NSTAAF International Factball: Colombia v Ivory Coast

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Hello, and welcome to another edition of No Such Thing as a Fish Presents International Fat Ball, the only football podcast out there that makes absolutely no mention of football whatsoever.

Brought to you by visitengland.com.

We are the QI Elves.

My name is Dan.

I'm sitting here with James, Andy, and Anna.

The match today is Columbia versus Côte d'Ivoire, and we're about to find out who the most interesting of those two are.

So, let's begin.

Columbia.

Okay, a fact about Colombia.

Yeah.

Okay, Colombians traditionally drank armadillo blood to treat asthma.

Wow.

Does it work?

I believe not.

Yeah.

And also, you get asthma quite a lot.

It's not like you just take a course of it and it's gone for the rest.

You need basically a live armadillo with a flesh wound.

Yeah, and treats it like an inhaler.

Yeah, exactly.

So people carry them around, presumably, like in a handbag.

You have an asthma sufferer, and she starts, and you're like, did you remember your armadillo?

Yeah, sorry, can I borrow your armadillo or just feel in a bit?

One traditional snack in the Santander region of Colombia, which I did not know was a region,

is hormigas colonas, which translates to ants with a big bum because they are a kind of ants that people like eating as a snack.

And they're very rare and very valuable because they only come out of their nesting ground one or two days a year.

Sorry, do you mean rare as in undercooked?

It has some great festivals, Colombia.

It's home to some of the various biggest festivals in the world.

It's home to the biggest theatre festival, as in like the highest number of people attend, the biggest salsa festival, biggest flower parade, and the biggest outdoor horse parade.

Very good.

What's the biggest indoor horse parade?

I know of only one famous Colombian.

Okay, who's that?

Gabrielle Garcia Marquez.

A fantastic, incredible author who passed away, sadly, this year.

And there's an interesting fact here, which I did not know.

It's not on the blurb of his book.

His grandmother was a secret witch doctor, and his grandfather once killed a man in a duel.

Wow.

Yeah.

Pistols at dawn.

That's amazing.

Bring your armadillos.

He was brilliant, wasn't he, Marcus?

He was married to his wife Mercedes for 55 years and every day throughout those years she put a yellow rose on his desk in the morning.

For a reason?

To say hi.

Do you need a reason to present your wife with a flower?

Yeah.

It's just romantic though.

I need a wife.

I need a wife first.

Mercedes meant Mercies, the plural of Mercy.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

No, I didn't know that either.

You must have heard of another Colombian down, Pablo Escobar.

Yeah.

The famous drug baron.

He was Colombian.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay.

He had a great big house where he kept loads of animals and stuff like that.

And apparently a load of his hippos keep escaping from the house and terrorizing local towns.

Wasn't that...

Didn't that help the police find him?

Because hippos are not native to Colombia.

You will ask questions, won't you?

If he was out and about.

Yeah.

Yeah, definitely.

In the 1990s, Escobar owned one of the best football teams in Colombia, Atlético Nacional, and their rivals, Millionarios, belong to a rival drug trafficker.

Wow.

Which is amazing.

He apparently used to have big parties.

Who?

Escobar.

Yeah, yeah.

And at those parties, he would drown his enemies in the pool.

It's a kind of like two burrows, one stone kind of thing.

Whereas

I don't want to just like do the dull stuff.

Let's party.

And then we can have this happen.

As one of his enemies, if you receive well, there are people going, I'm so surprised I've been invited to Escobar's party.

He's never liked me.

But I mean, I guess we should go.

I'm gonna say no to a pool party.

He said it's a pool party, but he said I don't need to bring trunks.

I don't understand that.

Medellin's an interesting town.

They have a no-pants day as a protest against the government.

I have a no-pants day several times a week.

Not as a protest, just as a way of life.

It's one of the many reasons we've changed the locks on this office, Andy.

How did you get in today?

You mean no pants, you mean?

No trousers.

Yes, American-style pants.

Okay, well, I'm still having a no-pants day today.

Yeah, it's against freedom of expression.

And so they walk around the town with no trousers on.

I mean sort of on the subject of this, there's a remote outpost in Colombia called it's pronounced Los Pinas, although it's not.

Nothing funny about that.

No, you're right.

Absolutely not.

It's just a way of expressing yourself.

And the guys who live there, it's the...

It's separated from the nearest town by a ravine, and the Colombian government's decided that it's too expensive and there aren't enough people living there to build a bridge over the ravine.

And And so the nearest school, for instance, is in the nearest town, and all the kids have to get there by zipwiring across the ravine.

And as you can imagine, they're not the safety conscious zip wires that tourists try when they pop over to New Zealand.

You don't want to get your lost penis stuck in that zip wire, do you?

Bogota also has a laziness museum.

It's a museum in Bogota which aims to make people think about the social issues implied in taking a nap, in being jobless, or in feeling that maybe we are wasting our time.

Do you want to go to the laziness laziness museum?

Nah.

Imagine the staff behind the desk.

Yeah, just going.

Why are there no cards here telling us what all these exhibits are?

And actually, why are there no exhibits?

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Okay, now it's time for the halftime show, which is three QI questions brought to you by visitingland.com.

And the three questions with the answers being revealed at the end of this podcast are, James, okay, my question is, how many lakes are there in the lake Lake District?

Question number two, Andy.

Where is the southernmost point of the mainland in England?

Okay, and question number three from Anna.

Which world first was built outside the Houses of Commons in 1868?

Okay, it's time for match to resume play and making their way onto the pitch.

It's Cote de Bois.

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So Cote d'Ivoire.

Who wants to go first?

Okay, are we going to keep calling it Cote d'Ivoire or Ivory Coast?

Why let's go for both?

Cote d'Ivoire is what most places in the world call it, but usually places in the UK call it Ivory Coast, but both are acceptable.

I prefer to call it Ivory Coat because it reminds me of my favourite item of clothing.

You've really got to hand that to a museum.

They've had a lot of problems in the Ivory Coast over the last several years.

They've had a civil war and they've had a lot of domestic unrest.

So partly as a result of that, everyone's very young.

The average age is about 19 across the whole country.

And also wages are very low.

So someone earning as little as $100 per month is pacified as being middle class officially.

Wow.

It is a troubled place.

We were saying that's quite hard to come up with more fun facts in the Ivory Coast because there are a lot of less fun facts.

As you say, Andy, it has been embroiled in civil war basically since 1999 with a couple of respites.

One of the major respites in the Civil War was in 2006 during the World Cup.

And the Ivory, I know we're not supposed to mention football, but the Ivory Coast football team was credited with causing a truce because as soon as either the Ivory Coast qualified for the World Cup, the football team brought the warring parties together and made them sign a truce.

And because both sides were supporting the Ivory Coast and the World Cup, it brought them together for a time.

I know an interesting fact about their Independence Day.

Go on.

Go on.

Their Independence Day is the 7th of August.

Good one, Dan.

Doesn't really sound like much of a fact, yeah.

They celebrate it on December 7th.

Oh, that is good.

Why?

Yeah, I think it's because by the time the harvests have been collected and sold, that's when they get paid.

And so their Independence Day was set up on that, but they didn't actually have enough money to have a proper celebration.

So it's just a better time of year.

Better time of year.

So they celebrate August the 7th, Independence Day, on December 7th.

We should celebrate Christmas in the summer when it's nice and sunny and not cold and horrible.

One thing you will like, Dan, is that there is a group of people in the Ivory Coast who are called the Dan.

Really?

Yep.

And they specialize in doing stilt dances, i.e., dancing while on stilts.

And their main town is called Man.

So you could be Dan of Man.

Dan of Man.

Yeah, I like it.

That's very cool.

There's another group of people, and I really like this.

They're called the Bowel people.

And they believe in another parallel world called Blolo.

And that means elsewhere.

So a man can have a Blolobla, which is another wife from the beyond.

And the female version of that is a Blolobian, which is obviously a man for the wife.

But they tend to have a negative effect on this life, the other, the normal life not blowo life uh marriage um i've got a dance in ivory coast called the fukafuka oh yeah you know of that no it's the dance that uh didier drobbat used to do when he scored a goal i know we're going back to football again sorry about that yeah oh okay but it's called the fukafuka that's quite what was it like a hip swivel

i see well the um original twerking comes from the ivory coast as well really there's a dance called the mapuka dance which is a traditional dance from the ivory coast it's mostly performed by women and another name for it is La Dance du Fessier, which means the dance of the behind.

In 1998, the government of the Ivory Coast prohibited its performance in public.

Wow, and here's one more dance craze from the Ivory Coast: flap your arms and cluck like a dying chicken.

This was a bird flu dance that they did.

It was invented by a 21-year-old disc jockey, DJ Lewis, who invented a dance making light of bird flu by imitating a chicken in its death throes during a cull.

Wow.

Wow.

If they would bring that into British clubs, then I would definitely start going out on the town again.

That's true.

Well, maybe we should go out tonight and try it.

Let's start the trend.

There is an absolutely amazing building in Cote d'Ivoire, which is it's a basilica at, I'm going to say this wrong, Yamusucro, and it's the tallest basilica in the world, as in it's taller than St.

Peter's in Rome.

They built it slightly smaller than St.

Peter's in Rome at the request of the Pope, and then they put a massive gold cross on it to make it taller at the top.

So they sort of cheated.

But a classic cheat for tall buildings around the world.

Always a large spike.

Like the Empire State Building with the radio mask.

They didn't need that.

Yeah.

It's so big that a third of all the Catholics in Ivory Coast could worship there.

Wow.

And also, I read that it's got the largest air-conditioned space in the world.

That sounds nice.

That church does.

Yeah.

Let's go there because I am bloody hot in this office today.

It is hot.

Okay, that's it.

That's full time.

That's the end of our match.

Before we find out who has won, we are going to quickly get the answers to our visitengland.com quiz that was our halftime show starting with the questions james what was the first okay the first question was how many lakes are there in the lake district it was a bit of a trick question most of them are meres or waters the only one that's actually called a lake is basenthwaite lake so the answer is one one lake yes i did not know that that was right andrew hunter murray gets a point nice andy my question was what's the southernmost point on the english mainland and if you were thinking it's land's end it's not it's actually Lizard Point which is not quite as far west but it is a bit further south.

Okay and Anna question number three.

Yeah so my question which world first was erected outside the House of Commons in 1868?

The answer is the world's first traffic lights.

Traffic lights, British first.

Yep.

That is correct.

Although it had to be taken down pretty soon after it was built because it exploded in the face of a policeman.

I thought you were going to say it was so successful they gave it the green light.

Okay, that's the end of the match.

And to decide who was the winner between Columbia and Cote d'Ivoire, we are going to go to James for the decision.

Oh, it's a tough one.

Let's go for the Cote d'Ivoire.

Yeah.

I really love all those dance moves, so let's go for that.

Yeah, great number of dance moves.

Yeah, I agree.

Okay, well, that's it for this match.

If you want to chat to us about any of the things that we've said, you can get us all on Twitter.

I'm on at Schreiberland, James.

At Egg Shapes, Andy.

At Andrew Hunter M.

And Anna.

If you write at Quickapedia, the QI Twitter feed, I might get back to you.

Yes, but we can't promise

because Anna hates Twitter.

Okay, that's it for the show.

Join us again tomorrow.

There's another matchup in our World Cup of Facts, and that is James.

That is the all-Europe encounter between Switzerland and Italy.

Exciting.

Very cool.

Okay, well, we'll be back with that match tomorrow.

Until then, goodbye.

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