NSTAAF International Factball: Uruguay v Costa Rica

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Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish presents the World Cup of Facts.

This is the only World Cup podcast out there that makes absolutely no mention of football whatsoever.

Brought to you by the QI Elves in association with VisitEngland.com.

My name is Dan Schreiber, and I am joined by James Harkin, Anna Chaczynski, and Andy Murray.

And today's match is Uruguay versus Costa Rica.

Let's begin with Uruguay.

I've got a fact.

It's actually the only fact I've got about football for any country I've I've researched.

Wait a minute, this is supposed to be a non-football, football club.

I don't know if you just heard the intro.

I'll dress it up as a newspaper fact.

Okay.

The first time that Uruguay won the World Cup.

1930?

1930.

The fact was not even reported in the Times.

That is how little esteemed sports news was then.

So they're just really aloof.

They might be fantastic at football.

They are actually pretty good, aren't they?

Well, actually, they are very good at football because they've managed to win the World Cup twice, despite having a tiny population.

What was it, Andy?

You were saying?

It's three and a half million, which is about the same as the West Midlands.

It's very small.

We're not doing very well at this being a non-football football podcast, are we?

Red cards all around, no football chat.

So Uruguay was besieged by the Argentine dictator, Juan Manuel del Crozas, in the 1840s, and they'd run out of proper ammunition, and they held their own in battle and won by raiding the galleys of their ships, finding that they had quite a lot of Dutch cheese, loaded up their cannons with what they now think, well, it was reported as E-Dam cheese, but Mythbusters looked into it, concluded it had to have been Gerotska cheese, and they won.

And they shot Gerotska cheese out of their cannons, penetrates the sails of the army ships, and they won the battle.

And then there'll be like little shrapnel of mini baby bells.

That's where we get baby bells.

Uruguay, we should say it means either river of birds or river of shellfish.

We don't know which one it means.

I mean, that's quite a big, like, a bird or a fish is a shellfish.

A shellfish, even.

Yeah.

What's for dinner tonight?

Good news.

It is.

But I'm allergic to shit.

I'm sorry.

I can't tell you.

Yeah, I literally do not know.

Uruguay has three times as many cows as it has people.

Well, it's where Freybentos comes from.

Yeah.

Isn't it?

There's actually a town called Freibentos, which is where the stuff comes from, like the pies and the corned beef and all that.

I think they've shut down, they've stopped making them, haven't they?

Have they?

Yeah, in the 70s, but we still obviously call it Frey Bentos.

Well, it was so important during the war, they called Freybentos a town the kitchen of the world and soldiers would say Frebentos instead of okay.

So how are you feeling today?

Freibentos.

That's great.

I like that.

Thomas on a mash pig.

Just on the food kind of areas you'd like a nice drink, national drink to go with it and they have their national tree.

When the leaves are turned into a tea it's a laxative tea.

That's their national tree.

It's called the ombu.

The national drink is a laxative.

If you said I would like to drink from your national tree, you know as you do when you go to countries and you say that, you would have a laxative.

They obviously eat a lot of meat, and so that can block you up.

But if they have laxatives as their national drink, then it would all balance out.

It's like dock leaves and nettles, isn't it?

Some of their meat is glow-in-the-dark, or their sheep glow-in-the-dark anyway, because it was a Uruguayan scientist who injected jellyfish genes into sheep, and that makes them glow-in-the-dark.

And it has a whole bunch of medical uses, they think, now, and they've done it with other things.

They think glow-in-the-dark cats with jellyfish genes might be used to cure AIDS maybe in future.

But that was in Uruguay anyway.

You get glow-in-the-dark sheep.

Wow.

Wow.

That's great.

Their president's a good guy, isn't he?

Do you all know about him?

No.

Jose Mujica.

He was a guerrilla fighter.

He was a socialist.

And he became president.

And he gives 90% of his income to charity.

He lives in a farm.

He never wears a tie.

And he lives with his three-legged dog who lost a leg in a tractor accident.

Oh, he became quite famous in the news recently.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

He spent 13 years in prison, but two of those years were in a well.

In the bottom of a well.

What?

That was during the dictatorship that was the previous government before he came to power.

It'd be a bit of a shock, though, if you were lifting out the family's water supplies for the week.

Oh, my God, so we seem to have a lot of people.

A future president, not a future president, my god.

And his three-legged dog.

All officials in Uruguay have to make a personal wealth declaration every year.

And in 2010, his entire declaration was £1,100, which is the value of his 1987 Volkswagen Beetle.

I mean, that's pretty modest living.

Wow, yeah.

Okay, here's another awesome Uruguayan.

Yeah.

He's called Emilio Arenas.

Okay.

And he has the largest collection of keyrings in the world.

He has 56,630 non-duplicated keychains, which he's been collecting since 1955.

Wow.

Does he just own a lot of properties?

Well, I think he's just a collector because he was also in the Guinness Book of Records for having the world's largest collection of pencils.

Good man.

That's great.

I like to imagine that he can never find his actual key because he's just going around and around this enormous round of keyrings.

Or he can never find a pen and it's got

pencils everywhere.

I just need a pen.

There's a cemetery in Uruguay which has, it's a Jewish cemetery and there are QR codes for you.

So you scan them in and you get all the information about the person and lots of details.

Or you can look at the cemetery remotely if you type in the right code for the QR code.

Ah, so that's like a

iPad gravestone.

Exactly.

Yeah.

I think that's the way ahead.

Go for it.

Okay.

I'll have your Wikipedia page on there

when you go in there.

You'll take it up.

Or with me, it'll go on and just say, this body is a stub.

You can help me here.

Yeah, expand.

With Anna, it'll just be a Nokia 5510.

It'll send you a text.

Yeah.

Today, we're exploring deep in the North American wilderness among nature's wildest plants, animals, and

cows.

Uh, you're actually on an Organic Valley dairy farm where nutritious, delicious, organic food gets its start.

But there's so much nature.

Exactly.

Organic Valley's small family farms protect the land and the plants and animals that call it home.

Extraordinary.

Sure is.

Organic Valley, protecting where your food comes from.

Learn more about their delicious dairy at ov.coop.

Okay, that's the halftime whistle whistle there, which means it's time for our halftime show, which comes in the form of a QI quiz brought to you by visitingland.com.

So we've got three questions for this one, and we're going to start with James.

Question number one.

Okay, my question is: why, during World War I, did someone come up with the idea to build an enormous fake mountain in Kent?

Andy.

St.

George is the patron saint of England now, but who was the patron saint of England before he was?

Question number three, Czazinski.

Yep, my question is, what is Big Ben?

Good question.

Good question.

Okay, well, those are good questions.

If anyone wants to find out the answer to these questions, you better stay tuned to our show because they're coming right at the end.

But until then, we've got a match to sort out.

So it's time for the second half and we're heading over to Costa Rica.

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I love this fact.

Costa Rica doesn't do proper addresses.

They don't have really street names or house numbers.

And the way you post a letter or the the way you direct someone somewhere is just by landmarks.

So the postmen have the worst life ever.

Every single letter is just like turn left at the post office by the edge of the street that's a bit dark coloured and then there's a big oak tree to the east of you.

And they do say it's hellish.

So they would have like a really massive envelope if you lived a long way away.

It's like turn left here and then right there.

And then I would have written you a letter, but there was no space after your address.

And one of them said, they give me strange directions sometimes.

So for instance, I'll be told to walk 300 meters north north and then walk back 250 meters.

I mean, it just sounds like hell.

That's great.

It sounds like they're just trying to punish their postman, doesn't it?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think they're not the only.

I think Dubai and Abu Dhabi have a similar

law that used to live in Dubai, trying to send letters to her was exactly that.

And she said, if you got a taxi home at night, you had to direct them home, like literally.

It wasn't like, bring me here.

It was like, I'll show you the way.

Taxi drivers always have the ignorance.

Yeah.

Let's go back to Costa Rica.

Yeah, anyway.

Costerica's first female president was called Laura Chinchilla.

She's quite a nice name.

And one of the founders of the Communist Party was called Carlos Fallos.

Nice.

And their currency is the Colon.

Oh, yeah, it is.

Probably named after Christopher Columbus.

Or his son, maybe.

Or his anus.

I really like the fact that in 1852, Costa Rica didn't have a national anthem, but they were being visited by UK and US diplomats.

And so they basically in Costa Rica went, I guess we we need to get a national anthem.

They commissioned a national anthem just for the visit.

And then it stuck.

Wow.

Yeah.

And then they didn't add words to it until the 1900s.

So they didn't have time for lyrics.

Yeah, they were like, we need to focus on one element of this right now.

We might get away with it.

Everyone just murmur our language.

They don't speak it anyway.

It's all fine.

Well, they don't have an army, Costa Rica.

They don't have an arrow.

They disbanded it years ago.

They got rid of it in 1949.

They had a civil war, and then one of their leaders, Jose Fugueres Ferrer, seized power to defeat an electoral fraud and then dissolved his own army but they still have a defense budget I think I just spent it on a military trained police force yeah sounds a little bit like an army but yeah

it's semantics crucially not quite that much yeah it's worked for them though not having an army because I think it was in 2009 of a survey of 143 nations they're the happiest in the world the happiest nation and the greenest nations and the most eco-friendly in the world they have a lot of animals there don't they I read a fact that it was they have 0.03% of the planet's surface but they are home to 500,000 unique species.

Wow.

That's 4% of all known species on Earth.

That's amazing.

And they have seven volcanoes in this tiny, tiny country.

Seven active volcanoes and 120 volcano formations.

Yeah.

Amazing butterflies, 10% of all the world's butterflies.

And I think maybe an even higher proportion of moths.

I think my all-time favorite Costa Rica fact has got to be that when an American fruit company went over there and started clearing land to grow bananas, they found these massive stone bowls.

No one knows what the bowls were for, no one knows why they're there, but they were the things that inspired the big bowl that chases Indiana Jones at the start of Raiders of the Lost Island.

Very cool.

They don't know why they're there.

No, no one knows.

That one there's a mystery.

Okay, that's the final whistle there.

But before we find out who has won today's match, Uruguay Costa Rica, we're going to get the answers to that visitengland.com quiz that we had at our halftime show.

So the answers are, starting with James.

Okay,

the idea of building an enormous fake mountain in Kent was to make it tall enough to get the high ground against German bombers.

That would have been a big mountain.

Yeah.

Okay, question number two is from Andy.

The original patron saint of England before St.

George was King Edward the Confessor, who was patron saint after he was king until 1066.

So Big Ben is not a clock.

Big Ben is the name for the bell within the clock.

Is it true that it was named after a big guy called Ben who was an MP?

Is that true?

It might be.

And was a complete bell.

Okay, well, those are the answers.

If you want to win any QI goodie prizes, sort of like books and so on, there's an additional quiz that's going on on visitingland.com.

So if you head over there, you get a chance to win some of the books.

All the elves are going to sign the copies of the books, and there's probably more going on there as well.

So now it's time to decide who's won this match.

I'm going to decide it today, and I'm going to go for Costa Rica because I'm a massive Indiana Jones fan, and I love the idea that those balls are out there, and they exist, and they inspired it.

Okay, so that's it for this match.

But join us again tomorrow, where there's going to be another great battle between two nations, and they are, James?

They are France and Honduras.

France and Honduras.

Okay, great.

In the meantime, if you want to ask us anything about the things we were talking about in this particular podcast, you can get us all on our Twitter handles.

I'm on at Schreiberland, Andy at Andrew Hunter M, James at Eggshaped, and Anna.

I'll reply to you at Quikipedia.

Or you can also email into elves at QI.com.

Okay, so we'll see you tomorrow for another match of the World Cup of Facts.

Goodbye.

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