Little Fish: You've Been Harkin'd

Speaker 1 Get ready for Malice, a twisted new drama starring Jack Whitehall, David DeCovney, and Carice Van Houten.

Speaker 1 Jack Whitehall plays Adam, a charming manny infiltrates the wealthy Tanner family with a hidden motive to destroy them.

Speaker 1 This edge-of-your-seat revenge thriller unravels a deliciously dark mystery in a world full of wealth, secrets, and betrayal. Malice will constantly keep you on your toes.

Speaker 1 Why is Adam after the Tanner family? What lengths will he go to? One thing's for sure, the past never stays buried, so keep your enemies close.

Speaker 1 Watch Malice, all episodes now streaming exclusively on Prime Video.

Speaker 2 Boxes were all filled with gifts big and small, but sharing pure love is the greatest gift of all.

Speaker 2 Stay cozy, my people, and have a boss here.

Speaker 2 Get into the holiday spirit with Boss and our ultimate gifting edit. Visit your nearest store or explore our curated selection online at boss.com.

Speaker 2 Hello and welcome to an episode of Little Fish,

Speaker 2 your new new weekly audience fact special of no such thing as a fish. This is the sibling show.
This is Big Brother's Little Brother. This is

Speaker 2 Bake Off an Extra Slice. Bake Off an Extra Slice.
Traitors Uncloaked. God, you know a lot of this.

Speaker 2 Well, I work in television. I have to know this stuff.
Antiques Roadshow, the cheap shit.

Speaker 2 So we've got some audience facts that have been sent in by a range of listeners. They're all brilliant.

Speaker 2 Let's get into it. Does anyone have a fact they'd like to kick off with? I can do one.
Yeah, go on. All right, this comes in from Kyla Jemison.

Speaker 2 And the fact is that the P-Tank on the International Space Station has a blue sky account to update everyone on how full it is. So when you say a P-tank,

Speaker 2 tank of we? Yeah, so there's a toilet on the ISS. There's a few toilets on the ISS.
One in particular. You don't want to be caught short.
Yeah. And they have been.
They have been. Have they? Oh, yeah.

Speaker 2 They've had some international problems as well.

Speaker 2 When stuff on the ground is going wrong, and let's say one toilet is clogged, maybe the Americans won't allow the Russians to use their toilet or vice versa.

Speaker 2 There's a lot of problems, but

Speaker 2 they do have a tank that collects the urine. The urine then gets turned into drinkable water, so it's reused and so on.

Speaker 2 And this is not an official account. It's very explicit that it's not affiliated with NASA, but there is an account on Blue Sky called the ISS Piss Tracker.

Speaker 2 And it's because the data of how full the tanks are are available to the public. And so, and like it updates all all the time.
So then how full is the how full is the P-tank right now? Right now.

Speaker 2 Should we have a game? Yeah, okay. Is it percentage? Yeah, it's percentage.
Okay. I'm going to say 37%.

Speaker 2 You're going to say 37%. I'll go 38% to just play the averages.
That's such a math of a difference answer. That's absolute bullshit.
I'm sorry.

Speaker 2 I'll change it. 37.1%.
Unbelievable. Okay.
You sure? All right.

Speaker 2 As of six minutes ago, the last update, it was 38% full.

Speaker 2 You're joking. No, I said 38.
Yeah, you did. But then you pulled back to 37.1, so you're still ahead of it.
Yeah, but you can only accept my first answer.

Speaker 2 And the thing is, it's like, I knew, I just, I had a feeling it was 38. And when Andy said 37, I thought, oh, gosh, he's going to get really close.
But I know it's 38, so I'm just going to go for 38.

Speaker 2 Because you thought I went for 38 because it's one more than 37, but no, I had an inkling. And when you said just play the averages, that was just, that was just your code for, I know it.

Speaker 2 I just know it.

Speaker 2 Are you you serious James got it bang on he got it bang on so annoying if we'd done it 22 minutes ago it was 36% full and you would have would have got it you would have got it but yeah so got to start these shows on time I'm sorry

Speaker 2 I'm really annoyed

Speaker 2 I was looking into just urine in space and how it works in the International Space Station and general shuttles and so on and there was a mission in 1984 where something went wrong with the exit point of where the urine gets let out into space.

Speaker 2 It froze up at the end. There was a giant giant icicle and they were really worried because they thought that if it loosens up, it might crack the heat shields as we're going back down.

Speaker 2 They almost did a spacewalk to sort of chisel it off. But in the end, they had a robot arm that came and knocked it off and knocked it away.
Wow.

Speaker 2 It also meant that once they'd got rid of it, the toilet was now out of order. So for six days, they had to pee into

Speaker 2 plastic bags. And also in space, really hard to pee because of the microgravity, right? So you've got to be very careful.
So how do you think you do it? You've got the bag. Bag for life?

Speaker 2 It's got to be. Because the other, the flimsy ones have small holes in the bottom, don't they? No use.
I assume these are more like what you'd put your sandwich in rather than a bag.

Speaker 2 Oh, don't put your sandwich in it. I don't think Sainsbury's bags made it to the ISS or challenge.
Do you get in the bag?

Speaker 2 Have the pee. How would that help? Well,

Speaker 2 because none of the peers get in the bag. Someone holds it closed.
You have your wee quickly, then you just get out of the bag. You can't put them in.

Speaker 2 it doesn't make sense put the bag on the penis this is for men uh-huh couple of crocodile clips hold it in place good very nice idea now we're thinking like astronauts now we are astronauts that did not make the cut uh no what the what you would do is you would put socks in and you would put underwear in so that the liquid would instantly soak into something So they were losing their socks.

Speaker 2 They were losing all of the clothing for six days while they're up there. But they made it back safe.
So all good. Great.
Here's one from Lauren Kramer.

Speaker 2 In spite of being completely landlocked and because of its man-made lakes and reservoirs, Oklahoma has more shoreline than the east and west coasts of the contiguous states combined.

Speaker 2 It also has an international port because the river connects to the Mississippi. Wait, Oklahoma has more shoreline than the east and west coasts of America.
That's what they're saying.

Speaker 2 But isn't Oklahoma part of the contiguous coastline? Yeah, but they don't have a Pacific or Atlantic coastline.

Speaker 2 So saying that the shoreline in Oklahoma is more than the the Pacific and the Atlantic combined. What?

Speaker 2 Wow. How can that be? Have you run the math? Well, I've looked into it and I think probably it's not true, unfortunately, because

Speaker 2 if you just take Alaska, the shoreline of Alaska is 33,904 miles. And according to the official bureau, Oklahoma has 55,646 miles of shoreline on its lakes.

Speaker 2 So if Alaska is like 60% of the total probably once you add the eastern seaboard and western seaboard yeah then you're going to go above it so i think it's probably not true but it was difficult for me to find the exact figures yeah wait did he say oklahoma on its lakes on its lakes so basically oklahoma has a ton of lakes and so they count as shoreline all the shores of the lakes

Speaker 2 and it's like this thing that you know if you're a sooner state person like you would just know that as a fact you're told as a kid but i think probably it's not quite true uh lauren also said that at high school she learned that oklahoma has the world's largest salt flats alabaster deposit and parakeet farm uh the largest salt flats is in bolivia the largest gypsum deposits are in spain and the parakeet farm closed in the 1950s after a fire so i'm sorry lauren oh oh lauren you've lauren you've experienced a rite of passage for anyone involved in qi on no such thing as fish which is called a thorough hearkening and it's like it's never a nice experience but you do come out of it a wiser wiser person yeah i'm sorry it's not lauren's fault she was told this at school james that is i know but that is a thorough that's a thorough job because now lauren you get to watch when james dishes out a harkening to the next person and you can be like yeah it's a club it is a club every other human being is in that club yeah

Speaker 2 who's farming parakeets it was one person it was one guy in warika Now, I might have mispronounced that, so Lauren might write in and say I've mispronounced it.

Speaker 2 But they brought in just a few parakeets from abroad. And then parakeets have like four or five babies every year.
And so, by the 1950s, they had about 1,500 breeding pairs.

Speaker 2 Wow, but then there was a fire, and they never quite reached their former glory.

Speaker 2 And now, if you go on the internet and you google Oklahoma parakeets, you see Oklahoma was once the parakeet capital of the world, and no one knows why. Well, that's why we know.

Speaker 2 I've got one which I think is true from Tracy Thiekston. A common British job used to be operating a Shake Willie machine.

Speaker 2 That's in the ISS once you finish.

Speaker 2 Take off the crocodile clips, shake your willy. Get out of that bag.

Speaker 2 This is so good. So

Speaker 2 you know the word shoddy? Yeah. Dodgy.
Shoddy is dodgy. It's really low quality.
Yeah, it was like a kind of old cloth or something shoddy, wasn't it? That's what it's about.

Speaker 2 I don't know if it's a word that's travelled outside the UK. I don't know if in America or Australia, you say it's a bit of a shoddy job, isn't it? No, yeah, yeah, yeah, you say shoddy.
Okay, okay.

Speaker 2 Well, there was this cloth, and it was a mix of ground-up rags and kind of virgin wool, and it was then woven into new cloth.

Speaker 2 And some of the makers started upping the amount of recycled material, and that led to like low-quality cloth because the new stuff was getting more expensive.

Speaker 2 So the word gained the meaning shoddy, low-quality. Shoddy just used to mean, oh, this is shoddy.
You know, just, oh, what a nice piece of shoddy cloth. Great.

Speaker 2 Anyway, one of the steps of making the shoddy cloths was to do the willying in a shake-willy machine. What it meant was roughly cleaning the material to fluff it up and to remove any dirt.

Speaker 2 Can you stop doing that with your hands while you tell us about it?

Speaker 2 And there are these census records of williers, willy girls, willy men.

Speaker 2 Do we know why it was called willy? Is it because they got woolly? Two theories.

Speaker 2 One is that there were willow baskets involved and one is that it's a derivation of winnowing where you're winnowing out the

Speaker 2 low quality stuff. So you had to feed the wool into the shake willie and that fluffed it up and that got rid of the nips, which is the dust and the dirt.

Speaker 2 The second willying machine is called the teaser, which is teasing it apart.

Speaker 2 So as far as I can tell, you do the fluffing in the shake willy, you get rid of the nips, put it through the teaser, and then finally add the lubricant. That's the process.

Speaker 2 Did Kenneth Williams invent this job? Imagine what's your profession? I'm a willy man. That's good.

Speaker 2 We were doing this recently with the Rachel Paris episode where we talked about extinct jobs. Yeah, I must admit I had Willieing on my list.
Oh,

Speaker 2 yeah. But we never got around to it.
That's surely extinct. There's nobody willying these days.
No Willias, now no there is a brilliant yorkshire company called e-nuyo what

Speaker 2 was that your yorkshire accent

Speaker 2 it's it's what it's called inuyo which is an abbreviation of it is not over until it is over

Speaker 2 because all it's almost all vowels uh sorry um what's that to do with willy ink they're a recycling firm it's about recycling cloth i got it yeah and and shoddy was pioneered in battley in yorkshire uh by benjamin law who founded a company called shoddy Manufacturing, which is lovely.

Speaker 2 Right, who's next? I'm going.

Speaker 2 This was sent in to us by Jackie Gemmel. She writes, the reason aeroplanes have round windows is because old planes used to have square ones, which created weak points, which caused metal fatigue.

Speaker 2 And metal fatigue failure would be where the window was weakened further by air pressure at high altitude. And supposedly a few crashes were off the back of this.

Speaker 2 And so they now, now as we all know have circular windows and that is to distribute the pressure evenly yeah that's a strong very strong shape isn't it a circle yeah I think now the materials are strong enough that you could get any shape of window could you have a plane that was all window yeah now you can wow but people just wouldn't go for it I think I wouldn't either I think I would not go for that.

Speaker 2 I would like a plane where you can see into the hold. So you look down, you're like, oh, there's my bag.
Yeah, I think that'd be really great.

Speaker 2 Do you think you probably, I reckon you don't want to know what goes on in there?

Speaker 2 I always imagine some weird shit goes on in those holes. Yeah, lots of willy-shaken down there.
Well, like snakes on a plane kind of thing. Yeah.
Yeah, I don't want to see snakes down there.

Speaker 2 But a novelty glass-bottom plane is a very interesting concept. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Like that, that is quite interesting.

Speaker 2 I'm a terrified flyer, but even I think I might do that. No.
Yeah. Have you ever been in a glass-bottom boat? I have.
They're great fun. Thank you.

Speaker 2 You didn't invent the glass boat. And well done.
And we should say Dan invented the glass boat.

Speaker 2 And now he's going to do it again with the plane, apparently. What about an aeroplane? You know those rides at theme parks where you're not in a carriage, you're sort of suspended by your shoulders?

Speaker 2 The danglers. You're a dangler.
What about a Ryanair?

Speaker 2 Where it's a dangle all the way to Malaga. Oh, my goodness.
So the plane has a top, but no bottom. Yeah.
That's a good idea.

Speaker 2 I'm thinking, you know, saves a bit of of money on fuselage it's gonna make serving the drinks very tricky

Speaker 2 I'll say that

Speaker 2 I guess the stewards are hanging upside down I suppose they could winch themselves along because there's no bottom on the plane why are they hanging upside down why are they not just attached the right way up like you are they're all vampire

Speaker 2 okay okay I'm gonna roll back on that they can be the right way up

Speaker 2 Now we're talking. Remember to not let Andy pitch our weird roller roller coaster plane on it.

Speaker 2 It will be stressful when you're coming into Lamp though, because it'll feel like you have to run very, very fast at a certain point to slow the plane down. It's a Flintstone's plane.

Speaker 2 Flintstone's plane.

Speaker 2 Mark Logie writes, in the 1760s, Simon Harcourt, the first Earl Harcourt, demolished the village of Newnham Courtney.

Speaker 2 as well as Newnham House in order to make room for his garden and he rebuilt the entire village one mile to the northeast. Wow.
To make room for his garden. Yeah.

Speaker 2 It feels to me like it's easier to move a garden than it is to multiply. The thing is about rich people, they're not really bothered about what's easiest.

Speaker 2 They're more bothered about what's more convenient for them. And what's affordable? Like if that's just within your budget.

Speaker 2 I think for Simon Harcourt, the first Earl Harcourt, everything was within budget. All right, there you go.
And just rebuilt it correctly?

Speaker 2 Yeah, so if you drive through that area now, so it's like basically from the M4 to the M40 up there, you can go go through newnham courtney and basically all the buildings look almost identical because he had to build them all at the same time for the people who he moved from that village wow well it's good look it's good that he rebuilt it i'll say that you know yeah yeah i would be a bit annoyed if someone said i'm gonna move your house from my garden but as if it's if you're putting it back what difference does it make if he moves everyone's right yeah no difference i guess you're gonna have a bit of time where the renovation's going on that's gonna be quite inconvenient yeah those jobs do stretch stretch on don't they especially if the builders will be quite busy because they've got to rebuild everyone's house yeah what would have been great is if one family happened to have gone away on like a really long trip and everyone decided not to tell them what had happened and they'd just go on as normal i swear to god we were closer to that

Speaker 2 am i going nuts um something else about newnhourtney yeah i was looking into famous residents mavis lever she was the person who broke the italian enigma code which allowed the royal navy to ambush the italian fleet at the Battle of Matapan, which was quite decisive.

Speaker 2 And she also broke the Abwehr Enigma, which was one of the German enigmas. They had a few different codes that they used.
Right. And that one, she solved it with her colleague Margaret Rock,

Speaker 2 which led to the great saying, Give me a lever and rock, and I can move the universe. Bloody brilliant.
That's what one of her bosses said. That's really good.

Speaker 1 Get Ready for Malice, a twisted new drama starring Jack Whitehall, David DeCovney, and Carice Van Houten.

Speaker 1 Jack Whitehall plays Adam, a charming manny infiltrates the wealthy Tanner family with a hidden motive to destroy them.

Speaker 1 This edge-of-your-seat revenge thriller unravels a deliciously dark mystery in a world full of wealth, secrets, and betrayal. Malice will constantly keep you on your toes.

Speaker 1 Why is Adam after the Tanner family? What lengths will he go to? One thing's for sure, the past never stays buried, so keep your enemies close.

Speaker 1 Watch Malice, all episodes now streaming exclusively on Prime Video.

Speaker 2 Boxes were all filled with gifts big and small, but sharing pure love is the greatest gift of all.

Speaker 2 Stay cozy, my people, and have a boss here.

Speaker 2 Get into the holiday spirit with Boss and our ultimate gifting edit. Visit your nearest store or explore our curated selection online at boss.com.

Speaker 2 Here's one. This is from Jude Caffruni.
This is maybe the most stoner fact in the inbox over the last, you know what I mean? Like the sort of, whoa, like the sort of cosmically mind-blowing fact.

Speaker 2 Let's hear it. The T-Rex is closer to us in time than it is to the Stegosaurus.

Speaker 2 Now, I really like this. I love dinosaur timing facts.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 And this is that the T-Rex went extinct when they all did, about 65, 6 million years ago. Right?

Speaker 2 But the T-Rex was actually quite new. It had only properly arrived in its final format about 72 million years ago.
And I got really sad reading that. And I thought, no, they had six million each time.

Speaker 2 It's such a long time. I don't know why.

Speaker 2 I got a bit misty-eyed thinking, God, they were in their prime. They had so much to give.
They could have built their own HS2 in that time, exactly, exactly.

Speaker 2 Um, but when that happened, when T-Rex arrived 72 million years ago in the late Cretaceous, Stegosauruses had already been extinct for over 70 million years.

Speaker 2 So, the Stegosaurus and the T-Rex are further apart than the T-Rex is from us. Do you know that Sergeant Pepper's the album

Speaker 2 is closer to the modern day than it is to when Cleopatra was alive?

Speaker 2 No way.

Speaker 2 And that's a stone effect as well.

Speaker 2 Sounds like an impressive fact until you actually listen to it.

Speaker 2 It does make you think though.

Speaker 2 That was the thing with the name Jurassic Park that often gets said is that half the dinosaurs in the movie

Speaker 2 are not Jurassic.

Speaker 2 It implies that the dinosaurs in the park would have been incredibly freaked out by each other. They would have like the T-Rex would have been looking at the Stegosaurus thinking, what is that? Yes.

Speaker 2 Whereas the humans, they would have been relatively calm about because we're closer in time to them.

Speaker 2 So they'd be like, oh yeah yeah it's normal you know what i mean yeah it's an interesting point i don't think so

Speaker 2 not an interesting point no

Speaker 2 i retract mine as well no you can't point you can't retract your point just because to go along with jay if you look now at an animal that was extinct 55 million years ago and then you see an animal which hasn't been invented yet and will come in 20 million years, even though it's closer to you, which is going to be more surprising.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Okay.
Yeah. All right.
I retract. Yeah.
Take that look. We're all agreeing my point was not interesting.

Speaker 2 You've been hawking. Oh, God.

Speaker 2 Oh, it's tough. It's tough.
But the T-Rex used to be the size of a Dalmatian. When it started.
Ages ago. Yeah, yeah.
Right. But I think that's cool.

Speaker 2 Three meters long and 30 kilos. Was that a T-Rex or like another Tyrannosaur? Like a related Tyrannosaurus? It was an ancestor.

Speaker 2 It was what eventually turned into the T-Rex. Because I wonder if a baby T-Rex, when it's born, is already bigger than that size.
I don't know. Three meters is a big egg, isn't it? Yeah.

Speaker 2 Oh, that's true. Anyway, there you go.

Speaker 2 Here's one. This is from Ron Leiback.

Speaker 2 And Ron says that Case Western Reserve University, which is home of the famous physics study, the Michelson-Morley experiment, which disproved that the ether existed.

Speaker 2 Love looking at me like you know what that means.

Speaker 2 The theory was that the Earth was going through some kind of air or some kind of field, but actually it turned out that it's going through space and these guys proved it. Anyway,

Speaker 2 this university, they test whether or not Galileo's theorem of gravity is true every Halloween by dropping two jumbo-sized pumpkins from the top of the auditorium building.

Speaker 2 And the idea is they could be different weights, but they should land at the same time. Right.
And spoiler alert, gravity works and they are correct.

Speaker 2 Good to check every year, though. You never know.
You never know. It might change.
Yeah, I think that is fun. Scientists have to check these things.
And it brought me onto pumpkins.

Speaker 2 I've done a bit of my own research on pumpkins. There's an old QI fact that 95% of pumpkins in the UK are not eaten because we basically buy them and...

Speaker 2 turn them into jack-o'-lanterns and then throw them away.

Speaker 2 But actually, that is not true anymore. That fact is really, really old.
But there was a 2024 survey that found about 37% of pumpkins are eaten.

Speaker 2 Which is just under the amount of urine currently sitting inside the ISSP tank. That's food for thought.

Speaker 2 Sorry for the stone effect.

Speaker 2 But it's still not enough.

Speaker 2 And there is a campaign run by Hubbub, which is a charity for the environment, and someone called Emily Gusson, who wrote something called Don't Waste Your Pumpkin to try and get people to eat pumpkins.

Speaker 2 And they have like pumpkin recipes and just to raise awareness of not wasting food.

Speaker 2 And they claimed that they've almost halved pumpkin waste in the last year. Wow.
So that's really good work for them. So if you're listening to this, it's three weeks after

Speaker 2 Halloween already. But don't despair.

Speaker 2 If you've still got a few pumpkins there, just scrape off the mold. They might still be good.
Nice. Can I just do one more thing?

Speaker 2 Because I have an extra one that we never got to.

Speaker 2 And I did lots of extra research for it. So Federico Sana wrote that if Tom and Jerry was made in ancient Rome, Tom, instead of being a cat, would have been a weasel.

Speaker 2 And that's because, according to Federico, the Romans had pet weasels instead of pet cats to get rid of mice and stuff. Lovely.

Speaker 2 I found a website called foundinantiquity.com, and they have a really, really long explanation of this. And they don't think it's true.
They think that weasels were not used as pets.

Speaker 2 They were in the houses, but they were kind of a pest themselves.

Speaker 2 But the reason I wanted to say it is because they found on this website that this theory was first theorized in 1718 by magnus rydelius and andreas e weasel

Speaker 2 and they reckon that maybe he came up with this theory that they had pet weasels because his name was mr weasel amazing sorry amazing oh federico you've been harkened

Speaker 2 that's that's good though that's um that's very interesting yeah i think the jury's still slightly out but uh because they're in the house i mean that's a big animal to have in your house as a pest yeah but a lot of the sources when they talk about these weasels they talk about them in the same as you would say there is a fly in the house or there's a mouse in the house or a rat in the house is like an annoying thing.

Speaker 2 Right. Are they basically like ferrets? Well, they are smaller than ferrets.
And the other thing is ferrets actually are quite easy to tame.

Speaker 2 And like I have a friend Sid who I don't know if he still has a pet ferret, but he definitely used to. I think John Mitchinson from QI used to have a pet ferret.
Oh, that's right. Yes.

Speaker 2 But I think a weasel, they're just a little bit angry.

Speaker 2 and i think they don't make good pets do we get them in the uk i can't actually oh yeah weasels yeah we get weasels okay yeah good fact old qi fact most weasels in the uk are least weasels because there's a species called the least weasel which is the most common one in the uk that's lovely

Speaker 2 i think we had a fact in the inbox someone's saying sorry i don't remember the correspondent now but the least weasel is currently rated as least concern Which is nice because their population is kind of doing all right.

Speaker 2 My old neighbor used to take a ferret for a walk walk on a lead

Speaker 2 as a pet, which is a cool thing to do. I think it's cool.
Yes. Yes.
You do. Okay.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 2 Okay. Let's end it there.
Let's go to inaugurating the latest members of the Friend of the Podcast Hall of Fame. Exciting.

Speaker 2 Anyone who has signed up to Clubfish at the Friend of the Podcast tier gets one of our headline facts in perpetuity.

Speaker 2 You are then the sponsor, patron, whatever you like of that fact, and you get a little shout-out on this show. That's what we're trying to say say here.
So

Speaker 2 we should do some shout-outs. Guys, we've had a bit of a rush on membership of Friend of the Podcast.
So we are going to up the pace

Speaker 2 of the number of shout-outs we give push-out and

Speaker 2 get through a few more. So we're sorry, we may not get to some of you for a little while, but your names are in the system and

Speaker 2 we're going to try really hard to get through them. There's been a swell.

Speaker 2 Do you know those companies when you ring them and they say, sorry, we're having an unexpected large number of calls, but they say it absolutely every single day.

Speaker 2 We're going going to have that. I'm afraid we've experienced unprecedented demand

Speaker 2 and we're going to be dealing with it in a precedented way. So your fact will be dealt with in around seven months.

Speaker 2 It'll be before then, we hope. It'll be before then, we hope.
Let's do right. Let's do some.
Right. Today, shout-out number one goes to Orion Slater.
Brilliant. What a terrific name.
Orion.

Speaker 2 Three stars.

Speaker 2 Lovely. Lovely.

Speaker 2 Orion must be absolutely sick of that joke.

Speaker 2 Belt up. There we go.
Very good. Anyway, Orion, your fact is that the earliest known dentistry is 9,000 years old.
Yes.

Speaker 2 Now, the exciting thing about this fact is it's not one of our facts or even one of Anna's. That's right.
It's Greg Jenner's. Historian Greg Jenner.
And this was our third episode.

Speaker 2 And Greg Jenner and comedian Alex Edelman were sitting there with me and James for this episode. So where was I?

Speaker 2 Who was Anna? I think he didn't really care about the show at that point. You're sort of a bit loosey-goosey.
And I've maintained that.

Speaker 2 In those days, yeah, we did two in one day, actually. Do you remember? And we got Greg and Alex to come in and do a show.

Speaker 2 And then, as soon as we finished, as soon as the mics went off, they came back on again and we did a show with the four of us. That's right.
They basically came in to have a cup of tea.

Speaker 2 And James and I said, why don't we just make an episode instead while they're here? So, yeah, well done to Orion Slater. Great fact.
Ancient dentistry. Let's have another.

Speaker 2 Okay, well, this one is going to Christine and Tom Asbridge. And the fact is that according to Dr.
Hans Ulrich, the Middle Ages never happened.

Speaker 2 This is a wild theory called Phantom Time Hypothesis. Largely put into the show because we knew that Greg would be horrified he was sitting on a show that was discussing this particular

Speaker 2 upset him, really, wasn't it? Yeah, in a friendly way. We did like him.
But that was the idea. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And the exciting thing about that one is that this is a special medieval fact requested by Christine for Tom, who is a medieval historian and writer.

Speaker 2 So we're not going to say you can request your facts if you're a friend of the podcast, but you can put a little note in. You know, like where you put, I'm allergic to nuts or something.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 But as the guy who does the emails, I'd like to specify that as the chef in this restaurant, I may put nuts in anyway.

Speaker 2 That's absolutely. While Andy's reply to your emails, he may be touching nuts.

Speaker 2 So let's go to the next one, which was

Speaker 2 the fact is the most medically indispensable sea creature in the United States is the horseshoe crab. And that was originally a fact from Alex Edelman.
Lovely. A good friend.
Like he's in the room.

Speaker 2 But now it is under the custodianship of Anna, also known as Anna MC, Anna Mac.

Speaker 2 She's a regular contributor to various emails and stuff like that.

Speaker 2 Yeah, congratulations, Anna. Yeah.
And I like that. I do like the fact the most medically indispensable sea creature in the United States.
Like it's qualifier city, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2 I think Alex had just read a documentary or watched a documentary about the horseshoe crab and just wanted to talk about that. I love the idea of reading a documentary.

Speaker 2 It feels like the kind of thing you would do, James, where you print out the transcript of the documentary and then you read it because you'll do it faster and there won't be irritating pictures in the way.

Speaker 2 I have a friend who reads all of our podcasts. Doesn't listen to them, reads them.
Wow. Yeah.
I mean, you read famously you read um

Speaker 2 scripts of toy stories all four of them

Speaker 2 never seen the films did you cry at the right bits

Speaker 2 yeah

Speaker 2 just dripped on the printout couldn't read the next bit oh dear right let's have another fact um this one is going to double oh dynames

Speaker 2 dynames it's a terrific name

Speaker 2 And it's that Queen Elizabeth slept in a bedroom with 28 women. So congratulations, double O.

Speaker 2 She's the bonny blue of her time.

Speaker 2 That's rude. Isn't it? I'm going to pretend I don't know who that is.

Speaker 2 Me too. Oh, me too.

Speaker 2 I think that was the vibe we were going for to try and do a bit of innuendo, but actually, this was the fact that she had lots of handmaids and stuff who used to sit and sleep in her bedroom.

Speaker 2 Yeah, they'd watch her give birth as well. Queen Elizabeth first.

Speaker 2 No,

Speaker 2 you have changed history, Dan. That's huge.
Sorry.

Speaker 2 I was thinking about the chambermaids who would stay and births in those periods were often viewed by huge parties.

Speaker 2 So for Queen Elizabeth I, nicknamed the Virgin Queen, I think probably that wouldn't have been a big part of the job spec.

Speaker 2 Not the nickname of Bonnie Blue.

Speaker 2 Okay, well, I don't know who that is. Right.
Carry on. So the next one, I'll do this one.
It's that 30 million Chinese people live in caves.

Speaker 2 And that fact is now under the custodianship of Nathan morgan congratulations nathan feels like a fact that will have undergone some depreciation yeah i think it was a uh a fact of its time or it could have been a depreciation because the population's gone up a long way in the last 11 years yeah what of china oh yeah i suppose it has yeah definitely i feel like the housing boom in china might have might have

Speaker 2 there's lots of rural bits of china that there are but

Speaker 2 increasingly more people live in these mega cities don't they yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah it's interesting that we can now say we've been going so long that we can talk about our old facts and say well, that was a different time.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And it's us we're talking about.
Well, it's weird if you listen back to that episode, you'd probably hear yourself saying stuff where you're going, what am I talking about? How?

Speaker 2 I don't know that. When did I say that? Oh, I mean, that happens with every episode by the last three.
Yeah, like, I just don't.

Speaker 2 Who's this guy? He sounds handsome.

Speaker 2 Are you one of those people who always gets me and you mixed up? I am Isis.

Speaker 2 Every time I look in the mirror, I'm shocked not to have your face.

Speaker 2 Shall I do one? Yeah. All right.
Hello, Alex Tebski. You have just become the custodian of this fact from James Harkin.

Speaker 2 There is a banker in Latvia who will lend you money using your immortal soul as security. That's great.
Is he still going? I'm not sure.

Speaker 2 I'll tell you why I did this fact because our first, I think our first ever listener was Gattis, who is or who was the advertising partner of my wife.

Speaker 2 And I sent him the episode to see what he thought about it. And that was before it went online or anything.
And he is from Latvia. So I thought we'd do a little Latvian fact quite early on.

Speaker 2 That's so cool. That is our first listener.
That's great. I think he is.
Well, that's a great fact. Congratulations, Alex.

Speaker 2 I'll do another one. This is another Anna.
Anna, your fact forever, is that for a hundred years, almost all maps of Africa contained a fictional mountain range called the Mountains of Kong.

Speaker 2 So, to clarify, that was a fact that was said by Anna. Yes.
But it's now under the custodianship of another Anna.

Speaker 2 Whose surname we don't know. She's just Anna.
Exactly. Unless Anna

Speaker 2 or Anna has signed up to be a friend of the podcast. Not a chance.
No.

Speaker 2 She doesn't listen to the main show, let alone whatever we're doing now. She doesn't know this exists.

Speaker 2 I spoke to her last weekend, and she says she has been listening to the recent episodes and really enjoying them. Oh, okay, so Anna's been replaced.

Speaker 2 Motherhood has done a really weird thing to her second time around. She did look very tired.

Speaker 2 That's a great fact. I I think that that's a really fun fact.
The mountains of Kong. There's just this huge mountain range.
Everyone said, well, you can't go that way.

Speaker 2 What about the mountains of Kong? And they just weren't there. That one feels weirdly like an OG classic of fish.
Absolutely.

Speaker 2 Here is one more for this week. So, male Pennsylvania grass spiders are much likelier to approach a female who has already killed and eaten a male.
That feels like an anifact, doesn't it?

Speaker 2 But actually, it was one of yours, Andy, but now it is under the custodianship of Alva Clausen. Well done, Alva.
It's a good fact.

Speaker 2 Male Pennsylvania grass spiders are much likely to approach a female who has already killed and eaten a male, which is crazy, right? Because she's got form, but she's full.

Speaker 2 You see what I mean? Yes.

Speaker 2 The killer wouldn't possibly want to kill again. No, that's what they say about serial killers, isn't it? Once you've killed once, it's not at all moorish.

Speaker 2 You bump into it. Oh, God.
No, no, no, no, don't worry. Don't worry.
I already did one tonight. I am.
Woo. Just want to hang.
Yeah, great. Well, there you go.

Speaker 2 That is this week's batch of fact custodians. Thank you so much to all of you who've signed up at, frankly, any tier of Clubfish.
It's a joy to have you on board.

Speaker 2 We will be back again in another week's time with another little fish. We'll be back in less time than that with another main episode of the show.

Speaker 2 And for members of Clubfish, we'll be back in an indeterminate amount of time with a drop as a line or audience feedback show. Clear? Clear.
Great. Bye.

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