NSTAAF International Factball: Cameroon vs Chile

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Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish Presents, the World Cup of Facts, brought to you by visitingland.com.

This is a football podcast in which we make absolutely no mention of football whatsoever.

We are the QI Elves.

My name is Dan.

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

And once again, we're pitting two countries against each other to find out who the most quite interesting is.

And today, those countries are Cameroon versus Chile.

We're going to start with Cameroon, so let's go.

We've got something for Cameroon.

Yeah, I read something really interesting.

During the Great Depression in 1931, the people of Cameroon clubbed together to collect money to send to the starving Americans, and they managed to send over a total of $3.77.

I love that fact.

That's amazing.

You could buy a bagel for that.

It would have been worth more, though, wouldn't it?

$3.

Yeah, probably two bagels.

Two bagels.

Yeah, I'm not sure it would have brought them out of extreme depression, but yeah.

It probably would have made them more depressed the idea that Cameroon was sending them money.

Like, wow, that's how bad it's got.

How times have changed.

Because,

so I'm kind of interested by the president of Cameroon, Paul Beer, who's been president since 1982.

Paul Beer.

Paul Beer.

Oh, yeah.

I just realised what it sounds like.

Paul Beer.

It's not spelled like that.

It was B-I-Y-A.

But he leads an extraordinarily lavish lifestyle, him and his wife.

In 2009, he took a holiday in France and he spent £25,000 a day on hotels.

And that's coming from a country where the average annual income is about £600 a year.

He's an interesting guy.

In 2004, he got so annoyed by the criticisms of the international vote monitoring groups who were constantly saying that he just makes these elections up, he just does them for show to prove that he's a legitimate president, that he set up his own committee with six ex-U.S.

Congressmen, paid them all, who certified his election as free and fair.

You have to, if you hear the national anthem in Cameroon, you have to stand still wherever you are.

If anyone's ever there, you can be put in prison for not doing that.

It's like a nationwide game of musical statues.

Wow.

It's exactly like that.

That's great.

But if you have to stand still and you don't, presumably you've got enough of a getaway time from the police who do have to stand still.

Or it could be the last person to stand still gets kicked out of the country.

Oh my god, yeah.

It's the new UKIP policy, isn't it?

They're going to play the national anthem, and the last Romanian to stand still gets kicked out.

In Cameroon, you can pay for taxi rides with beer bottle caps.

What?

There's a competition in the country with the beer companies and if you get the caps with a certain symbol on then you get a free beer and everyone knows how much a beer is worth so people are using these caps as payment.

So would then if you were paying a cab driver in it would the cab driver go off and get a beer or then would he use it as money?

Yes he could do or he could get himself a beer.

So it's a whole new currency?

It's a whole new currency.

Even bribes have been paid in this beer bottle cap.

currency.

Wow.

Can you forge a beer bottle cap?

I shouldn't think so, otherwise the competition would be a bit pointless.

Yeah.

Well, just speaking of beers,

the bars in Cameroon where you would buy such beers, they've got fantastic names.

There's one called Begone Gloom,

another called Polygamy,

and one called Word of God.

I'm suspicious about the purpose of the Polygamy Bar.

I feel like it's got a behind-the-scenes other means of getting money.

Yeah, they do have some good names.

There are 21,400 people in Cameroon who speak a language called Bum.

There are 3,000 Cameroonian speakers of the language Gimme, but it's an extraordinarily diverse place anyway, isn't it?

There I think there are 275 ethno-linguistic groups.

So it's incredibly varied.

Their biggest mountain, or not their biggest mountain, but just a really nice named mountain if we're going on names, Mount Faka.

How are we spelling that?

Mount F-A-K-A.

Yeah,

Mount Cameroon must be their highest mountain, I assume.

Yeah, it's known by locals as Mountain of Greatness.

I guess as we're on geographical features, it's got the most dangerous lake in the world, hasn't it?

Does it?

Lake Neos, which in 1986 killed 1,700 people and 3,500 livestock.

It's one of only three lakes in the world that's saturated with carbon dioxide, and there's volcanic activity and earthquakes around it.

And they're not entirely sure what happened, but the whole lake exploded with carbon dioxide suddenly, got super saturated, and it spilled carbon dioxide all over the surrounding villages, completely wiped out the population of one village.

Oh my god, that's terrible.

Asphyxiated.

Scary stuff.

Yeah.

It's rude in Cameroon to beckon with your palm turned upwards, apparently.

So you know how if we tell someone to come hither, as I am doing to you right now, Dan, you have to turn your palm downwards.

It's obscene to have your hand turned upwards.

I don't know anyone who does the up word.

Who summons people without saying, hey, can you just come to the house?

Doesn't Stephen Fry is the kind of person who would do that?

Doesn't The Rock do it?

He does.

The Rock is a wrestler from the WWF, and he does do that, Dwayne Johnson.

But he does that when he wants to kick your ass.

Yeah, you're right.

The Rock doesn't go, come hither.

Yeah.

One thing that Cameroon,

this is very exciting, I think.

The first ever disco record was released by a Cameroon-born sax player.

Wow.

Oh, cool.

Manu DiBanjo.

And doesn't play the banjo.

Does not play the banjo, but because that's not a featured disco musical instrument.

Certainly not as far as I know.

But so they're kind of responsible for disco, Cameroon.

Well, there's always B-A-N-J-O.

Do you know what they gave the Pope as a gift when he visited them in 2009?

No.

A turtle.

Oh, really?

That's nice.

Yeah, because it's the symbol of wisdom amongst the Bacca pygmies of Cameroon.

I do find the pygmy tribes fascinating in Cameroon, and so that I think there's some objection to the term pygmy because that actually encompasses a lot of tribes.

But let's say the Baccho tribes, which do inhabit the forests of Cameroon, because the legends of the Baccha tribes people completely mirror Christian, ancient Egyptian,

Jewish legends, but without them having had any contact so far as we know in the last 4,000 years with any of those major religions.

So, for instance, they've got a story where God made man, so in Bakka legend, then God made man, and he said that they'd have eternal life and live in this blissful haven on earth.

The Tahoe tree, he said, is absolutely forbidden to man.

You must never, for any reason, violate this law and eat the fruit of the Tahoe tree.

And then the woman violates this law, convinces her husband to eat it, she eats it, and God says, I'll punish you by making you come to grips with mortality and living on earth and suffering and working.

Which is that sounds very familiar.

So it's not a coincidence that you came into contact with ancient Egyptians thousands and thousands of years ago, and these legends were passed up and then incorporated into Christianity.

That's amazing.

Yeah.

That's my favorite fact.

Okay,

let's call halftime on that.

That was a fantastic half.

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Okay, it's time for our visitengland.com halftime quiz.

The QI Elves have put together three great facts about England, and we're going to reveal the answer at the end of the match.

And the three questions this match are, Jack, in which town did the Battle of Hastings take place?

Anna.

What animal-related museum can you find in the grounds of Leeds Castle?

And question number three, James.

Which town has passed between England and Scotland 13 times?

Find out the answers to all of these at the end of the match.

And now it's back to the game.

Chilly.

Let's do it.

Suffs.

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Anyone got a chili fact?

Yeah, I like that they have an extremely large telescope in Chile.

and that it is uh it's built it's it's 2600 meters up in the andes it's not finished yet it's going to be finished in 2021 uh and it's going to be the most powerful optical instrument in the world.

But my favorite thing is its name, which is the ELT.

Does anyone know what the ELT stands for?

Egg lettuce tomato.

I don't know.

Maybe named after a local Chilean astronomer.

You would think.

Yeah.

No, no, it's not.

ELT stands for Extremely Large Telescope.

It's what it is.

That's what it says on the tin.

Wow.

They have the largest swimming pool in the world.

In Chile.

Yeah.

Have you seen that?

I've seen a picture of it, yeah.

It's pretty awesome.

It's over a kilometer in length.

It's right right next to the sea, and they bring in the water from the sea, and you can navigate it by boat.

Yeah, like it's big enough that you can actually put a boat in it and actually take it round the pool.

Why you'd do that, I don't know.

I mean, I've put boats in pools.

What are you talking about?

Public pool, Digcock Pool.

I used to put a little rubber dinghy in there.

Yeah, dingy.

Not that impressive.

Not a yacht.

Were we talking like Titanic?

We're not talking Titanic, but we're talking a big ship.

Okay.

A giant ship.

An extremely large ship.

An ELS.

So I reckon they've used up all their imagination on their slang, because Chileans have really good slang and it's all like very metaphorical and it's full of imagery.

So things like they call popcorn cabritas, which means goats because of the way it jumps around like goats.

They have a saying tirar unchancho, which literally means to throw a pig, but it actually means to burp.

And they have another saying, araglas los bigotas, which means arranging their moustaches.

And that actually means making a secret deal or lining their pockets

like a villain sort of twirling his mustache exactly there is a bird that's only found in chile called the mustachioed turca is there yep a couple more seaside cynclodes and the juan fernandez tit tyrant Wow, as seen on QI, I think.

In 2010, the general manager of the Royal Mint was fired after misspelling Chile on over a thousand coins.

The 50 pesos coin had chili spelt with a double I instead of IL.

They were printed in 2008 but no one noticed until 2009.

Wow.

And they're now worth, they're quite valuable now, these coins.

In 2007, 6,000 Chileans were duped by Madame Gilbert van Erp's magic cheese kits.

Let's just end on that.

No explanation.

No explanation.

If you'd like any explanation to that, send me a cheque for £20.

Go on, tell us about it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, tell us about it.

saying that this magic cheese was very popular in France and sold the kits to locals saying if you make this, you'll be able to sell it for a fortune in France.

But there was no magic cheese, they were just normal cheese kits.

There's one guy that spent a million pesos.

He's a Chilean newspaper vendor and he spent it on having 82 Julia Roberts tattoos all over his body.

Each one is from a different scene of the movie.

If you are on Google now, which movie podcast?

One movie or all the movies?

Various movies, various scenes from her films.

If you look him up, his name is Milienko Bukovic, and they're all over his torso and arm and legs.

And his dream is one day to meet her.

Yeah, I'm sure she's excited about that as well.

I'm sure they say, We've got a fan outside.

He has 80-something tattoos of you.

She's going to go bring him in.

That's very exciting.

He's not going to stab me.

I've got a Chilean badass for you.

Oh, great.

Yeah.

He was a native Chilean.

He fought the Spaniards.

His name was Galvarino and the Spanish caught him and cut off his hands but it didn't put him off.

He went back and attached swords to the stubs of his hands and then went back and attacked the Spanish.

Wow.

That's amazing.

What was his name?

Galvarino.

Galvarino, so he had sword hands.

Yeah.

Like Edward Scissors.

Yeah, not.

Okay, we're going to have to wrap up.

Anyone got any last?

Yeah, I think it has the coolest plant in the world, Chile, which has only recently been discovered, its capacity to do this, but it's a woody vine called the Bochea trifoliolata, and it's the only plant that's known to mimic the leaves of surrounding trees completely in everything in terms of size, shape, colour, orientation.

It can even so what it does is it seeks out trees around it and it climbs up them and it pretends to be them by looking exactly like them.

Otherwise, insects would eat it.

So it's like easy prey for insects, unless it pretends to be a tree that's not very edible, which it does.

But one of these vines can mimic multiple trees at once to the extent that if there's a tree that like grows little spines on its tips and stuff, it will grow a spine on the tip of its leaf.

Oh my god.

It's like an octopus.

It's like an X-Man.

I haven't seen it, but probably.

Okay, that's full-time.

That's the end of the match.

Before we give the scores out, I'm just going to give you the results of the quiz from the halftime show sponsored by visitengland.com.

And they are, if you give the question and the answer, we'll start with Jack.

So the question was, in which town did the Battle of Hastings take place?

And the answer is battle, not not Hastings.

Ah so really it was the Hastings of battle.

Anna what was your question?

My question was which animal related museum would you find in the grounds of Leeds Castle and the answer is the dog collar museum.

Oh that makes sense because you would attach a lead to a dog collar right?

That's what you said about it.

That's such a good point.

All right, James, what was yours?

The town which has changed hands between England and Scotland 13 times is Berwick upon Tweed.

Okay,

that's the answers to the quiz.

If you would like to win a prize, though, you can actually head over to visitengland.com where there's going to be all sorts of QI goodies waiting there.

But who won today's match?

Due to the fact that I just get to decide, I am going to say it was Cameroon because I love that the original Genesis story of Adam and Eve is traced earliest back to Cameroon.

I think that's amazing.

So that's Cameroon moving forward to the next match.

And we are going to be back again tomorrow with another World Cup of Facts match.

And this time it's going to be, James, Columbia versus the Côte d'Ivoire.

Ooh, okay.

Exciting.

Exciting.

Okay, if you want to, again, contact with any of us about the facts that we've been saying today, you want to find out any more, we're all on Twitter.

I'm at Tribaland, Jack, at Jack Esperk, James, at Eggshaped, and Anna.

You can get me on the QI Twitter feed, which is at Quickopedia.

Anna still doesn't have a Twitter account.

We'll be back again tomorrow with that match, and we'll we'll see you then.

Goodbye.

Let's be real.

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