NSTAAF International Factball: Belgium v Algeria

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Hello, and welcome to another episode of the No Such Things a Fish International Fact Ball brought to you by the QILs in association with visitengland.com.

My name is Anna Tashinski, and joining me today are Andy Murray, James Harkin, and Dan Schreiber.

And today's match is Belgium versus Algeria.

So guys, anything interesting about Algeria?

Algeria is the oldest known country where magic mushrooms were taken.

Ah, yeah.

Really?

Yep.

About seven to nine thousand years ago, there is a mural which is thought to depict the species Silokaib Maire, which is the magic mushroom.

It's also the first place that orangina came from.

What is that?

It's the soft drink orangina is from Algeria.

It only became French after the country...

It was kind of won in the war.

The war of independence.

What?

So they when they said...

France gained orangina.

A lot of things that we think are French are actually Algerian, aren't they?

Really?

Albert Kamus, was he Algerian?

Yes.

He was the goalkeeper of his Algerian university football team.

Sorry, we're really sucking not talking about football.

Listen, film our football.

Yeah, sorry.

Tarzan of the Apes was filmed in Algier.

It's a weird place to film, Tarzan.

They have very little jungle.

They have, I think, almost 90% of Algeria is a Sahara desert, isn't it?

Yeah.

It is huge.

Inside Algeria, you could fit most of Western Europe, including the whole of Germany, Spain, France, the UK, Poland, Italy, and Portugal.

So it's pretty large.

That's pretty big.

But all their people, it's kind of like Australia.

They're packed into about 12% of the landmass.

Because all the rest of it is Saharan desert.

10% of the world's helium comes from Algeria.

Aren't we running out of helium?

Yes.

Yes, we are.

That's why people's voices are getting deeper and deeper.

There is more of a culture of women not having such a rough time in Algeria.

At the moment, women in Algeria make up 70% of its lawyers and 60% of its judges and 60% of university students are female.

Yeah, that's very exciting.

Someone who lived in Algeria until about the 18th century, they were known as Algerines.

Really?

Yeah, which is quite a nice word.

Yeah, it sounds like a fruit.

Yeah, exactly.

And clementines come from Algeria.

They were first grown in an orphanage in Algeria by Father Clement Rodier.

Oh, wow.

Well, speaking of food, a bunch of Algerians publicly ate lunch during Ramadan to demonstrate against people being persecuted for not observing Ramadan.

That's my kind of protest

that I can get on board with.

Pretty brave protest.

That was in August last year.

That was August last year.

Okay.

In 1999, 149 Algerians died from scorpion bites.

Wow.

In 2007, in a marketplace in Algeria, one man was trying to sell a donkey to another man and they were bartering over the price of the donkey and they bartered for so long that the donkey ate the huge pile of cash that one man had brought brought to pay for the donkey and they didn't notice until it had all been consumed and the case had to be referred to the Supreme Court in the end because no one else could decide who the donkey therefore belonged to.

Speaking of four-legged animals, there's a one of the oldest traditional practices is ram fighting, where people make rams fight each other.

I don't think people fight rams.

Oh, I thought it might just be where you ram into somebody.

Yeah, Saint Augustine.

Born in Algeria.

Yeah, he was born in Hippo, wasn't he?

He was born in Hippo.

He's the bishop of Hippo.

That's an Algerian city, Hippo.

Yes, meaning horse.

What?

Yeah, hippo means horse.

So hippopotamus means river horse in Greek.

Yeah.

All hippos are actually horses.

Didn't know that.

Yeah.

Like a fancy dress party.

Oh, oh, this is a horse in the front of the hippo, and there's another one in the back of the hippo.

So there was an uprising in Algeria in 1856 of the Maribou people, and that was in French Algeria, it was at the time.

And the Maribou people claimed they could perform works of magic, and that was making them quite powerful.

And Napoleon III, French Napoleon III, obviously wanted to quell this uprising, and so he sent the most famous magician of the era to go and prove to these Maribou people that their magician was more powerful than the Algerian magician, and they better chill out.

Who was that?

That magician was Houda, who obviously gave...

Houdin!

Houdin!

Houdini's the man whom Houdini took his name after.

Indeed, yes.

And he turned up and he performed all sorts of incredible tricks, and apparently he did intimidate the Algerians into submission.

Yeah, did they use electromagnetism on a big metal metal box so that nobody else could lift it because it was held down by an electromagnet and then he surreptitiously turned off the magnet and lifted it himself?

I'm probably out of the magic circle now that I told you how he did that trick.

Yeah, so that was okay.

It was an electromagnetism.

You've already been excommunicated twice from the Roman Catholic Church.

Now you're out of the magic circle.

I know.

You're going to have no more subs to pay by the end of the year.

It's going to be a real cheap 2015 for you.

And the largest meat-eating dinosaur known to have lived on Earth was found in Algeria.

Ooh.

That's the Cacharodontosaurus Saharicus.

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Oh, that was the whistle for half-time.

So that's Algeria covered.

And now we're going to bring you our QI quiz brought to you by visitengland.com.

We've got three questions about England for you.

Let's kick off with Andy.

My question is, what is the only town in England named after a novel?

It's also got punctuation in the actual place name.

It should be another clue.

50 Shades of Greys in Essex.

It is not.

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.

That's got an apostrophe.

Yes, but it's a town, right?

It's only a book, not a town.

Stone is a town.

I don't even know what that is.

Anywho, no time for guessing.

On to the next one.

No time for more guessing.

Question number two from James.

My question is, why did Mad Jack give everybody in Shrewsbury £10?

He was a bloody nice guy.

Thanks for that.

And now to question number three from Dan.

Yes, the Queen of England could be addressed in a number of ways, but what does Brian Blessed like to call her?

Brian Blessed being the thespian actor with a booming voice, for those who don't know him.

And also for those who don't know Dan, Brian Blessed being his main life obsession.

And for those people who don't know the queen,

look at your banknotes.

Visit visitingthem.com.

I'm sure she's referenced somewhere.

Okay, thanks for that guys.

And that's halftime over onto the second half.

And we are going to find out some interesting stuff about Belgium.

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French fries.

French fries.

French fries.

One country from Belgium.

Really?

Belgian fries.

Okay, well, they had a French fries revolution.

Is that just an occasion where they turned all the French fries around?

Oh, nice.

No.

But it was, Belgium went the longest of any country without a government.

So young people started what they call the Frit Revolutie, with the Fries Revolution, because that's a symbol of the country.

Yeah.

And there were lots of ideas.

There were demonstrations.

Protesters in Ghent occupied one of the city squares and then the country which had gone longest without a government before that was Iraq.

So they invited an Iraqi delegate to come and hand over a trophy as the longest running country without a functioning government.

541 days they went and they without a government.

I think Belgium has the world's only carrot museum.

Oh.

They have a lot of very weird museums in Brussels.

There's a sewer museum, there's a streetlighting museum, and there's also the wardrobe of the mannequin piss, you know, that little statue.

They dress it up every year, and he has more than 800 costumes which you can go and visit in this museum.

There's also an underpants museum.

Is there?

Yeah.

It's a Belgian artist called Jean Bouquet.

Are we sure his mum didn't just visit his flat one day, walk in and go, this is disgusting?

And he went, no, no, no, it's my museum.

No, mum.

And you didn't pay the admission fee.

Yeah.

The gift shop's a bit weird, but.

Speaking of gift shops, Brussels International Airport is the world's biggest chocolate-selling point.

The chocolate-selling location that sells the most chocolate in the world.

It sells more than 800 tons of chocolate every year.

Whoa.

I feel like I've been there, and I feel like they sell a lot of smurfs as well.

Smurfs were invented by a Belgian, right?

Tintin as well.

Belgian.

Is he?

That's cool.

I believe so.

Oh, he's based on a real-life war correspondent called Robert Sexe.

That's all I know about him.

He's amazing.

Also Dufflecoats, a Belgian.

Oh, yeah.

And the saxophone, invented by not Robert Sexe, but Adolph Sachs.

Yes, and he has a museum in Brussels as well, which I've been to.

They have a lot of very small, specific...

They quite like celebrating quite weird things in their museums.

I like it.

Yeah, I went to the Sachs Museum and was very disappointed when I went through the dark.

There are live Sachs show happening.

But the thing is, it was an amazingly controversial thing for him to invent.

So on one occasion at a show before it was displayed as this new invention, they kicked one of his saxophones to death so badly.

To death?

Yeah.

They kicked one of his saxophones, so it was so badly bent out of shape that he couldn't show it.

And someone was killed on his doorstep, and he thought it was one of his apprentices who'd been mistaken for him.

So it was an amazingly controversial thing to invent.

The saxophone?

Yeah, he spent years in the courts and he was tricked out of money and driven to bankruptcy.

Yeah.

Here's something controversial.

The Katenstoet was a medieval festival in Belgium in which cats were thrown from a belfry tower.

Did you know that only 2% of Belgians know the words to their own national anthem?

There is a very strong history of not knowing it.

For example, in 2007, a Belgian politician was asked to sing the national anthem and he accidentally sang the French one.

Started singing the Marseillaise instead of Belgians rabancon.

They do celebrate weird things that you were saying earlier, Andy.

Every year on August the 15th, Belgium has an international regatta of bathtubs.

25,000 people tend to turn up.

It's a one-kilometre race down the river Meurs in the town of Dinon.

Been going since 1982.

And they just jump in bathtubs with various decorations on them.

Race down.

I like the sound of Belgium.

I'm really into this country.

Yeah,

they seem slightly nuts, but still cool at the same time.

Great museums.

I love the Belgian town or the Belgian exclave of Baal Hertog.

Oh, yeah, I've been there.

Why is that?

Have you?

So to explain, it's a Belgian exclave.

It's in the Netherlands, so it's within the Netherlands, but it's an exclave of Belgium.

So it's 22 little pockets, and there are borders between Belgium and the Netherlands all over the place, all over this little town, aren't they?

And they're marked with these little white crosses.

Yeah, that's right.

There are white crosses on the floor, so you can hop over from one country to the other whenever you want.

And also, all of the houses have little flags on them, either Belgium flags or Netherlands flags, so you know whether they're in Belgium or the Netherlands.

So what's an exclave?

It's just...

So an exclave is a piece of a country that's fully surrounded by another country.

Oh, okay.

There are a lot of houses that are built across the border, so you decide what nationality your house is by where the front door is.

That's right.

Oh, wow.

Such a confusing place.

It's a really cool place.

I recommend anyone goes there.

We're going to have to wrap on Belgium.

Anyone want to throw in some.

They invented roller skates in 1760.

The guy who invented them, when he was debuting them, almost killed himself by crashing into a giant mirror.

So.

Who's that other guy who's roller skates as well as me?

Yeah, these are my invention?

Hey you, come here.

Oh, that's the full-time whistle.

Well done to both the competitors.

Time's up.

And it's now time for the answers to our QI Visit England quiz.

So Andy, what was your question and answer?

The only town in England to feature punctuation and which is named after a novel is Westwood Ho Exclamation Mark in Devon.

They named it after the novel and then the author Charles Kingsley got very annoyed annoyed that they had done so because they hadn't actually asked permission.

It was just to get tourists in.

Okay, thanks for that, Andy.

James, what was your answer?

My answer to the question: why did Mad Jack give everyone in Shrewsbury £10?

This was in 1819.

He wanted to become an MP, and so he bribed everyone in the town £10, and they all voted for him and he became an MP.

That's very clever.

Yeah, Jack Mitten.

Not allowed, I don't think, in this day and age.

Frowned upon, certainly.

Dan, your question?

Yes, the queen.

The queen, we all know her as Queen Elizabeth II.

But Brian Blessed, what does he know her as?

The answer is he calls her Knuckles.

He calls her Knuckles because anytime he meets her, she hits him on his hand with her knuckles.

Well, like a fist pump.

No, no, he goes off on a lot of adventures, and she gets very worried about him.

And so she says, don't go on those adventures.

And she hits his hands.

And so he's like, Knuckles.

And then she also gets him to say Gordon's alive.

Apparently, she's a massive Flash Gordon fan, according to Brian Blessed.

Okay, so they're all the answers.

Of course, you didn't get to win any prizes, even if you knew all the answers, but you can win a prize if you go to visitengland.com, where you'll have the chance to enter a ballot and win some just fantastic, brilliant, marvellous QI goodies, including a signed book if you're lucky.

And so now, I think it's only left to decide who won that match.

And I guess totally arbitrarily, James is going to pick a winner.

I am going to go for the guy guy who invented the roller skates.

Yeah, I think we have to go for Belgium.

All right, Belgium, congratulations.

Algeria, hard luck.

Okay, if you want to get in touch with any of us to register any strong feelings you have about this podcast, you can get Dan on...

At Triberland.

You can get James on.

My Twitter is at EggShaped.

You can get Andy on.

At Andrew HunterM.

And you can't get me at all because I don't have a Twitter feed, but you can email elves at QI.com and I will respond there.

And thanks for listening, guys.

Join us tomorrow when we'll be pitting two countries against each other and those countries will be

Cameroon and Chile.

Cameroon and Chile.

Join us then.

Bye.

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