australian firemen.

Yeah, so it could be made up, couldn't it? I don't think it's made up, but I think it needs to be observed properly. Okay.
It seems likely, though.

It does make sense, because they rely on fires for their food very often, don't they? Those types of birds. So it makes sense.
Yeah, it reminds me of a thing.

We did a radio show with a guy called Rupert Sheldrake a few years ago, and he said that people anecdotally have said that when sheep want to get across a cattle grid, they kind of roll over on the cattle grid to get from one side to the other.

And he said loads of people have seen this happening. Yeah.
But actually, we think probably it never happened.

It might be just a story. What they noticed was someone started reporting it in one bit of Australia.

And then a few days later, sheep across the country started doing it as if there was some kind of secret sheep whispering kind of network that managed to spread.

But it's yeah, so it sounds like it's in the Sheldrakey area slightly, I guess.

But actually these people who have been talking about it are, you know, like you say, they're park rangers and they're, you know, people who kind of would know that kind of thing, aren't they?

So it would be very, very good to know if

it does happen. And

so there's more research being done, basically, and more observation being done.

One of the co-authors of it, Mark Bonter, has suggested that humans might have learnt about spreading fires from birds,

which seems less likely.

But apparently, yeah, because

they have to carry them quite small distances while they're still smoldering, obviously, because if you fly, you know, far, then it'll go out.

I mean, if we learn about carrying fire from birds, we overtook them so fast.

They're still there, occasionally picking up a burning ember. We've got bonfire night.

Does happen that, so in 2014, a pigeon in Stockwell did start a fire by dropping a cigarette in its nest.

Oh, that did it. On purpose?

Well, we don't know.

I've read about this new Kickstarter that's been fully funded where you can now, if you're out in camping or whatever, it's this little kit where you light a fire and it heats up this pad that creates a battery charge for your iPhone.

So you've got an external iPhone charger now or smartphone charger which plugs in to a fire source to give it away isn't that really cool? That is so cool. That's very cool.
Yeah.

Speaking of humans making fire, actually some humans still can't make fire.

Or until the 20th century there are tribes that still hadn't learned how to make fire.

So there are the, for instance, FA and Mbuti pygmies, that I think pygmy tribes that are in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

We think they could make fire thousands of years ago. There's some evidence for that.

But it seems like they forgot and now it's part of tribal tradition that you have to carry around a burnt burning ember with you all the time.

So you get fire from like if there's a lightning storm in the forest, then a tree sets on fire, and you pick up that.

And it's the women's job in these tribes to carry around this burning ember, and they have to wrap it up in damp leaves when they move from one campsite to the next so that they keep this fire.

Because if the fire goes out, it's like we've got no fire. Just waiting for the next thunderstorm.
Waiting for the next storm, yeah. Isn't that weird? Yeah, yeah.

And then I think some anthropologist turned up about 20 years ago and said, Guys, I was thinking about some other unusual birds, cool birds. Oh, yeah.

So, baby grey cat birds. They get their name because they make a noise like a cat.
They kind of do a little meow, which sounds great, but it's not really great for them because it just attracts cats.

That is a massive evolutionary design for us. And in 2011, they did a study and they found that domestic cats were responsible for nearly half of all deaths of these birds.
Oh, my God. Oh my god.

Here's another one.

There's a hummingbird called Anna's hummingbird. Oh yeah, he's at home now.
Yeah. Didn't want to come tonight.

Anna's hummingbird can shake their bodies 55 times per second, which is the fastest shake of any vertebrate known.

Just back to the sounds, I was reading about a bird that's called the fork-tailed drongo. And this bird has the ability to mimic other animals and other birds.

And what it does is it lets out, it's learnt the call of there's danger nearby. So if it feels like it, so basically it's so that they can steal food off other animals.

So they'll be like, danger's coming, and then they'll say it like a cat or like a, I don't know, like a hamster or something. And they'll like.
It's like a human. Could they say danger's coming in?

A human, mastered human. Yeah.
And so they, so these things run off and then they get the food. But they've learnt to both lie and not lie when there is actual danger.

So they, so they've kept animals on their toes. When they hear it and go, oh, it's probably that dickhead bird.
They can actually then get eaten because it wasn't telling them. Yeah.
It's cry wolf.

Yes. But sometimes there is a wolf.
Yeah.

You obviously never read to the end of the story of cry wolf.

I got the gist of it.

The same thing just kept happening. I was like, this is boring now.
Oh, God.

Cuckoos are. So I was looking at birds committing crimes.
These birds commit arson. Cuckoos are obviously very famous criminal birds.
You know,

put their eggs in other birds' nests and disguise them as other birds' eggs. And then the egg hatches and it tips all the real eggs out of the nest.
And that's that.

So so they're murderers and kind of house thieves

but other birds are getting really wise to it so um they've cuckoos have evolved to make their eggs mimic the eggs of whatever bird whose nest they want to steal so the eggs look identical uh to our human eyes to the bird whose nest they want to steal's eggs but birds other birds have now developed uh evolved really super sensitive infrared type vision so they can see really subtle differences in cuckoo's eggs that completely distinguish them from their own eggs so they're getting the better of them gradually.

That's very cool. It's quite, isn't it? But then the cuckoos will probably evolve again to beat that.
It's a race.

Yeah. Why can't they evolve to build their own nests one day?

I think of all the cuckoo species, I think most of them don't do that parasitic thing. The ones in Europe do, but around the world, I think most of them don't.
Yeah, that's true.

Last month, an Israeli vulture was arrested in Lebanon for spying.

So that happened.

And was it charged?

I don't think so. I think it was eventually released.
So, what kind of interrogation happened that they went?

No, you didn't do it, did you? You've been framed. It had a location transmitter and an Israeli identification tag on it.

So I suppose the thinking was that Israeli spies would have written this is a spy on a bird.

Yeah.

In 1471, a chicken in Basel was found guilty of laying a brightly coloured egg,

which was thought to be in defiance of natural law. What was the penalty? Unfortunately it wasn't let free like the Israeli one.
It was burned to death at the stake.

Ah, I mean that's delicious, delicious sentence.

And so Nandoz was born.

I found a bird that I'd never heard of before. It's a Tibetan blackbird.
This is its name. Turdus maximus.

It's an actual bird. All corded birds are the Turdus genus, aren't they?

Thrushes are all turdis. So they're Turdus Turdus, I think.
They're Turdus Turdus. So Corvids are crows and Corvids aren't the best.

They're crows, ravens, magpies, all birds like that, and they're so intelligent.

So this fact is kind of about birds of prey learning how to use tools in a way. And Corvids are amazing at using tools.

So there was one experiment where a crow was, it managed to, it was given a piece of wire, and it managed to bend this piece of wire into a hook using a glass kind of beaker that was nearby.

So, it like pushed the glass beaker against a wall so that it bent this bit of wire into a hook in order that it could hook a stick that was slightly out of its reach and it hooked the stick towards it.

And then it took the long stick with which it was able to get the food that it wanted to get. A wire? That's impressive, isn't it? That's really impressive.

And I don't know why I couldn't just fly over and pick up the food, but it was challenging itself.

We're going to have to move on really shortly. So, anything else before we do? Koalas to escape forest fires, their instinctive reaction is to crawl up a tree.

So

they often have to get rescued by Australian firefighters.

Very badly evolved. Yeah.

But they presumably move really slowly, so that's their best bet, I'm guessing. Like, I would never picture a herd of koala coming out because a fire was approaching them.
Yeah.

All right, let's move on to our third fact of the evening, and that is Chasinski.

Yeah, my fact is that in 1461, the mayor of Haien in Spain donated 10,000 eggs to his citizens so they could have a huge food fight.

Very kind. It's nice of him.
He's a good guy.

This is a guy called Constable Don Miguel Lucas de Aranzo, and he decided for Easter, Easter celebration, give his people this big food fight, and he built this huge fake wooden castle that he wheeled into the city centre.

And I think he then holed himself up in his house with some of his guards. And he was like to the townspeople, said, you get in this castle and let's pelt each other with eggs for a while.

And they did it. And then they did it again on May Day because they enjoyed it so much and for a few subsequent years.

It does kind of feel like a thing that should have carried on forever, doesn't it? Because it does sound like the most fun thing ever. What must have happened to stop it?

I feel like he, because it always seems to be him throughout the 1460s, so maybe when he left office, he sounds like maybe the Boris Johnson of the 15th century.

He probably had some dodgy policies, but did a lot of fun stuff on the side. Won the people round.

I read that in one of the other fights that he had that there was such a surplus of food that people then started hitting each other with chickens.

No, yeah.

How do you hit someone with a chicken? Well, it's just an older egg, isn't it?

Waiter, I think this egg is off.

So you come into Nando's everyday.

There were boiled eggs, I think, which sounds a bit less funny.

Yeah.

I've read mixture. There's a lot of controversy over the type of egg.
Oh, really? I think, yeah, some sources say boiled, some say just raw, but it's so hard to tell from the outside, isn't it? Yeah.

Actually, there is a game called um egg roulette, which so I think this is part of the

uh the Lincolnshire World Egg Throwing Championships, which are a massive deal. We've probably all tried to get tickets at some point.

And um they have stuff like the World Egg Trebuchet and um egg throwing, obviously.

And then one of the contests is egg roulette, which involves you sit at a table with one other person and you've got a whole bunch of eggs laid out in front of you and they're all boiled except one, and you take it in turns to select one and smash it against your forehead and then you get covered in raw egg when you pick the wrong one.

So it's not as dangerous as Russian roulette, but you're still covered in

sort of boiled egg when you

and it's not great, it's not a good result. It's not ideal.

The egg throwing itself, it's quite good. It's what happens is you're 10 meters away from your friend, and you chuck in the egg

or she, and they have to catch it and not break it. And then everyone does that, and everyone who does it right and it doesn't break, then they go to 20 meters and then 30 metres and then 40 meters.

So it's quite a cool game, that isn't it? I reckon we should have a goal later on. Are there rules that you have to throw it fairly towards them?

Because you could throw it off a bit and then they'd find it very difficult. You're in a team, so you watch the catcher.

This is why your team keeps losing.

You're going to get that guy this time.

Are you allowed to use an apron to catch it? An apron. No, I think with your hands, it has to be.
And they also have very strict drug rules as well, according to their website.

No, they say that, like any sport, you're not allowed any performance enhancing drugs but they do say

they do say that the local happy jack real ale is not only permitted but recommended.

I was reading about being egged, the phenomenon of being egged. Okay.
Being egged.

Fun thing to say. There was a 2006 study which was called Here's Egg in Your Eye, a prospective study of blunt ocular trauma resulting from thrown eggs.

This was a real study. And it just concluded, don't do it.

I mean, have people been ocularly traumatized frequently? Yes. Really? Not frequently, no.
But it does happen very seldom.

Janu Kovich, do you remember the president of the Ukraine?

Got struck with a brick, was rushed to hospital because he'd been struck with a brick, and it transpired when people looked back. I think they looked back over the footage and it had just been an egg.

So

it is apparently more dangerous and hard-hitting than they look. Yeah.

Wow. So he didn't look at the debris around him.
He just assumed it was a brick? I think, I guess maybe he had serious ocular damage and could no longer see

his surroundings. You know, in Greece, you don't get egged, you get yogurted.

It's called Yaoturma. Don't write in.

Yeah, like yogurt, Yaroturma.

And it's a specific kind of yogurt that they use, which is sheep's milk yogurt.

That's really good for Yaoturma ing people because you're sort of reminding people that they're Greek and that they've shamed Greekness

with your Greek yogurt. Greek yogurt at the house.
So, when you say it's a special kind, do you go into a shop and say, Do you have any yogurt?

And they say, is this for eating or for assaulting a politician?

Other politicians, they're in the top left corner.

Oh, there was quite a vicious food fight in 1818 in Harvard, apparently. This was an era of quite a lot of student protests in America, I think.

And yeah, this food fight started when someone threw a slice of buttered bread and it ended up going mad for days. And

all Harvard's crockery was smashed. Lots of plates and chairs were thrown at each other.
Lots of furniture broken.

There was

a lot of students were suspended, unsurprisingly, and then all the other students who hadn't been suspended went and protested.

One of them was Emerson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, was there at the time and he protested and went, stood under a tree and they sort of mobbed all the tutors and said, How dare you suspend students for breaking all the furniture in this place and smashing all the crockery.

And yet, apparently, this is quite a common occurrence. So they let them all back in because they were upset.
Wow. Okay.
It's kind of embarrassing how bad I am at budgeting. Let me see your charges.

Fine. You spent over $600 on takeout last month.
I can't cook. You know this.
Yes, I have had your disgusting food, but you're literally paying for a meal subscription on top of that.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

That can't be right. Look, just get Rocket Money.
It shows you all of your expenses in one place and even tracks your subscriptions.

And if there's a subscription you don't want, which for you, there are a lot you don't need, you can just cancel right in the app with a few taps. So you mean I don't have to call anyone to cancel?

Nope. No hold times or anything.
And they'll even try to get you a refund on some of the months of wasted money, which is a lot of money for you. Okay, okay.
And if you thought I was done, I'm not.

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All right, hey, let's move on to our final fact of the show and that is James Harkin. Okay, my fact this week is that in 1951, Australia's football team played against England and lost 17-nil.

The goalkeeper was called Norman Conquest.

What a great name, Norman Conquest. I love it.
And he is quite a famous goalkeeper. He's in the Australian Hall of Fame.

But he's most famous for being in this one game where they got absolutely annihilated by England. One being in the game.

Well, 17-0, but how did he... There was a report written by a guy called Tugger Bryant, who was another former footballer.
And he said that Australia could not handle the mud.

It was a really, really muddy pitch. Australia could not handle the mud, whereas England revelled in it and rang rings around the Australians.

Our players spent more time on their backs in the mud than on their feet. The only time they were on their feet was when the band played God Save the Queen.

So, yeah, the English team could kind of deal with their heavy conditions, but the Australians just weren't used to it.

I looked up more excellent footballer names

in the history. So, Reading in the 70s had a goalkeeper called Steve Death.

And just outside the goalie arena, there's a Zimbabwean defender, I'm sure you'll have heard of him, James, called Danger Fourpence,

which is great.

There's a Ghanaian chap called Naughty Naughty.

Amazing. There's a Brazilian striker called Credence Clearwater Kuto because his parents were such fans of Credence Clearwater revival.
Oh, yeah. He's quite famous.
These calls.

Everyone calls him Paul Easter, I think. Do they? Yeah.

But Australia are now obviously quite a decent team, aren't they? They're such a good team, aren't they? Because Dan's from Australia or was brought up in Australia, weren't you? So

you're a fan of the Socceroos. Yeah, yeah, they're so.
And we watched the games in the last World Cup in the QA office.

When they lost 17-0, it was the record defeat, I think, of any team in an international game. But now Australia holds the record win when they beat American Samoa 31-0 in 2001.

But what happened there was the American Samoa team all had passport issues. And so all but one of the players were ineligible to play because they couldn't get out of the King Ronda.
Oh my God.

They couldn't call up any of their under-20 team because they were all doing exams at the time.

And so they had to just draft draft in all these really, really young or inexperienced players, including three 15-year-olds.

And at the end of the game, the stadium showed that the score was 32-0 because everyone had lost count of Alex.

Oh my god.

There's always a little caveat for any international glory for Australian sport. It's so annoying.
Do you remember at the Olympics? It was that speed racer guy on

so

he was a speed skater, right? Yeah, speed skater, and he was coming last in the heats,

and or I think it was he'd made it through the heats and he was in the semis. And as they came around the corner on the last bit, he was away in behind.
Someone tripped in front, took out everyone.

He was so far back that he could dodge right around them.

Came first, made it to the finals. So everyone was going, there was no way this guy should ever be here, but here he is now.
Finals. Gets around to the same corner.
He's way behind.

Same thing happens. Everyone moves down.
Yep. He took over and just waltzed in to gold.

First ever gold that we've got. and he got it because both tides.
And he now goes around the country of Australia doing motivational talks

to school kids and stuff. And his talks are basically, oh, you never know, someone might cock up.

He's always like the tenth person, the ass, but the other nine get hit by.

Yeah.

I was just reading a bit about goalkeeping tactics over the years

because this is about a goalkeeper.

So

John Burridge was a goalkeeper, and he kept his his reflexes nice and sharp between the 60s and the 90s was his career by asking his wife to throw fruit at him when he wasn't looking.

That's amazing. There was a guy called Harry Rennie, who was a Scottish goalie, and in the 1890s, his training regime was to throw himself onto wooden boards for half an hour every day

just to toughen himself up. Yeah, because he'd have to be throwing himself on the floor.
Exactly, yeah.

Ah, okay.

Half an hour. So the first mention of football that I could find, at least, in Australia, is a letter to a newspaper complaining about football.

And it's a guy, I'm going to read it out. Our town is increasingly going in the wrong direction.
It will ultimately be no more than a Dutch lang street. My pipe is out.
I must now halt.

Till you hear from me again, Bog Trotter.

Absolutely. Love it.
And another thing about Norman Conquest is on there's a website called howmanyofme.com where you can see how many names there are of you. This is only in America, unfortunately.

But there are 288,278 Normans in America. What?

Yeah. What? People called Norman.
How many thou? 288,000. Out of 150 million men, roughly.
Yeah, that's quite a lot.

There's 1,082 people with the last name Conquest, and there's one person in America called Norman Conquest. Really? Yeah.
Oh, cool. So if you're listening, Norman.

The name Norman is going out of fashion, I think, in Britain. I think in 2005, there were only two babies called Norman born, and then I couldn't even find data for after that.

So unless there's been a huge surge, then I think it might have disappeared entirely. No, it's really sad, isn't it? It's pretty sad, yeah.
Pretty sad.

Can I quickly move the chat to names in Australia?

I just started doing a Google on things that I both have been to in Australia just to see the origins of it.

And I was looking at Mount Kusykusco, which there's a lot of, I'm actually not sure how to pronounce it properly, but it's the tallest mountain in Australia.

And i've climbed it it's so easy to climb it's it's a tiny little bump and and um but we're very proud of it it's our it's our tallest mountain so there was a thing was for years and years it was called mount kosikusco uh and it was this wonderful mountain and uh in uh basically they discovered and this was explained in a 1910 book that they eventually started recalculating the sizes and heights of mountains and discovered that a mountain just near Mount Kosikusco called Mount Townsend was actually taller.

So suddenly we had a new tallest mountain and rather than changing all the books, they just decided this is going to be a massive hassle. Let's just swap the names of the mountains.

They genuinely did that. So Mount Kosukusko is actually Mount Townsend.
They were just too lazy to do any admin. That's such a good idea though, isn't it? Yeah.
You don't have to change anything.

Yeah, on the maps, you can just draw two arrows.

So does it not have many big mountains, Australia? No. I think it's bigger than ours.
How tall is Mount Kosikusco? That's 2,228 metres.

Right, you know that's almost three times higher than England's highest mountain.

We go calling it a little bum.

Just because. I think it's not.
Is there not a tall? It's the biggest one on the mainland, isn't there? There might be one in the Australian Islands, which is a bit bigger.

There are a bunch in the Australian Islands.

There's actually a bit on the Wikipedia page that says mountains higher than the highest mountain.

And there's a huge list, but they're not on the mainland. They're not called Mount Kazikusko.

We found another one.

We need to wrap up very soon. Have you guys got anything before we do? Some funny names, maybe.

Always a highbrow note to end on. Exactly.
There's a website called nameoftheyear.com, which is quite cool.

And there, I don't think it's an official award or anything like that, but they go around and look in all the newspapers and anyone who's kind of a notable person, and they take all the funniest names and they make them battle against each other, like which of these is the best name, and they go through to the next round and you have a winner.

And the winner last year was a lady who hit the news after being arrested for shoplifting in Idaho called Amanda Miranda Panda.

Wow.

Sure, she didn't just panic when the police asked her.

Yeah.

Some of the people that she beat include Reverend Pier Batista Pizza Baller,

who is the head of the custody of the Holy Land Priory, and Dr. Wallop Promthong,

who is a professor at

Rajamangala University. And there's people in Britain, various names.
This was a newspaper article, I think it was in the mirror or somewhere, people with funny names.

There's a Justin Case, a Barb Dwyer, Terry Bull, and Doug Hull, all people in the UK with those names.

And there's a retired Ironman called Stan Still

from Siren Sester. And he said, it's been a blooming millstone round my neck my entire life.
Probably why I can't move.

Okay, that's it. That's all of our facts.
Thank you so much for listening.

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

I'm on at Schreiberland, James, at Egg Shaped, Andy, at Andrew Hunter M Jaczynski. You can email podcast at QI.com.
Yep, or you can go to no such thingasafish.com. That's our website.

We've got all of our previous episodes up there. Thank you so much for listening at home.
Thank you guys for listening here. That's the show.
Good night.

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