NSTAAF International Factball: Brazil v Croatia

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And each day, we're going to be pitting each country playing in this year's World Cup against each other to find out who the most quite interesting is.

And we begin with Brazil versus Croatia.

I've got a fact about Brazil.

Go for it.

You want to hear it?

Yep.

Okay, there's an island in Brazil.

It's the size of Buckingham Palace Gardens, but it contains more than half a million venomous snakes.

Wow.

Yeah.

You wouldn't want to go there, would you?

That's in favour of Brazil being a better country.

Don't go there.

Well, I mean, doesn't it have great flora and fauna, for instance, of which this is a...

Mostly fauna, it sounds like.

But they can't be...

As far as I know, the most venomous snakes in the world of the top 10, all 10 are in Australia.

So they haven't got particularly

ruthless venomous snakes.

Yeah, but I think the animals in Brazil have got to be top of their list of great things, haven't they?

Yeah.

Well, parrots.

They have a lot of parrots, right?

Because the country is named after a Brazil tree, but initially Italian merchants called it the land of parrots due to the number of parrots that were there.

Yeah.

But yeah, so okay, so they got parrots.

What else they got there?

They have piranha, those little fish that bite you that everyone else calls piranha.

The Cayapo people people of Brazil, they have a rite of passage called hornet fighting, where men climb up ladders and assault hornets' nests with their bare hands.

What is the purpose of that?

Why?

I think to prove that they're men.

We've got to develop better ways of showing we're men.

I like the 18th birthday.

Yeah.

Brazil also has, in the Amazon, you just have larger animals of every kind.

So they also have the giant river otter, which gets up to about two meters long.

Wow.

I know.

Isn't it fantastic?

My favourite thing is that the leading exporter of Brazil nuts in the world is Brazil.

Bolivia.

Oh.

That's great.

So they lose out on Brazil nuts, but they do have the world's largest cashew tree, right?

Which is 7,500 meters squared in area.

I haven't seen a picture of it.

It must have lots of sprouting roots.

Yeah.

A lot of cashew nuts you get out of that.

A lot of bar snacks.

Having said the thing about the snakes and not having particularly venomous snakes, Australia having them all, they do in fact have the most venomous spider in the world.

The wandering spider.

The Brazilian wandering spider.

So that's a point in their favour.

That's the one that, if it bites you, it gives you priapism, gives you very long,

very painful erections.

Oh, yeah.

What that's the.

They last for days.

As in long, you mean like they last a long time.

Not as in long.

Measured in minutes, not inches.

But although there are some people I think.

Great nickname.

James measured a minute.

There are some people,

I think they're in Brazil.

Are they called the Tapami people or something?

The ones who put snakes down their trousers and get them to bite their penises to give them longer infections.

Again, longer in minutes, not inches.

You're thinking of ferrets, aren't you?

And Yorkshire merchants.

Just to turn it away for a second from penises.

I like any country that still has a sense of mystery about it.

Oh, yeah, Brazil definitely does.

Brazil seems to, right?

This is so interesting.

It was only until 1950 that they found the highest area of Brazil.

Up until then, they just didn't know where it was, and it just so happened to be a pilot who was flying over a mountain when it was a cloudless moment.

Well, and then the pilot just went, hey, that looks high.

Yeah.

That looks higher than the last bit.

Well, he thought, well, there's nowhere higher than 10,000 feet here.

He just went smack into the night.

And they are unidentified flying objects in Brazil.

Are there?

Yeah, they have a UFO, a group of UFO hunters, and their center of UFology is a town called Vagina.

It's probably pronounced Vagina.

Like Piranha.

Speaking of vaginas, there's a thing called the Lotus Flower Project.

There's a prison in Brazil where all the inmates spend their time knitting.

There was a Brazilian fashion designer who was running short of knitters and she designs knitted goods.

And the prisoners, for every three days they spend knitting goods,

they get a day knocked off their sentence.

And so there's these hilarious pictures of these like super tough, kind of hardcore inmates in this prison, and they're just knitting away.

Wow, there's also another prison in Brazil where the inmates cycle exercise bikes, and the exercise bikes are attached to the generators and can provide electricity for the local town.

And the longer you cycle for, the more time you can get off your sentence.

No, really, that is really good.

So, the fitter and stronger you are, the earlier you can be released

as I see.

That's not how you want to send a criminal back into the world.

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Okay, and now it's time for our halftime show, which comes in the form of a quiz sponsored by visitengland.com.

We've got three questions for you, and if you listen to the end of the podcast, you will get the answers.

So here we go.

James, first question.

Okay, my question is about a golf course that I play in in Silverdale in Lancashire.

And my question is: what can you find there that you can't find anywhere else in England?

Okay.

Anna.

In 1949, what caused Big Ben to slow down by five minutes?

I have no idea.

Question three, Andy.

What incredible service has West Country academic Dr.

Robert Dunning done the County of Somerset?

Tough.

Okay, so those are the three questions.

Stay tuned to the end of the podcast in order to find out the answers to it.

Unfortunately, no prizes whatsoever.

Just for fun.

Just for fun.

But for now, let's return back to the match, and it's Croatia.

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What do you got?

Dalmatians.

Oh, yeah?

Oh, yeah.

Dalmatian coast.

That's what they're named after.

They're named after the dog.

Croatia used to be called Dalmatia.

Gotcha.

Okay.

Croatia's not named after the dog.

That would be a sad source for a country name.

Look, Brazil was almost named after a parrot.

And was named after a tree.

Yeah.

Another word we get from Croatia, really obviously, cravat.

Cravat came over from Croatia in the 17th century from a Croatian mercenary, I think.

They used to call Croatians cravats, I think.

The troops are filled with cravats and Tatars, Hussars, and Cossacks.

Frightening army.

Yeah.

Well, I think we've covered on the show before that Croatia literally means Thailand.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, I know.

Land of Thai.

Yeah, that's a good one.

Speaking of scary, Croatia was home to the first ever historical vampire.

As in not just a story, it was a person who people actually thought was a vampire who actually lived.

He was called Jure Grando, and he lived in the 17th century, and he died and then his wife thought that he was coming back having sex with her in the night and he was bothering all of the people in his village.

But a few years later they went back to his grave and he still had a rosy complexion so they cut his head off.

Well that's a rational response.

Someone who's looking well in death.

And it stopped, yeah, it stopped, it worked.

Oh that's the trick then.

Dead person causing you trouble.

Chop off the head.

One of my favourite things about Croatia is there's a museum of broken relationships there.

And this is a museum, and they keep things which, when you split up with your ex, if you have an object which reminds you of that time, then you give it to those guys.

One of the things they have there is a candy thong.

And the woman who gave that to the museum said, he never bought me flowers because flowers, he said, were for boring people.

Instead, I got sausages or new parts for my bicycle.

She said, I didn't mind because I loved him.

After four years, he turned out to be as cheap and shabby as his presents.

He cheated on me with a colleague from the office and dumped me via email.

Was this all on the little museum pack that they had?

Okay, that's interesting.

I can tell you also, the world's ugliest man comes from Croatia, self-styled world's ugliest man.

Boy, he calls himself the world's ugliest man.

He does, right?

This is a guy called his surname is Katsits.

I don't know which is what his first name is.

He's from Zagreb.

And he's asked people to marry him 5,000 times and they've all said no.

And he thinks the only reasonable reason that he might be still single is because he must be the ugliest man in the world.

Not because he asks thousands of women.

He said, I've got to the point where I've even been asking people I'm meeting in the streets to marry me and they always say no.

It's assuming a level of superficiality among women that I object to, that we're rejecting him because he's so ugly.

Maybe he's an asshole.

Yeah, or maybe he's a creepy guy who asks people to marry him on the street.

Yeah.

But they've also got the world's ugliest goat.

What?

It's called Octo Goat.

It was born with eight legs.

Wow.

So it literally looks like a furry octopus.

Wow.

Yeah, it survived as well.

It survived for a long time.

That's incredible.

It also has the world's smallest town.

That's excitingly.

Population of 17.

Croatia does.

Oh, yeah.

What town is that?

It's called Hum, which is nice because you can imagine there being a very low hum all the time that never really got above three decibels.

I have another great Croatian invention, maybe the best invention ever.

Nikola Tesla.

Oh, he was Croatian involved.

Who was born in Croatia and was possibly the most interesting man who's ever lived.

He was fantastic.

Some people thought he came from Venus to give us secrets.

Well, he didn't, he came from Croatia.

I stand corrected.

Obviously, that's ridiculous because only women are from Venus, right?

Yeah, very true.

Although he was called Nikola.

I know that.

No one's ever drawn attention to this.

But he develops alternating current.

He is responsible for.

He supposedly invented the death ray just before he died, didn't he?

The seconds before he died, he invented it.

He had been pointing the wrong way around.

The idea was invent a death ray and that will stop all wars because no one will want to attack each other because everyone has a death ray.

Yeah, he wasn't a practical man in many ways.

He just was a genius.

He was a Da Vinci-like once-in-a-century mind.

The main relationship in his life was with a pigeon.

He was a very, very strange man.

Can you

take that a bit further?

Unfortunately, there's some feathers in the Museum of Broken Relationships.

There was a pigeon which came to his room every day.

He lived out his last years in a hotel.

Yeah, he said he loved her like you would love a woman, didn't he?

Yes.

I think.

And we can only assume he was speaking metaphorically.

We're quickly approaching full time.

So, if anyone's got any final Croatia facts.

Last one, most popular ice cream flavour in Croatia last year.

Facebook flavour.

No.

Invented by a guy called Admir Adili, whose teenage daughter asked him to create an ice cream flavor inspired by Facebook, and it became a huge hit.

What flavor is Facebook flavor?

It's blue and white.

That's all I can tell you.

Not a flavor.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, so if you, what, when you, when you look at it, do you creepily see photos of people you used to go to university?

You don't lick it, you like it.

Okay, that's the end of the match.

Brazil versus Croatia.

Before we find out the scores and who won, let's get the answers to that visitengland.com quiz from our halftime show.

James, starting with you.

Yes, the thing that you can find on Silverdale Golf Course in Lancashire is England's rarest orchid, the Lady Slipper Orchid.

Oh, and that's nowhere else?

It's found nowhere else, just where my wayward golf bowls end up.

Okay.

Question number two was Anna.

Yep, in 1949, Big Ben was slowed down by five minutes when a flock of starlings landed on its minute hand.

Really?

Yep.

Wow, what an interesting fact.

Andy, question number three.

Robert Dunning started in 1967 writing the authoritative history of Somerset, and he worked at it for 40 years and has had to retire with only nine of his outline 22 volumes finished.

Wow, it's very impressive.

As he handed it on to someone, he's handed it on to another researcher.

Okay.

All right, well, there you go.

There's the answers to the questions.

And now it's time to find out who has won the match.

And to make that decision, we're going to go to James.

Okay,

I think arbitrarily we are going to say the most quite interesting country of the two is Brazil.

I think those big raindrops have just about won it.

I agree.

Okay, there you go.

Brazil has won.

So if you want to get in contact with any of us to dispute that or just ask us about any of the facts that we've spoken about, you can reach us all on our Twitter handles.

I'm on at Schreiberland.

Andy at Andrew Hunter M.

James.

At eggshapes.

And Anna.

You can write at Wikipedia or you can email podcast at QI.com.

Okay, so that's it for this episode, but we're going to be back again tomorrow with the next match of the World Cup, and that will be Spain versus Netherlands.

Spain versus Netherlands, exciting.

Okay, hope you enjoyed the show, guys, and tune in again tomorrow.

We'll see you then.

Bye.

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