NSTAAF International Factball: Australia v Mexico

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Hello, and welcome to another edition of No Such Thing as a Fish Presents International Fat Ball.

This is brought to you by the QI Elves in association with VisitEngland.com.

My name is Dan.

I'm sitting here with Alex, James, and Molly.

And it's time to pit another two teams together.

And today's match is Australia versus Mexico.

So let's begin with Australia.

What is quite interesting about Australia?

Who wants to go first?

Well, Dan Schreiber is from Australia.

I am Australian.

Yes.

And so this is going to be a very biased match, I feel.

I think we're all going to be going for Mexico just despite.

How dare you.

Bloody dare you.

This is very Australian.

The national anthem was written on a bus.

Really?

Yeah, yeah.

It was a guy called Peter Dodds, McCormick.

He was returning from a concert of national anthems.

That must have been a great concert.

And he was just annoyed that Australia didn't have one.

Yeah, he was basically sitting on the bus and he thought, no way, we need a national anthem.

And so he just started writing it.

Did you write a good one?

We wrote Advance Australia Fair, Welsh.

No, it does include the line, Our home is girt by sea.

What does that mean?

Girt by sea, it means it's surrounded by sea.

We are a beautiful island, he wanted to say.

Yeah, which would have been nicer to say we're a beautiful island.

Okay, so some facts about Australia.

Lots of Aboriginal languages in Australia, and here are some words that we get from there: Budgerigar, Bunyip, Dingo, Gala, Kangaroo, Koala, Kukaburra, Numbat, Wallaby, wallaroo, wichiti, wonga, and wombat.

And also kylie, right?

Kylie is an Aboriginal word that means kind of like a boomerang that doesn't come back.

It's a stick that used to be used for catching and killing animals.

That's what Kylie means.

And there's the oldest one that's been dated at 20,000 years old, made from a mammoth tusk.

It would really hurt the mammoth because it's made out of mammoth tusks and then it gets hit by something that's made out of his own tusks.

Oh, that's terrible.

That would be like us walking around as someone throws a leg at us.

Yeah, it's like hit by a human bit of body.

That's terrible.

They have a surprising number of shipwrecks on the shores of Australia.

They've got over 6,500 shipwrecks.

Have they?

Yeah, that's really high.

That's one for every nine kilometers of the coast.

It should be our country is girt by shipwrecks.

Yeah, absolutely.

This is really nice.

One of Australia's lakes is called Lake Disappointment.

It was a guy who went to one of the most remote parts of Australia.

He was following a number of creeks, convinced that it was going to lead to a ginormous lake.

And the body of water they eventually got to was so salty that he couldn't drink it.

So he just said, Oh, this is a huge disappointment.

I find exactly the same thing with a mountain.

There's a Mount Disappointment north of Melbourne, I think.

And two explorers, Human Hovel,

they climbed it and it was really difficult.

And they got to the top, and the view was rubbish and they were really disappointed with it, so they called it Mount Disappointment.

I hope it's the same explorer who did Make Disappointments.

How was your trip?

It was really disappointing.

It's like early trip advisor, just kind of giving it a really crap name.

Lake One Star.

Shall we move on to the Australian animals?

Because I think they're probably one of the greatest thing about Australia.

Okay, go on.

So classic QI fact, kangaroos have three vaginas, but so do koalas, wombats, and Tasmanian devils.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

Oh, yeah.

So wombats have three vaginas?

Yup.

Koalas too.

Koalas have three vaginas?

Tasmanian devils too.

Tazzie devils have three.

Yup.

A tiny kangaroo is the size of a jelly bean, which I think would be pretty cute to see.

A roux.

A roux, yeah.

When they're born, they come out, but then they climb up the front of the mother and go into the pouch.

And they're these tiny little things.

Tiny little mountain climbers.

Have you ever seen one?

Yeah, yeah.

You can watch in a David Attenborough documentary.

Yeah, we see the jelly bean.

In 1932, there was a Great Emu War in Australia.

And basically, after World War I, a lot of soldiers retired into farming.

But they had a massive problem with emus that were coming and ravaging their land.

So they went to the Minister of Defence who gave them a load of machine guns and they assumed that they were just going to decimate them.

And they only got about 5,000 in one go.

How did the emus fight back?

They just ran around and were just generally really difficult.

He said that they were organizing guerrilla tactics.

They were tending to be guerrillas.

That's how they go around it.

He said, if we had a military division with the bullet-carrying capacity of these birds, it would face any army in the world.

They can face machine guns with the invulnerability of tanks.

They are like Zulus whom even dumb-dumb bullets could not stop.

Yeah, that's a bit weird.

I read that this is a story about a guy, Captain Starlight, who was a ranch man.

He was kind of like a drover and

he stole a thousand cows from a ranch and he steered them 800 miles across some of the most inhospitable land in Australia.

And he was caught as a result of it.

And when he was put on trial, the jury, they were so impressed by his achievement that they found him not guilty.

You're not guilty because you've got such an awesome name.

Yeah.

What?

We're going to put Captain Starlight in jail?

No way.

He's a superhero.

Yeah, that's not happening.

In Australian law, they have guilty, not guilty, or lad.

Lad.

Captain Starlight.

They do have, though, Australian MPs.

If an MP is being sort of either rude or whatever, they can be sin binned.

At school, we have this seat called the hot seat, and they didn't turn it on anymore, but back in the day, they used to just turn it on, and it got hotter and hotter and would like burn you as you sat there, and everyone would walk past and you were like on fire.

That's torture.

That's not allowed.

We used to have a school, we used to have, in a playground, we used to have a friendship stop.

And the idea was that in the playground, if you don't have any friends, you go and stand by the stuff on it and you wait for someone else who doesn't have any friends and then you go and make friends.

Well, we would call that the bully store.

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Okay,

that's it for the first half.

That's Australia done.

But now it's time for our halftime quiz sponsored by visitingland.com.

And this comes in the form of three QI questions, which we will reveal the answers to at the end of this podcast.

So, Molly, what's your question?

Where in England used puffins as currency?

Puffins as an actual currency.

Well we'll find out.

Yeah, I guess.

Has it got the queen on it?

Can you do that?

Is that legal tenant?

Stamp the queen on it, the puffins.

Alright James, question number two.

My question is, what does the German word Coventryn mean?

There must be an English link there somewhere.

It's not just a German question.

Okay, and question number three, Alex.

Mine is, when William the Conqueror went to crush an uprising in Exeter in 1068, what rude gesture did one of the residents make that really upset him?

Okay, well, that's the quiz.

Get the answers at the end of our podcast.

And now it's back to the second half of our match, and it's Mexico.

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We started off with Australia with a national anthem fact.

So I've got one on Mexico, and that's that you can be fined in Mexico if you stumble while singing the national anthem.

So stumble as in fall over, or just get the words wrong.

Did you get the words wrong?

There was a woman who got in Guadalajara who got fined $40

when she was singing for in front of a football stadium, the national anthem.

Just speaking about weird laws that have been put in place, in a northern Mexican state called Sonora, there are a bunch of names that they've made it illegal to call your child now.

So you are not allowed to call your child Burger King.

Fair enough.

Rambo, Robocop, Harry Potter, Terminator, Hitler, Scrotum,

Batman, Martian, and Panties.

Does that mean there are kids in Mexico already called things like Scrotum?

It must be.

It must mean that these were put on there for a reason.

So they must be somewhere out there, Terminator is playing with spinach.

I just imagine Scrotum standing underneath the like, I need a friend place and ice a school.

Robocop.

Who's naming their kid Robocop?

I'll tell you something that's not illegal in Mexico.

Escaping from prison.

They don't punish if you escape from prison and then if you were caught, they just put you back in prison.

You don't get charged with an extra crime because they concede everyone has a natural desire to be free.

Also, if they were trying to escape, there's plenty of tunnels for them to do that in, cross-border drug tunnels,

which I'd never heard of.

And apparently, since the 90s, more than 100 drug tunnels have been made that go across the border.

They have lots of ways of getting drugs into America, don't they?

They catapult them over sometimes.

And there was a guy in 2013 who was arrested trying to float from Mexico to the US on a bag of marijuana.

Wow.

So his boat was the drugs itself.

Oh my god.

It's quite clever, isn't it?

That's great.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And he got busted, did he?

Oh, yeah.

Otherwise, we wouldn't know about him, I guess.

Yeah.

Well, many bustings of people trying to cross the border

into America

are made at the hand of one of the greatest of all sheriffs, an actual sheriff, Stephen Seagal.

Stephen Seagal is not a sheriff.

He's a sheriff.

He's a genuine sheriff.

Is this a movie that you want to know?

No, no, no, no.

Anyone listening, Google it.

You'll see that he's busted a number of people.

He got two guys who were traveling across the border with $250,000 worth of marijuana, and he busted them.

They're in jail.

Mexico has more televisions per head than any other country in the world.

Just a fact.

Oh.

And I think the most obese people.

That's where chocolate comes from, I guess.

It is indeed.

Yeah, is that a Mexican word?

And I didn't know that.

That's a chocolate itself, the word, is

one of the.

Yeah, it's nahuatl.

And other words that come from there are avocado, chili, coyote, axolotl, tequila, and tomato.

All words originally from Mexico.

Do you know what tequila is made out of?

Yeah, it's made from cactus, I think.

No, it's made from a plant called agave.

Oh.

It's like a cactus, but it's related to the lily.

And there's 136 species of it in Mexico.

Onto other Mexican foods, avocado means testicle tree.

And it was named by the Aztecs because they thought that avocados just looked like testicles hanging from a tree.

Wow, they must have had very strangely shaped testicles.

Massive.

Green.

Certain priests of the Catholic Church believe that Mexico is currently under attack by Satan and they put a calling out for more exorcists because they need more to fight him.

And apparently, it's gone so bad that there is an unprecedented demand for their services, and some are so busy that they can't take on new cases.

It's reflective of the state that they think that Mexico's got into with drug trade and all that stuff.

It's a very Catholic country as well.

Yes, exactly.

So they think Satan's got a stranglehold on them right now.

So if there are any exorcists...

listening and they're not getting enough work in England, Mexico's your place.

We're going to have to wrap up.

We've covered a lot with Mexico there.

Does anyone have anything they want to chuck in?

Well, I want to go to Night of the Radishes, which is held on December 23rd every year in Mexico in Oaxaca.

And hundreds of people compete to make the coolest nativity scenes and all kinds of stuff out of radishes.

And the winner gets their photo in the local newspaper.

That's really good.

Okay, all right.

Well, that's that's the end of our of our match.

Before we find out who has won, Australia or Mexico, why don't we find out the answers to our visitengland.com quiz?

And we'll start with you, Molly, with the question first.

Where in England used puffins as currency?

The answer is Lundy Island.

Lundy Island.

Yeah.

And what did they, so how much was one puffin worth?

Do we know?

So there was a guy called Martin Coles who in 1925 bought the whole of Lundy Island and he issued two coins, the half puffin and the one puffin, and he used them as local currency.

So it wasn't real puffins.

Oh, okay, yeah, because when you said half puffin, I was like, oh my god, that suddenly got dark.

Keep the change.

Yeah.

James, question number two.

My question was, what was the German word Coventrieren mean?

And it means to flatten, and it refers to the bombing of Coventry.

By the way, wow, that actually made it into their language as a word.

That's horrible.

Wow, yeah, that's terrible.

I don't think it's particularly commonly used, but it does mean that.

Wow.

Okay, Alex, last one from you.

My question was, when William the Conqueror went to crush an uprising in Exeter in 1068, what rude gesture did one of the residents make that really upset him?

Oh, yeah.

And the answer is that he climbed onto city walls, dropped his trousers, and broke wind at the the approaching troops.

How did they know from that distance that he broke wind?

That must have been in like one of those areas that just echoes.

Well, their flags are fluttering.

Okay, so that's the answer there.

There's no prizes, unfortunately.

However, if you do go over to visitengland.com, there is a chance to win some QI goodies,

including some of the books signed by the elves.

There's a bunch of stuff there, so go and check it out.

But in the meantime, let's sort out who's won this match.

Alex, who do you think?

I think Mexico.

What?

Yeah, sorry.

All right.

uh, James, yeah, definitely.

Mexico.

Okay, this is not, this is clearly.

I'm all over Mexico.

Really, you as well?

Chocolate, avocados, all good things.

Oh, my days.

All right, well, there we go.

Decision made.

Australia, the obvious winner there.

And I don't know what you guys are doing there.

Yeah.

So that's it from us.

If you want to get in contact with us about any of the things that we've said over the course of this podcast, you can reach us all on our Twitter handles.

I'm on at Schreiberland.

Molly.

At Molly Oldfield.

James.

At egg-shaped.

And Alex.

At AlexBell underscore.

And

stay tuned again for another episode tomorrow, in which it will be, James.

That will be Greece versus Japan.

Greece versus Japan.

There we go.

Okay, thanks everyone for listening.

We'll see you again tomorrow.

Goodbye.