Little Fish: The OId Ron Brown

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Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of Little Fish. This is the show where we put down our favorite facts from the last seven days and we go through the podcast at QI.com inbox. We pick out the best facts that you have all found and we're gonna read them out now. I'm sitting here with James Harkin, Andrew Hunter Murray. Guys, let's do it. Who's got a fact? I've got one. This is a great one. It's from James Patterson.

And it's that the author. No. How do you know? It's spelled slightly differently. Oh. I've got an answer for everything. James Patterson or James Patterson using an incredibly unimaginative non deplume. The fact is It's that during the Cold War, a KGB agent had several meetings with Edinburgh Leith MP and communist sympathizer Ron Brown. However, they were unsure if he was spying for them or not. because they couldn't understand his thick Scottish accent and had no idea what he was telling them.

That's incredible. It's um this Did you do some reading on that? Is that true? A little bit. I d it's from this um Ben McIntyre book about uh Oleg Gordievsky, who was I think a a double agent on on various sides. Uh and the quote was Brown may have been leaking top grade secrets, but equally he might have been talking about football and they just couldn't tell. They just could not.

So interesting. I don't know why. When you learn another language, it's kind of you can understand it usually, but when people talk over each other, that's when it's tricky. But she can do it with a lot of things. You can get you can get some really, really hard to decide. Especially Edinburgh is a relatively soft accent. Yes. It is, it is absolutely. Glasgow's often said to be the harder of the two to

Shit again. Yeah, yeah. I don't know where Ron Brown was from. I know he b he was the M MP for there, but uh he was apparently a colourful character. He was a Labour MP who damaged the parliamentary mace in a row over the Poltax and ended up in court for stealing his mistress's underwear. Wow.

That's very cool. I I have a uh a another political one. Should we jump to that very quickly? So this is sent into us by Brady Steeper and uh it's to do with Canada's longest serving prime minister who's called William King.

Um, so he says it's important to know before hearing this fact that he guided the country through the Great Depression, the Second World War, established Canadian citizenship, and successfully challenged the power of the crown. And the guy who he was challenging it against was called Lord Bing. in a delightfully named constitutional crisis called the King Bing Affair or the King Bing Wingding. Yes. Yeah.

I presume they were just waiting for they at some point had to have a wingding. Yeah. I've never heard the phrase wingding used outside of fonts. Oh yeah. I didn't know it was a thing. A wing ding was a thing. Lovely. Um no, I don't think I did either. No. I think you say, Oh, we had a wingding. I've I've I've heard that. No, I've heard we had a ding dong. That was when it was the uh Prime Minister of China, Mr. Ding, and the um Vietnamese currency, the dong. The ding dong ding dong.

Well, anyway, the fact that Brady wanted to send to us is that on his death, King donated his estate to the Canadian government, and that included all of his diaries, 172 volumes. Wow. And when they were read, they revealed that. He made huge use of seances during his term as prime minister. So while he was prime minister, he was consulting with his dead mother. He was consulting with a former dead prime minister, Sir Wilfred Laurier, and his dog, Pat.

He would talk to his dog Pat. I think uh he stands up in Parliament. I think we need more biscuits. And one other thing to say Woof woof Yeah, but I mean I apparently spoke to Pat about the importance of the involvement that Canada had in the Second World War, um, conscription into the army. Um I seem to r remember reading about this, and I think that the story has been changed a bit over the years. I think he was using it as a way to air his own thoughts and he would use

Either his dead mother or a former prime minister as a sort of soundboard uh Can you choose who you get through to in a sound? I don't really know much about that. You can you can try and request. I think that's largely people go and they hope that Someone that's on their mind will show you. No, but if you've got a particular previous prime minister, can you say I'd rather have someone from the other party actually? Or can you say, like, is Genghis Khan available?

We're in the middle of a total war. You c I I'm sure you could. Yeah. I'm sure it's a good thing. It depends how p pliable your medium is, I guess. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Did you read that in the news about the Canadian Prime Minister was he in DevOps? Yeah, uh he stole some sandwiches. It was the Mark Carney Sani Barney. Oh my god. I was wondering why you hadn't said anything for the last minute.

I can't believe you let me go through a whole seance chat without having me listening to any of that yet. You're gonna be shocked when you hear what happened while you were gone into your pun temple.

Okay, here is a fact from Sasha M. And Sasha says um well Sasha sends us an what they call an almost perfect sentence with no further context. Now this is from Harper's magazine, and the sentence goes South African taphonomist found that pigs decompose more slowly when they are wearing winter garments and more quickly when they are eaten by the Cape Grey mongoose.

Yes, I sort of would have expected that last bit, I guess. It's a brilliant sentence. I love it. Absolutely fantastic. Yeah, well what they do is they use pigs. decomposing to analogise to humans. Like if you want to do an experiment to see how humans are going to decompose, you can't get a human and do it. Right. So you but you can get a pig. There might be one left over from a abattoir or something. Yeah.

Uh, and so that's why they do it. So they put them in garments to see how the pig decomposes in case someone has been f like let's say you find a body in the top of a mountain. And it's at a certain level of decomposition, you compare it with the pig. No, but I'm just imagining the process is getting the winter garments like having to drag a dead pig into a branch of North Face. Yeah. We need something a little bit bigger in the waist, I'm afraid. Do you have any

Um Wow. Wow. That's a great sentence. Yeah, lovely. I also read um a brilliant study. Uh this was from quite a few years ago now, about twenty or thirty years ago, but they put three tons of dead pigs in the middle of a forest in America. Uh and again they wanted to see how what would happen when it decomposed. And this one was slightly different. They wanted to see if there was a big die off of any animal, how it would affect the ecosystem.

Interesting. Um so they put these dead pigs in the middle of the forest. Uh they looked at first the vultures came and then the maggots and then the flies and all that kind of stuff. And basically what they found is it gets really nasty really quite quickly. Right. Uh and not only did it get really nasty and there was dead pig everywhere and it was all rotten, actually the area never really recovered.

And it still hasn't really recovered and they're still studying it today because it's not back to how it was when they did the study. Gosh. So yeah. That's wild. That is wild. Again, it's just scientists, you know, you need to know this stuff. Absolutely. You don't know when it's gonna be useful in the future. Absolutely. Yeah. Uh Andy, you. Let's get a fact. This is you. This is a fact from Nicholas Wilkinson.

uh who begins, unpromising, it's maybe not exactly a fact, but um You know the pangolin? Yeah. Okay. It's a strange scaly creature, isn't it? It's quite hard shelled. Hard shelled, much used in the looks a bit like an armadillo. Yeah. It looks a bit like an armadillo, lovely long claws. Uh, traditional Chinese medicine get through a a fair few. I think they've just been removed from the official I think they're the most trafficked animal in the world. Well.

I'm glad you say that. Well I'm not glad you say that. I'm very I'm incredibly sad you say that'cause they're lovely. Sorry. Um God. Um so you know the thing of more sharks, many, many more sharks are killed by people than people are killed by sharks. Yeah. Um, so Nicholas writes, this is similar. Because of the trade in pangolin products, about a million pangolins are very sadly killed by humans each year. Obviously horrendous.

The total of humans killed by pangolins is one. Oh. Okay. So they have no teeth, they're slow moving, they have poor eyesight, and they're about the size of a cat. Okay. So It's an amazing story. It's from the book Mammals of Thailand, right? Um when threatened, the pangolin will wrap its tail completely around itself, turning itself into a ball, basically. So it is almost impossible to unfold. Yeah. Like a an armadella or a hedgehog, whatever.

Um but this is related by a naturalist called W. W. A. Phillips. Uh a villager clubbered a pangolin one day in the jungle and started back for his village. The pangolin slung over his neck, the tail hanging down on one side, the head on the other. Uh oh. But the pangolin was merely stunned. When found later the man was dead on the trail, strangled'cause the pangolin had suddenly come to

And then thought coil up, defensive. Panglin strangling. Oh my god. If only there was a head of state that rhyme with that. If you can think of a head of state who rhymes with panglin or strangling, podcast at qi.com Yeah, and it was still curled around his neck when the guy was found, proving he'd been the victim of a scaly mugging. There you go. Yeah, really good. Amazing. Yeah, very much one story.

Uh well while we're in the world of animals, Jelk Ludlfilge. Uh apologies for the pronunciation there. No notes. Ludelfulge. It's very rare to hear you nail it the first time, but Ciao! J E L K E? Yelka, probably. But that was exactly how you speak when you're doing an impression of the Nobel committee. Sorry, Yelke or Jelk. Uh, but it's a great fact you've sent in.

Which is when biologists catch lizards during field work, they use a loop of dental floss with which they lasso the lizard. This makes sure that the lizard remains unharmed and can be later released again without injury. Uh the lasso is of course known as a lizu. Um so a little dental floss lasso for lizards that's really c quite sweet. It is quite sweet. Yeah. I love it. Okay, here is a fact from Sam Walker.

Uh which Sam describes as a little fun fact. But let's see what you think. Sam says that the average ejaculate contains approximately two hundred and twenty thousand terabytes of data. Terabytes? That's massive, isn't it? Like one terabyte is very big. It's more than I've got on my computer. Oh dear. You can get cloth you can get special cloths. Buy one of the lights and that'll show you where you need to devote most intensive attention to. Oh dear.

You know when you walk straight into your own trap? You could almost physically hear the funk as your head hit. It was a proper sideshow Bob and the rakes, wasn't it? Wow. So yeah, this this is because each sperm contains around thirty seven point five megabytes of DNA data, which is basically it's your genome is in every sperm. uh and there's a lot of sperms in uh an ejaculate. Right. But I think

if you were to put it in a zip file, if you were to compress it. Because actually all the data is kind of very similar. If it's gone into your zip, something's gone wrong. Um What I'm saying, like the there's a fact that says that um the amount of data is the same as um the entirety of English Wikipedia approximately forty thousand times.

Wow. That amount of data. But the truth is that all that data is almost the same. So if you were to put it into your computer, you can compress it. And actually I think it would be much, much smaller than that. Okay. Because it's like the thing is about data is you can have like Mary has a little lamb written down. And but you could do the same thing two hundred million times, but is there really any more data there? Or is it the same amount of data just replicated? So it's a lot of

Hm. Just see a receptionist at the Sperb. Please go. Thank you, Mr. Horkin. But actually we just need you to fill the sample. Thank you. But I will pass that on to I'm writing it down, zip file. I got it. Yeah yeah. And you're gonna need to give that a wife. J, köpa några nya Pallfält i lagret. Det kanske blir lite mer grejer. Man är skribord, och kontorstolar och så hade de en skitsnyggontain på en massa bra. Vi har inredning för hela arbetsplatsen. Välkommen till Agipen.

Snö överallt! Kyland biter! Då gäller det att vara redo. Svedål har vi inte kladderna som klarar heller. Under ställ, stump på vinterkännön. jakul syyllor van Välkommen till Svedal! restaurant from Kenneth Booman uh or Bauman. Uh hopefully this is suitable for little fish. I work for a competitor of Chevrolet, so this one stings a bit.

The Chevrolet Suburban is the longest produced automobile model, or nameplate, still in production today. It was introduced in nineteen thirty four. Wow. They've been making Chevrolet Suburban since nineteen thirty four. Gosh. Is that weird? I can't picture anything but I can't imagine what

A Chevy It's a it's a b it's a really quite big American car. Is it? Uh and I'm sure they get much bigger, but uh it is on its twelfth generation. Like if you look at first generation one, it does look different to the modern really. Yeah. Of course, yeah, yeah. Like Doctor Who. It's just Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Also on roughly the twelfth generation, right? That's what I well, no yeah, I can't remember actually. Yeah.

A rare chink in the armour for you, Dan? Are we counting the audiobooks? Because uh That's amazing. Yeah, I think it's good, isn't it? Is there any other ones that are kind of similar? I can't imagine like Like a Ford Fiesta? Ford Fiesta, that's the one that was in my

That's interesting, isn't it? It's like when you say thing of a car and people say Ace of Spades. If you ask a British person to name a car, they'll probably say Ford Fiesta. I think so. But wasn't like some of the early Volkswagens, didn't they date back to World War Two?

I don't know. Yes, they probably haven't had a bit of a clear out of the Volkswagens, didn't they, after the mid forties? I think they by association. I don't know. This is the problem of doing this show with no Google. Absolutely. Yeah. I'll do one more here, which was sent in by Chloe Martin. Um, she says a good Hong Kong fact for you.

Rednack Cellar Terrace in the Hong Kong mid levels is so named because the original sign writer wrote Alexander Terrace right to left, as in the Chinese way, Rednack Cella. Oh it's Alexander Backwards. It's Alexander Backwards. Now we've mentioned this on the show before. We have, and we've mentioned it'cause um my mum and dad lived on that road. Yes. Yeah. It's friend of the podcast, Rednecks Hello.

Last one. Yeah. Uh okay, this is from Graham Wallace. And Graham says, You've covered animal regeneration previously, but this seems to be an extreme example. There are two sea slugs from the species Sacchoglossan. that can amputate their entire body. And then come back to life. Wait, what's uh what's left if you've amputated your entire body? Your head. Separate. Separate your head from your body. No more shoulders, knees and toes though.

It's a quick game. Head. Head. You've got your eyes and your ears and your mouth and your nose. So you actually actually Um So here's the thing. How do you get the energy to regrow your body if you're only a head and you don't have a digestive system? I guess you can't travel around to eat'cause you were using your body for that. Even if you could eat.

Was the food can't digest? Um I would say small mic like micro digestive system just in your mouth. Kind of, but there's something more. Uh do you park the bottom of the hole in your neck. on the anus of another slug and taken the nutrients of what's passed through their body. Wow, Dan. I mean it that I can imagine that working. Nature is wild. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But uh sea slugs especially, they are wacky. Yeah. What seems to happen is that they eat some algae

And the algae photosynthesizes, creates energy, and that gives them the energy to then create that body. Insane. I know. That is nature. That's as weird as you said, then. Is it yeah, I was gonna say, is that any weirder than attaching your head onto someone's anus to get the it's weirdly like uh like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein monster where it

like electricity was turning like it's it's creating this kind of zap sense of question over here. Actually I don't think she ever says the galvanizing force is electricity in the book.

No, but in the preface she does talk about Galvani's experiments. Yes, but that's just an example and actually it's very unclear what chemical mechanism is used to bring the creature to life. Yeah, but I would Sorry I'm just forced to I'm just forced to all against you. I would I would have said Frankenstein in that case, but I said Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which is the name of the Kenneth Branner film To which I

electricity is used. I'm gonna cut off my top knot right now. Very nice. Very nice. Okay, well this is brilliant. We love these facts coming in. Thank you so much, everyone. And uh before we wrap up with this episode, we've got one more important thing to do, which is hand out.

Some past headline facts to members of the highest tier friend of the podcast of Clubfish. So who wants to go first? I will Uh this one goes out to Radu Fluera. A fantastic name, Radu. Uh this is the fact that in medical jargon, lol used to mean little old lady. Uh and that meant that other doctors' acronyms included Lolinad, little old lady in no apparent distress, or Lolfidig.

Little old lady, fall down, go boom. This is great. This is episode twenty seven and we had as guest on the show Helen Zoltzman. It's a such a weird one, this kind of medical jargon stuff because The idea is that doctors write it on your notes. And then I saw a really, really believable debunk saying

You're allowed to get your notes now. There is absolutely no way that any doctor would do this. And a load of doctors saying, Yeah, it was a thing that happened in the past, but we don't do it anymore. But then I've heard actual doctors saying, Yeah, we do do that. We do this all the time.

So I don't know what to believe. Yeah. In between carving our initials on your liver during sensitive operations. Uh yeah, I think probably it definitely used to happen a fair bit before you could get your notes quite so easily. Uh yeah, and Helen is of course a complete podcasting don. She's of uh Answer Me This and and The Illusionist and all sorts of other shows and uh I don't think it's too much to say that we were partly inspired.

to make this show from Helen. A hundred percent. They showed kind of the potential of what a podcast could be to everyone who was making it at the time. So that was very cool. We love Helen. Um Okay, here is one for Alice Jackson. And Alice, your fact. I'm sorry, it's another Dan Schreiber one. Only joking, no, it's a great fact. It is that according to researchers at Glasgow Caledonian University

listening to Billy Connolly can substantially increase your tolerance to pain. Mm. Uh and this is the way that they do this is you put your hand in ice for as long as possible. uh and you take it out when you can't manage it any longer. And they've done a few experiments like this. The famous one is the one about um swearing. Which is you could keep your f hand in the ice for longer if you're just going effing. Yeah, effing is Jeffing, yeah.

Oh, I thought you were just doing a thick Scottish accent and I could understand what you were saying. The old Ron Brown

Uh well congrats to you Alice. Uh that's your fact. Um and now Kate Haymes, we have one for you. Is it not Hames? No, I was just laughing because do you remember peop you called me Haym for quite a long time. Hamez. Hamez. But I think one reason was Did I not get mentioned in someone's book? Yeah, you received an acknowledgement in Steve Colgan's book, which was Haimes Harkin, and you became Haymes for a very long time. Yeah. So um so Kate Haimes, this is your fact.

The first woman to cycle the world learned to ride a bike the day before she set off. Is this friend of the podcast? Annie Londonderry. Annie Londonderry. Who was an amazing world travelling uh cycling lady. And she was I think she was about tw twenty three when she did it. She was so young. I think she might even have had a

Husband and children who she might have written out of the story She did. Which she was selling to the press because she wanted to be like young, single, cool lady. Right. Gets press attention. You know what? There is that's a lot of the story, but there is so much more to it. And you can read all about it in the excellent book.

Everything to play for, the QI Book of Sport by James Harkin and Anna Toshinski. She has a whole chapter about her. Yeah. Oh wow. Or you can just go on Wikipedia. I mean it's Or you could listen back to episodes twenty seven as well. I think we found some stuff that isn't in Wikipedia for that. And we went to the old newspaper archives because

She was in the newspapers quite a lot and they gave like lots of really amazing um stories of when she fell off her bike and all this kind of stuff. And do you think did she cheat for any bits? Obviously she went on boats over the ocean but Yeah, we think we think that a lot of her stories should be taken with a bit of a pinch of salt. Yeah. But she was very cool. Yeah, oh yeah, super cool. Very early friend of the podcast. One of the first ever friends of the podcast.

actually. Yeah. But she did make it to we did recently. If you're part of the top tier of Club Fish, there is the friend of the podcast here. If you remember that, after three months you get sent a t-shirt. And we have made a Friends of the Podcast t shirt which lists all of the greatest friends of the podcast and she makes it on there. Cool. Annie Londonderry appears.

Uh Andy, let's go to you. This is a fact that goes to Mark Norman. Mark, your fact is that when Californian ground squirrels are attacked by snakes, They increase their blood pressure so their tail gives off more infrared radiation, making them look bigger. You might be thinking, Well, I my blood pressure would increase if I was being threatened by a rattlesnake, but the really cool thing is they do this with rattlesnakes.

Which they know can see an infrared, even though the squirrel itself can't see an infrared, it knows that the snake can. It's fascinating. And it doesn't do it with other snakes. So we know it's a deliberate thing because it knows it I th that's I guess it just knows it works. Maybe it doesn't know about the infrared spectrum. Yeah. It just does something. Yeah. And this works against that snake and they're like, guys, we should do that again. Exactly.

Here is a fact. Uh this one goes to J D G. J D G I don't know what your what they stand for. But I think the J might be Joshua looking at your email address. But anyway, JDG, this is your fact now and that is that every day over a hundred people used to watch King Louis XV get up and get dressed.

Magnificent facts. Yeah. Uh that was uh one of your facts, Andy. And it was a brilliant fact about um yeah, about how his life was just on display. Yeah. It was called the Revai, wasn't it? And people just woke up and Well, they woke up early and then went to watch him wake up.

And then they watched him have his first wee of the day. And then they watched him get dressed. And then they watched him have his breakfast. Yes. We're actually thinking of launching a higher tier where you can get this kind of access to if anyone Registers their interest. Yeah. Very cool. I'm I'm gonna read out the next one here. And by the way, uh that last fact was from episode twenty eight.

Uh so here's the second one from that episode, which is now under the custodianship of Gemma Donald, and it is that there is an original Picasso that we will never see because it was eaten by the dog. Really nice. I know he was very prolific, Picasso, wasn't he? Yeah. And he was the one who also did a supposedly did the drawing on a napkin to pay for his

Class Ops. Yes, that's right. And they said, Mr. Picasso, can you sign it, please? And he said, No, I want to pay for my coffee, not the entire cafe. Yes. Always a way to endear yourself to the staff, isn't it? Do you guys ever do this in cafes or restaurants? I do it all the time. Yeah. I offer them a sort a bit of tedious humour and uh you know yeah, get a ten percent off. Five? Yeah. Okay, we'll just take a service child from that. Thank you very much.

I've actually added ten percent to the bill. Time wasting. Oh, here's another one. Yep. It goes out to JF. This is the fact. It's that, during the Second World War, the US Navy diving manual contained detailed instructions over what to do if eaten by a giant clam. Wow. Yes.

Yes, that was one of mine. I can't remember the details about it now, but it was just in this I remember seeing the images. Yeah, little illustrations. I and then we looked into it and actually a giant clam isn't strong enough. to it takes an hour to close and all of this. And even if it did close it has little gaps in it and you'd be able to get your foot out anyway. Yeah. It's just a clam. Grow up. I don't want to be responsible as a podcast.

best for anyone being eaten by a giant clam and them saying, Oh, I'm just gonna keep my foot in here for an hour'cause no such thing as a fish said that I'll be able to easily wiggle it out. No such thing as a fish, they know what they're talking about in the underwater realm. Fine.

Um I sort of think it would be cool if we were responsible for that. Well we're trying to get publicity this year, aren't we? It's the year of you know, putting ourselves out there. Right. So I think getting getting listeners eaten by dried clams would Is one way of doing it. Yeah. Is that or the one show? I think the problem with that is if we try and get our listenership up by doing away with our listeners.

Yeah. You know, we have to get two new listeners for the one that we've lost. That's a r do you know what that's a really good point. That's a really good point. Okay. Well, there we go. Our latest custodians. Congratulations to JF, to Gemma, to J D G. to Mark, Kate, Alice, and Radu.

Uh you are now the custodians of all these facts. If you yourself would like to get ownership of one of our facts, all you need to do is join the top tier of clubfish. Go to patreon.com slash no such thing as a fish. And not only will you be given a shout out on the show, but we will also send you a digital certificate and uh do with that what you like. Um

Anyway, we're gonna be back again next week. Do keep sending us your facts. We absolutely love reading them out here on Little Fish. Otherwise, come join us again on Friday for another regular episode of No Such Thing as a Fish. We will see you then. Goodbye. Kia presenterar djud av förändring. Lej slut! Skången går från vänner till revanjären. Snön ger sig inte, och inte vi heller. Hos fördål hittar du allt för att göra jobbet i Kila. Snörskiffla isacos, snör slung och snör.

Handka, viselvärmar, infravärme. Handlampor. Och ja, vi bjuder på kaffe. Allt för att få jobb. Välkommen till Svedal!