No Such Thing As A Fish - 374: No Such Thing As Tarzan In A Waterpark

Episode Date: May 21, 2021

Anna, James, Dan and Andy discuss song sheets, short streams and service stations.  Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes.

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from four undisclosed locations in the UK. My name is Dan Schreiber, I am sitting here with Anna Tyshinski, Andrew Hunt and Murray and James Harkin and once again we have gathered round the microphones with our four favourite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order, here we go. Starting with you, Andy. My fact is that the founder of the UK's first electric vehicle forecourt was named after a service station.

A service station? Is he named TB? He was named Toddington. A classic. Kind of like Paddington Bear actually being named after Paddington Bear. Was he founded that service station like Paddington Bear was founded in the West Coast? Yeah, he came from South America with a jar of marmalade and no, he wasn't, it's a really weird story.

So he's a guy called Toddington Harper and he is named after the M1 Toddington Services. He is actually, I believe, the child of some solar pioneers. His parents were involved in solar electricity when they were younger and he actually has a brother who is named Heston after Heston services. So both boys in this family are named after service stations. His mum just said, his mum was interviewed, there was this piece in the mail about this electric forecourt service station thing and his mum said they were driving back from the hospital, they didn't have a name for him and they drove through Heston services.

This was with their first boy and they thought Heston's the name and then a few years later they carried it on. They were on Home Trudes on Radio 4 talking about this and they said that they were driving down the M4 and they just started reading out the names of places they passed to see if any of these would be a decent name. So they read out Roe Hampton, Putney, Siemens, Honeywell, that was the Heston, that was the first one. So did Toddington get his, because that was just a theme or was that a different route

they took home after that hospital? So what happened was they called the first one Heston and that is the first service station on the M4 and according to the mother, she said, a friend of mine said, if you've called your first son after the first service station on the M4, how about calling your second son after the first service station on the M1, right? So that's what she said, but Toddington isn't the first service station on the M1. The first service station on the M1 is London Gateway. So he should have been called London Gateway, I thought, but London Gateway is a new name

for this service station. It's only been called that since 2000 and really he should have been called Scratchwood. Nice. I think. That's the first service station historically or the first one that you reached geographically. It's the first one as you leave London going northbound for the M1 or westbound for the M4. Right.

The first historically it's between two, I think instead we'd have to be called Watford Gap, which isn't great, or Newport Pagnell, which is quite a cool name, actually. Yeah. It would have been. And there was this amazing website called MotorwayServicesOnline.co.uk. I really think we should start doing a series of insanely good websites about really arcade subjects. Like ThatchInfo.com.

Exactly. The person who made this site has to get together with the person who made that one. So they go very deep into the debate over whether Newport Pagnell or Watford Gap or the first service station. It is Newport Pagnell. It beat Watford Gap by about two weeks in 1960, but it's got some other great stuff on it. It has a whole page on the Lou of the Year Award because the Lou of the Year Award has a section about service stations.

And very sadly, it used to cover three for England, Scotland and Wales, but they've had to scale back the awards. Are you talking about the Four Court Trader Awards because they have a Four Court Lou of the Year category? This is an award ceremony just for Four Courts and service stations and things. That's a completely different awards ceremony, Andy. It's a very common confusion, though. Go on.

But presumably you want to talk about them, which is relatively unrelated, to be honest, but go on. Okay. Well, they've got Best Four Court Lou of the Year Award category, and they've also got Best Coffee and Hot Beverages Outlet and Best Car Care and Lubricants Outlet as a... Wow. Best Lubricants. Is it car lubricants as well?

Or is it just car care and then general lubrication? It must be car lubricants. Otherwise, that is a very specialist award. There's an author called David Lawrence. I don't know if he's got anything to do with that website that you were talking about, Anna, but he is pretty much the UK expert on service stations. He's written a couple of books about them. And there was an interview with him where he said that he's racked up 11,000 miles of

motorway driving and eating breakfast in over 100 service stations for his research. And he said that he once spent Christmas in a travel lodge in a service station. Nice. And they asked him what that was like, and he said it was a mixture of being in the midst of everyone's Christmas travels and also very alone. Oh, but worth it for the fame and glory that he's subsequently got. He said that he once stayed in a service station in a motel in the UK, and the bed hadn't been changed since the previous occupants had celebrated their wedding night, and it still had confetti

in the bed. And goodness knows what else probably lubricants. Actually, the travel lodge in Toddington's, so the service station that this guy is named after used to do this good thing, which I think all service stationers should, where they had a power nap scheme. This is actually according to Alex Horn, who wrote this big article on service stations because he loves them, but you could rent a room for three hours. And I don't know why that's not absolutely standard, right?

When you get to a service station, so often you just have a half hour nap in your car. I think people don't like to do that because it might encourage, like what in Japan you call love hotels where people just rent by the hour and go to check. Yes, I think that makes sense. Was that Alex Horn from Taskmaster? Yes, he does a second string on his bow. He loves them. He loves them.

Actually, I found, I contacted him last night because I read that article too, and he was talking about one particularly great service station called Clacket Lane. It's in Clacket Lane, and he was saying that as well as, you know, fun things they have there, like they've got Roman pottery that was found at the site on display, so you can see that while you're there. But they've also got a palm reading machine. This is kind of like Zoltar, you know, you put your palm into the machine, your hand into the machine, and it tells you your future, and you get this little ticket that tells

you your future is going to be. Interestingly, Clacket Lane, as well, supposedly, is the best place on the M25 to hitchhike, and that's according to Hitchwiki, which I'd never heard of, another fantastic website. Dan, were you just, were you googling how to get picked up at most places? And you still want to go on Hitchwiki. Anyone fancy a power nap? One good place where you could get picked up at a service station was Watford Gap, back in the day when it was a place where lots of bands used to go, and apparently, according

to Francis Rossi of Status Quo, it used to be where groupies hung out because they knew that all the bands would stop at Watford Gap on their way to a gig or back from a gig, and so as well as going to the backstage door or going to the hotels or whatever, they used to hang out at Watford Gap services to see if they could pick up a rock star. So great. It feels like such a high stakes game, doesn't it, because you might pick up, you know, a Rolling Stone or something, or you might just spend your entire evening at the Watford Gap service.

On your 70th McDonald's, all you've met is van drivers so far. But yeah, they all used to talk about it, became sort of famous, and Ronnie Wood of Rolling Stones fame, obviously, said that apparently Jimi Hendrix thought that it was a nightclub, so it was called the Blue Boar back then, the cafe was called Blue Boar, and he said Hendrix thought it was a nightclub because all of his fellow musicians used to go on about stopping off at the Blue Boar, so he was so excited to finally get there and find that it sold bad coffee and had a big car park, and it doesn't even get very rated very highly in service station awards now, I learned from my favourite website,

sadly. Did you guys hear the song about Watford Gap? Yes. No. So this is by a folk singer called Roy Harper, so he's a very famous folk musician and he, there's a Led Zeppelin song called Hats Off to Roy Harper, he's a pretty big deal. He released a song called Watford Gap, which was so rude about the Watford Gap that its owners kind of called in the lawyers, and they, some people intervened and got it taken

off the album, so here are some of the lines from it, just about a mile from where the motorways all merge, you can view the national edifice, a monumental splurge, it's the lonesome travellers' rock-gut or bacteria's revenge, the great plastic spectacular descendant of Stonehenge, the countryside is ravaged like a syphilitic whore, yodelling up the canyon is the dirty old blue ball, and they didn't like it. Watford Gap, Watford Gap, it's a load of crap, you can go there for a two-hour nap, but you might get the clap, that's what I would love for. That's very strong.

The American pioneer of petrol stations was a man whose name was Sylvanas Freelove Bowser. Wow. That was his name. The head of Nintendo's called Bowser, isn't he? People send us that from time to time. Yeah. Bowser is also a character in Diddy Donways. Yeah, yeah.

In Mario Kart. In Mario Kart, yeah. So, who's the evil guy? I guess maybe some relation between Sylvanas Freelove and the head of Nintendo, I don't know. Well, here's a, we're also talking about, with this fact about electric cars, right? And so just as a connection to that, the Tesla, there's a lot of Easter eggs in the Tesla that sort of have been programmed either by Elon Musk or the nerds from within there.

And one of them is that while you're driving, if you rapidly press the autopilot button four times in a row, the street on your display will turn from the standard road into Rainbow Road from Mario Kart. Wait a minute. In Rainbow Road, my memory says that it's very easy to fall off that road, isn't it? Yes. Yeah. It's the most dangerous of tracks in the classic Mario Kart, yeah.

There was that thing which I was going to do as a fact on this show that if you say open butthole, that it opens the thing that you use to charge the car up, like the voice activation system. Oh, is that deliberate? That's an Easter egg. It's not some accident because it sounds like something, I don't know what. Like bolt hole, possibly. I don't know.

God, I don't know if I want Easter eggs in my car. You don't want to go, oh, maybe if you do three left turns in a row, the drive will be ejected or something. I can't think of anything. Well, here's another one. If you tap the corner of the top main monitor, the T, if you tap it three times, it turns into a touchscreen and you can start drawing with a colour palette so you can just start, you know, doing whatever drawings you want.

You have to do it as the passenger, obviously, this is not for the driver, and then you submit it afterwards to Tesla and they critique your drawing for you. Wow. Is that Elon Musk, personally? Wow. Is that what he does now? He just sits in a study critiquing people's drawings. It feels like that and he sends you 10 million doge coins for the best one or something.

I think the very first electric car was designed in 1839, so they didn't catch on at all and they weren't used publicly, but this guy called Moritz von Jacobi, who was a Russian engineer. So there had been around about the same time there was a boat that carried passengers that was electric powered and he built an electric car that he exhibited around Scotland and he just couldn't get people interested in it. So he, you know, people, I don't see any use to this, the only people who were interested were railway workers and they were afraid it was going to supplant the railway and so they smashed it up in his garage in the middle of the night and took 40 years before it took

off again. Wow. Yeah. Rough. So much what might have been stuff about this, it's obviously so nice to imagine, you know, where all the cars were electric driving me off. And then thanks to bloody cyclists such as myself, who claim we're so environmentally friendly these days, but we killed the electric car because it was the improvement of road

surfaces in the late 19th century by kind of cyclists pushing for improved road surfaces so they could go touring, which meant that people wanted to go on longer drives. And the one problem with electric cars back then was the same as now, which is that they didn't have a very big range. And so suddenly gasoline petrol cars took off because they could drive a long way over these newly surfaced roads. So cyclists got a lot to answer for actually. But then when they did know that they couldn't go very far and so they aimed the electric

cars directly at women. So in the 1910s and going into the 1920s, you would get these advertisements like for the Argo company. They advertised their electric vehicle as a woman's car that any man is proud to drive. And the idea was that women wouldn't want to go on long journeys. They would much rather kind of poodle around the city or whatever. And so we're more likely to buy these cars. That's so that's classic women.

They hate distance. They hate the notion. Can't take a brain to absorb those big numbers. Did anyone else did anyone else think when James said they the only way to use electric cars was to aim them at women that you literally were saying you put your foot down. That's another Easter egg. Yeah. OK, it is time for fact number two and that is Anna.

My fact this week is that from 1975 to 2004, it was illegal to buy the world's most popular collection of jazz music. And when I say jazz music, I mean sheet music. So jazz music that you play. So this is this thing called The Real Book. And I learned about it on a 99 percent invisible episode that I was pointed to by the browser. So I just want to point out if there's anyone left in the country who hasn't discovered the browser dot com.

It's an amazing site which curates great articles for you. God, I've been signed up to the bowser dot com, which is the details of people called bowser. It's not coming handy for 300 episodes. So they don't really want your type on there. It's sort of a highbrow thing. Anyway, the browser dot com pointed me towards The Real Book, which is the definitive book of jazz tunes for anyone who wants to play jazz, anyone who is a jazz musician out there,

I'm sure will know it. And this was made in 1974 and it was published and sold without any kind of copyright releases or any permissions or any royalties arranged or anything. It was just written out, printed off and then sold in sort of back alleyways and in people's bedrooms, student bedrooms and every jazz student has to have it. And it's basically all the jazz standards as they're called from the beginning of jazz from the 1920s and even before that you need if you want to entertain someone in the bar. It's amazing the story of how it came about as well.

It's sort of originated with the fact that radio stations needed to work out how to pay copyrights and royalties towards the composers of certain songs and they had a really hard time doing it. So they created this thing called the tune decks and they were index cards that on one side had the information about a particular song. So it would have your composer's name or any of the information that you would need for payment. And on the other side, they would have literally the sheet music, but like a section of the

song so that anyone who was playing the song could identify it via the lyrics or by literally the notes on the staves. And when you say playing, you mean like if you're a radio DJ, anyone who's putting the song on. So it's like, you'll hear the song and then you can skim through these cars and be like, oh yeah, that looks like the tune. So I can say this is Blah-dee-blah by So-and-So Publix. Exactly.

Does that mean a DJ would have to be able to read music to even that's what it sounded like? Yeah, it does sound like that. And so one of the reasons that they became quite popular was because musicians found them really useful for when they were going to gigs to be able to use them basically as cheat sheets so that they could look at it and fake their way through a popular song that they didn't necessarily know. And because it's jazz and free flowing, you can venture off the main theme, but it's

the essence of it. It gives you the basics and then from there you can kind of fake it. Yes. It gives you the chords and the kind of melody and the lyrics and as Dan says, you just riff off the back of that, which you do anyway. And then you said that it was legal in 2004 and that's because a company made a legal version where they got all the copyrights from people and stuff like that, right? Yes.

And lots of other publishers tried to publish actual books of jazz tunes, but this because it had evolved over 50, 60, 70 years, nothing could compete. So yeah, I think in the end it was Hal Leonard, music publishers, wasn't it, who got all the rights to all the songs, which must have been held. Yeah. I think the reason the reason other publishers couldn't compete was that they were trying to do it legally and I asked a friend of mine and my friend, Will, who is a jazz saxophonist, I asked him, have you heard of the real book?

And he said, of course I have. And he said, there are many editions and I own many editions and I, he said that legal editions Andy or the, I'm not saying I'm not dropping him, although I have an active on this podcast. What is it called? Will. Will. Yeah.

Will Gumbins. Yeah. Yeah. But he said that until the sixth edition, they didn't have quite enough of the standards for it to be, you know, all encompassing comprehensive. So apparently you want the sixth edition onwards if you're, if you're in the market. Oh. It's kind of hard to, because so many tunes in the whole point of jazz, I suppose, or

lots of the point of it is that there's lots of improvisation. It's kind of hard to know in the real book which bits have come from who. So you know, if someone's got a brilliant doobadoo doobadoo moment and they play that on the night. Does that... That's Miles Dovers, I think, isn't it? I'm mistaken. Yeah, that's right.

Yeah. You know, as in who kind of owns that is a really vexed question. They had jazz diplomacy, of course. The idea being that America would send jazz musicians out to countries that were threatened by communism and the jazz musicians would make people think that America's a great place because it has this kind of subversive music. And this was started by a congressman called Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., who was an African-American congressman who represented Harlem, but it wasn't really his idea.

It was his wife's idea. His wife was called Hazel Scott and she was a jazz pianist and she was amazing. She was the first black American to host her own TV show, The Hazel Scott Show. She would never play in a place where there was any segregation between black and white people. She would turn up and then if there was any segregation she'd walk away and cause riots a lot of the time because she wouldn't play. But she was eventually brought down because people thought she was a communist.

The interesting thing or another interesting thing about her is that her grandson, Adam C. Powell IV, currently runs a company that's trying to find greener ways to find rare earth metals for electric cars. So we've come a full circle to the electric car stuff. This is the Powell family podcast. There was a thing in the First World War called this was, I guess, this was not jazz diplomacy. In fact, it was the opposite. It was jazz war because there was a regiment called the Harlem Hellfighters.

That was their nickname and they were the 369th U.S. infantry, largely recruited from Harlem. And so it had a lot of musicians in it, the regiment. And as they arrived in France, they played jazz and people in France, maybe some people in Paris had heard jazz before, but people in, you know, 1917 in rural France had not heard jazz. As they arrived, they played a jazz version of the Marseillais and it blew people's minds. And there was a kind of mini craze which got called ragtimeitis. As a result of it, people hadn't had syncopated rhythms before playing off the beat.

This is insane. In World War II, there was also a bit of jazz war waged by Britain who launched a jazz radio station in Germany, which I had never read about. But this was basically a surrogateous way to poison the minds of Germans against the Nazis. And it involves setting up a jazz station and the announcer on it was a woman called Agnes Bernel. She was actually a German expat. She'd fled Nazi Germany and landed in Britain and they said, can you be a DJ on a fake jazz

radio station? And through you will get loads of secret messages out there to basically to plant chaos. For instance, she commiserated at one point with a specific German U-boat captain saying, you must be so hard for him because he hasn't been on leave for two years, but congratulations on the birth of his son. That's why I've just given birth to a son. And this guy. So she was pregnant for over two years.

That's amazing. Very long gestation period. I've just understood the implication. Wow. I'm naive. He was captaining a boat off the coast of Scotland and he went to the coast and surrendered and said, saw this, my wife just shagged someone else. I'm out.

Surrendered that boat. So it worked. There was another thing that she was reminiscing about on the show I listened to her on, which was that she announced on this radio station that Allied saboteurs in SS uniforms had been dropped in a particular region. And so SS cars went all over this region, arresting each other. Whenever they saw anyone in SS, they arrested each other. That's a great idea.

Have you guys heard of Ra-san Roland Kirk? No. I think he might be my favorite jazz player ever. I only found him in the course of researching this, but he was blind from a very young age. And in spite of that, he not only mastered saxophone, he managed to master playing three saxophones at the same time. Hang on. Okay.

How much orificit is he? Incredible. I could imagine blowing it through your nose and through your mouth, but he's not blowing through his ears or his anus, is he? He wasn't. He was not. He had three saxophones around his neck, and he could fit all three into his mouth, stretched out at the same time.

Okay. For the listeners, Andy was stretching his mouth out there by putting his index fingers into the sides of his mouth and pulling them sideways. Yeah. Come on. I've been a good sound. Did it work? It sounds all right.

Does it? Really? Yeah. But he doesn't have enough hands. Yeah. I was going to say, it's not just mouths that you need to play saxophone. Okay. This is where it gets interesting.

He had six hands. He uses his two hands on two sets of keys and lets the third saxophone go for the moment, but he's always shifting hands between the saxes. It's better than I've made it sound. He could also play the flute with his mouth while playing the recorder with his nose. He was unbelievably talented. That's very cool. I did a quick search into other jazz books that are out there that we might not have

heard of, and it led me to discover a book that was published by one of the great American jazz musicians, Charles Mingus, who I actually grew up listening to. He's an extraordinary musician. It turns out that after his gigs, he used to sell a self-published book. It was a pamphlet, which he called a catalog, cat hyphen a log. It was a book that was toilet training for your cat, which he was obsessed by. He had a cat called Nightlife, who he claims he took three to four weeks to train, to sit on a toilet, and the whole pamphlet is his step-by-step guide for how you can make this

happen. It starts with you've got to teach them to go to a kitty litter to begin with, slowly inch that box towards the bathroom. Once you've reached the bathroom and they feel comfortable going there, put the box on top of the toilet, then cut a hole in the bottom. This is over a period of week. Cut a hole at the bottom of the cardboard, then gradually cut the box down, so it's just a flat bit of paper, and eventually you'll find, he said, you'll be hearing in the night

just flushing noises from the toilet as your cat has taken itself to the toilet. Sorry, the cat flushes it afterwards. This is Nightlife apparently does this. So is this Charlie Mingus' cat? Charles Mingus' cat? Charles Mingus, as well as sustaining the incredible jazz career he did, was house trainer cat. I can't believe that.

I know. It's extraordinary. And honestly, after gigs, this is what he would sell. This was like his big push. He printed ads up where he was doing mail order so that you could buy these pamphlets. So there is another jazz book, which is so weird, called A Cat A Log, which this might have been a response to because it was by Cab Calloway. In 1938, he published Cab Calloway's Cat A Log, A Hepster's Dictionary, which was the

first dictionary written by an African American, and it was the Jive Language Reference Book of the New York Public Library. So if you went to the library and you wanted to know about Jive Talk, this is the book you'd get. And the cat there is like a hep cat, I guess, right? Exactly. Yeah. So is it possible Charlie Mingus was referring nodding to that?

In my reading, I didn't see any of that as a pun reference. Awful if you mistakenly got the wrong one. You'll never train that cat, but it will speak very good Jive. So this fact was about the black market, so selling music on the black market. So I had to look at some of the black market stuff. What do you reckon is the most expensive of your bodily organs on the black market? My eyeballs. Oh, Cognia's $30,000 on the black market about.

This is according to the website Ranker, which has got quite a few. It does have quite a lot of good sources in this list. So I'll say a kidney. Oh, got it in one, Andy. I can't believe it. Yeah, kidney. So apparently, if you want to buy a kidney on the black market, it's going to cost you approximately $200,000.

And they sourced for that a book called Cultural Anthropology by William Haveland, which came out in 2010. There might be quite a bit more than that now. But compared to $200,000 for your kidneys, about $157,000 for your liver, that's what you said, Anna, wasn't it? So probably second. Your heart, apparently an illegally obtained heart is only worth about $119,000. And I think the reason for that is you need to have such a specialist to put your heart

in. Really, if you're in a situation where you need a new heart, you're probably in a legit hospital. So there's not many people on the street corner going, you know, anyone got a heart. Oh, it's kidneys. You can just ram it in, can't you? That's one way. When you say street corners, is that like, I feel like it's more, that's more high-end

selling, right? Because I imagine I've got a kidney or I've got a bootleg copy of, you know, grown-ups to, you know, those are the things I'd expect on a street corner. I don't think it's just, it's probably, it is, I mean, apart from anything else, if you're giving someone a kidney, it has to be kept in a very sterile, very cold environment. It can't be, you can't open up your, your coat and on the inside lining, it's just got a load of organs just hanging off it. That's not going to work out.

Thanks for a lovely coat, though. Sounds like something Lady Gargo would wear. OK, it is time for fact number three, and that is James. OK, my fact this week is that the world's longest water slide is almost 20 times longer than the world's shortest river. Insane. Great. Which one is more surprising?

What, what are the lengths? And I'll decide which one I'm more surprised by, the shortness of the river or the length of the water slide. OK, well, the river, which we might get onto a bit later because it's a bit controversial, the river is 201 feet or 61 meters long. And the water slide is 1111 meters, so that's over a kilometer long, 3,645 feet. So cool. It's amazing.

I think the water slide is there is a more stunning one to go over a kilometer in a water slide. And this is in Penang, which is in Malaysia, in northern Malaysia. And it was recently featured on the Guinness World Records YouTube channel, where they showed a video of someone going all the way down this, this water slide. And like I say, it's four minutes long. And to get to this water slide, you have to go on a cable car chairlift. You can't just walk up the stairs or anything like you would in a normal water park.

It's one of those where you're in like a little rubber ring and you go down, down the the best, the best kind. Yeah. Relaxing, but also thrilling, I think. Yeah. Oh, that's controversial stain. No, because because it's it is better because the water doesn't, it doesn't jet up, up you, you know, in the same way.

Yeah. So I think some people like that. I must say. Yeah. OK. Yeah. Tickles like kidneys. But, um, yeah, some people just like the, you know, the simplicity of just sitting down

and you're swimming cosy and going straight down on your bum. It's very true. It's very true. You've got no protection. The ring adds a little, you know, takes away some of the risk factor. And that's what I like about it. I think also a ring might sometimes it makes you go further up the edge and makes it feel a bit scarier if you're going fast.

It is scarier. I agree. If you take a corner too hard, you risk flying out of the whole thing. That's happened to me a couple of times. Really? Really? Yeah. And it's petrifying.

You've come out. Well, I sort of went a bit over the lip on a corner and that really scared me to never, really push it on a water slide ever again. What's amazing, though, about this water slide is that... I'm just imagining how lame you all are at a water park. I had a terrifying experience when I went quite far up the wall and you're going, oh, I'd rather do this sort of in a car so that I'm not touching anything. I always keep my hands on the side to slow me down.

And I have to push myself along because the water's not touching me. It's a Shinsuke behind me, probably. I'm doing a bomb shape. Bloody rocket on the back of it. Visually, this is an amazing water slide. The first thing to say about it is it's a physical water slide. So the previous record for the longest water slide was in Vernon, New Jersey. And that was an inflatable water slide, which is what I immediately pictured when you sent this fact, James.

But this goes through this beautiful dense forest and it's open top and you're just, you know, you're going through trees and it's absolutely amazing. Basically, if you flip out of that, Dan, you're living with the squirrels for quite a few years before they find you again, aren't you? That's how Tarzan started, isn't it? So is it a straight line? It's not winding around a hundred metres? No, very much winding. Yeah, you end up quite close to where you began. Good to know.

And it has leisurely bits in it as well, where it sort of goes on a bit more of a flat and you just, you know, you just go along quite nicely pushed by the stream. Now that sounds interesting to me. That's Andy's point. Andy's reading Pride and Prejudice on the way down. His waterproof copy. I've never really sort of looked into or thought about water slides at all before, but they're amazing.

They, you know, I really like the pioneer of water sliding, Dick Krull. One of them. Oh, his sound fun. I'd go on Dick Krull's water slide. It sounds like an original name for Dick Dastardly, doesn't it? Yes. He dug a five acre lake, which he was going to be using for bass fishing. Bass the fish.

Obviously. Not the maker better. And then he had all this dirt and he shaped the dirt into this massive great ramp, 350 feet long, which was, was a waterfall. And then he realized it could be a recreational water slide. And that was supposedly the world's first, but actually, I think there, I think there was some. Well, that was 71.

Okay. Yeah. Cause there was another guy who dug his own lake with similar results called Bob Byers and he created Lake Dolores. He called it. It was named after his wife. And this is a water park, a recreational water park that he created just for his family. This is in the late fifties that he did this.

So he made this lake in a series of pools and channels and people would drive past it and noticed it and rocked up and would be like, Hey, can I have a go on in this fun recreational lake you've created? And so then, yeah, he added eight hundred and fifty foot slides. And he also added, which doesn't seem to exist anymore, two standing slides. And they're really cool photos of doing this. So they're kind of in a V shape. So you stand up and your feet are just squashed into the little bottom of the V and you shoot

down very fast. I think they go at like a 60 degree slope. So really steep. And you're on a little, it looks like you're on a little, you know, those floats. You'd have a pool before you could swim standing on one of those. What do you mean before? Whether you can swim or not. Yeah, they are.

Of course. Your mum makes you bring them into the office every day in case it rains. Yeah, it sounds amazing. And then it's shut down. Did you, did you see the sort of like original, original water slides? The ones that didn't have water on them? You spotted those slides, are they? Yeah, there were slides, but you ended up in the water.

They got the ending right, but they didn't get the initial bit. Well, actually, you didn't even really end up in the water. Basically what it was is in New Zealand as part of the 1906 international exhibition, they had this wonderland and they created these slides where you went down in boats. And once you got to the bottom, you traveled, you know, you were basically skimming across the water in a boat as you got to the bottom. And that got developed later in 1923 to Herbert Selner, who lived in America, who created it, but with a sort of sled.

So when you went down on the sled, you would eventually topple into the water, but it got you about 100 feet of skimming across the water once you'd reached the bottom. And those were the kind of precursors before they realized, oh, let's just put water in and lose the sled. Very cool. I think, yeah, they are cool. There was one of those in Coney Island as well. We talked about Coney Island the other week.

There was one that was in Coney Island in 1895. But this one in the international exhibition in 1906, it went into Lake Victoria in Christchurch was the place it ended up. And it was this exhibition was so popular that 1,967,682 people visited it at a time when the whole population of New Zealand was 975,000. So more than twice as many people went to this as lived in the whole country. And then this slide got bought out and got taken to Wellington. And they had it there for a few years and eventually it got taken down.

But the position where it was in Wellington is where Peter Jackson's studio is at today. Oh, really? Yeah. So it's seen a lot over the years that place. Yeah. Was that the one which this guy called Arthur Guinness went down? I think there was a newspaper report from 1906. And he was the Speaker of the House of Representatives at the time.

And the only reason it's funny is if you Google Arthur Guinness, the Speaker of the House of Representatives of New Zealand in 1906, and he's got a huge white wig on. I'm not sure that he wore this when he was going down the slide, but his white wig was one of those really elaborate waxed mustaches, huge beard. And the newspaper report said he turned up. And the next thing all spectators knew was there was a tall black hat among a lot of girls being hauled up in the carriage.

And then as it shot down the slope, he had his silk hat pulled over his ears and a hard point of order look in his eye, which I'm not sure how that goes. But as they splashed into the water, somebody shouted, point of order. Classic. That's a funny joke. Great.

Yeah. Classic satire. Yeah. That's really good. The very start of this section, dear listener, you might remember, was that the longest water slide is 20 times longer than the world's shortest river. So I should quickly tell you about the world's shortest river. It is the Roe River, but it's extremely controversial.

Has it said a few out of date things? It's been cancelled. This was something I read in an article on the website, Condé Nest, and it was written by a Japanese champion in America, Ken Jennings. And it was basically the argument between two rivers in America, the Roe River and the D River, about which was the shortest. So the Guinness Book of Records had always said that the D River was the shortest.

But then one day in 1987, there was a teacher called Mrs. Suzie Nardlinger. And she got her fifth grade class to measure this little kind of water near their school and work out how long it was. And they realized that it was shorter than this so-called world's shortest river. But it didn't have a name, so it couldn't be in the Guinness Book of Records. And so they wrote to the U.S. Board on geographical names, and they got them to give it a name, which was the Roe River. And then the Guinness Book of Records put that as their world's shortest river.

Now, the people who lived near the D River were furious, because they'd lost their records of these bloody school kids. And this was in Lincoln City. And the Chamber of Commerce in Lincoln City said that this Roe River was nothing more than a drainage ditch surveyed for a school project. One man's drainage ditch is another man's noble river. I think that's one way of looking at it. Mrs. Nardlinger, when she was told this, said that the D River

was nothing more than an ocean water backup. And so there was this massive argument between these two people about which was the shortest and whether they were even real rivers or they were just effluent pipes or bits of the ocean coming in or whatever. And eventually Guinness just said, you know what? Let's not do this record anymore. So if you get a Guinness Book of Records now, it's not in there anymore. So cowardly if they just stuck to their guns.

I mean, it was also a crazy record to have, isn't it? Because they're both sides are saying to each other, oh, yours is rubbish and tiny. Yeah, that's kind of the point. It's not tiny enough. I think I found a water slide actually that would suit both you, Andy and you, Anna. It's got the danger and the leisure at the same time. And this is in the Bahamas.

And so what it is is you it's called the serpent water slide at the Atlantis resort. And you go down and it's a normal water slide. But then, Andy, you come out into a sort of what takes about two minutes to get across leisurely bit where you're just in your rubber ring and you're going very nicely to the end. Where the danger bit comes in is when you're having that leisurely bit in the slide, you are in the middle of a giant aquarium with sharks on either side of you. Yeah, it looks amazing. My friend's been on that one, actually, but weirdly got a tutoring job with a family.

And then after tutoring them, this is years ago, realized they were incredibly rich and got taken for two weeks in the Bahamas with them and said it was so fantastic. That's so funny. I thought you were going to say that they were tutoring in the Bahamas and they were so incredibly rich they took them to a water park. I mean, we can only dream one day we'll be able to afford a thought park. Right at the very top of this fact, Dan, you said that the previous record holder of the longest slide was in New Jersey. It was in a place called Action Park.

And Action Park is more famous on the Internet for having this incredible water slide, which had a loop-the-loop at the bottom, which was only open for one month in 1985. Mad. It is incredible. Basically, what happens is you go down, you get enough speed and you fly around the loop-the-loop and you've got enough speed that you can stay on the edge of the loop-the-loop and then you come out to the end. The Central Fugal Force sort of holds you to the edge of the loop-the-loop.

But the problem is if you're like Andy and you kind of, or me, I should say, because I said this earlier, you kind of put your hands on it to slow yourself down, right? If you did that, you don't have enough speed to get round the loop-the-loop. And so one thing that can happen is if you get halfway and you run out of speed, you just smack your head down because gravity takes over. Another thing is you could get halfway up and then come right the way back down again to the very, very bottom and then there's no way out of the slide because you literally can't get out. And so they had-

And Tyshinski's coming up right behind you. But you've got to send people. You've got to send people down to shove you along. Well, eventually, instead of that solution, they built a hatch at the bottom to let people out if they got stuck. So that's, I've been on one that has the same thing. My favourite waterslide I've ever been on is in the Gold Coast and if you do live in Australia and you haven't been to it, you've got to.

And it's basically that. It's incredible. I think it's a place called Wet and Wild. And you stand up really high at the top. So you start super high and you're standing on a trap door. And then, you know, they do a lot of, Oh, are you ready? Oh, are we going to go yet?

And then the trap door suddenly vanishes. And so you plummet down. So you drop vertically really fast for ages. And then you do the loop-the-loop, which is so awesome. So a woman did get stuck in it because I remember seeing when I was going to go on it, I saw this escape hatch in this loop. And I was like, I wonder if that's ever been used. And there was indeed a woman who got stuck in it a few years ago.

So you break the hatch from inside or do they have to have someone? You do. So she said she realised she was stuck and she thought, my God, is someone going to come down after me? I'd better clutch at this escape hatch with my hand and pull yourself out. Well, the one in New Jersey anyway, there was an interview on deadspin.com with one of the people who worked there. And they said that the main problem was that at the very bottom of the loop-the-loop,

a load of kind of sand and dirt and stuff would kind of accumulate and they wouldn't be able to get rid of it. And so as you went down, as soon as you got to the bottom of the loop-the-loop, it would just drag against your back and just basically take all the skin off the bottom of your back before you came out. So that's why it's not there anymore. Jesus. They are painful.

It's worth it because they're great, but almost all good water slides, you end up with some serious, crazy things, don't you? Not that painful. Up to the end without your back. Okay, it is time for fact number four, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that scientists in the South Pole are starting to speak with an Antarctic accent. This is an interesting thing that was studied by the University of Munich. And the idea was they wanted to see what effect being isolated in a place like Antarctica would have on a communal accent.

And the scientists at this university decided that they were going to do a case study where they took 11 members of the bases there. And they got them to sit down and say 28 different words into a recorder before their departure. Into a recorder. Is this the same recorder that was up that guy's nose? Yeah, sorry, they were recording their voices. Yeah, there was eight Brits, it was one American, it was a German and someone from Iceland. And then every six weeks for their entire stay, they would get them to do a further recording of the same 28 words. And they noticed as they were going along that their accents were all converging towards the same vowel sounds.

For example, if they came in saying food, they all started saying food. Now, that doesn't sound too different. It's very tiny. But what it is is the back of the throat is being used for the first food that I'm saying there, food. And then food is the front of my mouth using it. And they all merged to this one same vowel sound. Now, it's a very small study. And there's a great video, by the way, to watch about it on the half as interesting website on YouTube.

Do check it out. It's a real proper explanation of it. And they show you all the sounds. But they noticed that an Antarctic accent was emerging as a result. That's very cool. But such a shame that they didn't do what I definitely would have done and said, should we just really screw with these guys and turn up six weeks later going food. Wow.

Isn't very cool or is it very cool? Or is it very cool? Cue. Yes, vowel fronting. That does seem to be what happens to the sounds that we make over time. And there's this thing called goose fronting. Did you guys, have you read about this? It's this really cool linguistic thing that was defined in 1983.

And it basically uses goose as the example word. So exactly as Dan says, we tend to start with words that have our tongue high up and closer to the back of our mouth. And it makes a more rounded sound. And over time, the tongue comes forward and it makes a slightly more sort of sounds a bit more nasal sound. Goose used to be said in a more sonorous rounded way. And it's increasingly being said like goose, goose, goose. In some places it's almost indistinguishable from geese apparently. And we don't know why this is happening.

It's happening all around the world goose fronting. Apparently especially in southern British English, I read. Yes. I never noticed that you guys said the word goose different the way I say the word goose. Goose. How often have you heard us say goose though? It's rare for me to say goose. I can imagine the queen would say goose, goose.

Goose, goose, goose. Get that goose off my swan. There was another aspect of this Antarctic study, which is, I mean, this is again in the runs of theory now, but it was a theory that people might develop accents faster if survival is more uncertain or more at risk. So it helps if you can understand what people are saying bluntly and it might accelerate the process if there is more life and death situations. Really? I think over a long period of time though, it's not like if you get stuck in a, you know, water slide, you're not going to suddenly start talking with a Geordie accent or something.

We want to help, but we can't understand you anymore. You've been in there so long. If I went to a water park in Newcastle and I was stuck in there, I might, in my panic, try. I think that might make it much less likely that you're rescued, doesn't it? Or can you like, and then deck, let me out of here. Immediately. Who's this dickhead? Leave him in there.

That is cool. So the idea is that these scientists in the Antarctic, if one of them wakes up and is unintelligible to the others, then they won't be able to survive. We've run out of food. What's he saying? We've run out of food. Don't get it, mate. We've run out of what? And there was this, one of these linguists was Jonathan Harrington from the University of Munich.

And he said specifically, it might be if people go to Mars, for instance, and you have a group of people who have all gone to Mars that by the time they come back or that we can talk to them, they might all have a different Mars accent. So cool. Such a cool idea. Yeah, that's completely useless. Imagine if they go to Mars, gather all this vital scientific data, bring it back, and we've got no idea what they're trying to tell us. There is a thing where you basically, the longer that the Queen is around, the more you speak like the Queen. If you are a naked mole rat, this is a recent study where they looked at colonies of naked mole rats and naked mole rats, they're mammals,

but they act a bit like bees and ants and stuff. And they have a Queen who's in charge of all the mating and then all the workers and stuff like that. But they found that the dialects of all these naked mole rats, all the little chirps and stuff, they make are very similar to what the Queen makes. And then as soon as the Queen dies, everyone sort of goes crazy and does all sorts of weird accents and stuff like that. And then when they get a new Queen, they all sort of go back towards whatever that new Queen's accent is like. Right. Isn't that cool? So we'd all be kind of like walking around London going, how do you do it?

How do you do it? How do you do it? And then as soon as, you know, hopefully very long in the future, the Queen dies, we'd all be going. It's falling. Hunts and trees. Oh, that is monstrous carbuncle. Well, if you were a naked mole rat, then that would be the perfect moment to infiltrate the pack of another group of naked mole rats, because accents are incredibly important to them to the point where if you have a different accent,

let's say you've got 300 members of a single colony of mole rats naked mole rats living with each other and a random mole rat from a different colony comes in and wants to hang out. They hear its chirping accent. And if it's different, they'll kill it. They'll just kill it. It's their accents absolutely define who they are as a group. And that's been studied quite a lot recently because there are other animals that speak with accents, but usually they're either water based or they're constantly moving around like primates.

And it's really hard to track and really study, but they have been studying naked mole rats. And yeah, they are just vicious. They also do that in Newcastle, Andy, by the way, just when we're touring there later this year. Just make sure wherever you go, you always do your Geordie accent. You won't be able to tell me from born and bred Geordie quite the time we get there. It'll be amazing. Oh, here's a weird thing. Okay, so if I say to you, ants don't sleep in a French accent.

Oh, that was that French. That was French. Yeah. Can you do it again? Ants don't sleep. I got it. Yeah. It's so clearly a French accent.

I can't believe you need it. Yeah. Unbelievable. Do you believe me when I say that? The ants don't sleep. Yeah. Sleep. Okay.

I know, but I need because we did it on the podcast. They, they work 24. I know that's not the point you're trying to make right now. But yeah, Some of them might sleep. I guess if some of them work 24 hours, but other ones might sleep. Oh yeah. They might be speeches.

I believe you. But perhaps it's because we've been working together for 10 years. So the, the accent is relevant here because there was a study by a couple of psychologists about whether people trust more or less information that they hear in a foreign accent or in their own native accent. And rather depressingly, people trust factual statements less if they hear them in a foreign accent. Really?

So does that mean people who listen to this podcast who aren't in the UK are going to less believe our facts than people in the UK or not? Americans just think we're a podcast of like made up, imaginative. And does it also mean that people in the North trust me better than they trust the rest of you? Maybe. Yeah. People and no one trusts them.

Is that? I've got. It's only rightfully so. Very rare case where they're totally justified. Wow. We actually had the naked mole rat thing for a while in English society, the death by accent thing. So in the 14th century, you could be asked how you pronounced bread and cheese and beheaded

if you did it wrong, specifically if you said it with a Flemish accent. So, and bizarrely then, so that was 14th century. And then in the 16th century in Friesland, anyone who pronounced bread and cheese with a French accent was beheaded. And this is all about people being kind of racist back then. Still, it was ever thus. And this was in the 14th century and the peasants revolt and the Flemish were associated with being sort of merchants.

And, you know, they came from that part of the world that was doing quite well and the peasants weren't doing well. And so these mobs were got someone to say, say bread and cheese. And if they heard a hint of Flemish, so a hint of like, I think it's brought and caused who knows how they were said 700 years ago. Then you got your head off. Wow. And that's a shibboleth, right?

Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. It's like a shibbolish. Shibbolish. Shit. I'm having beheaded. There was a thing you were saying before, Andy, about how, you know, you have to change an

accent in order for people to understand for important moments, right? It's not the same scenario, but in the business world, a lot of companies have been called out because they've been doing things that are called accent neutralization classes. And particularly in America and Tennessee at a nuclear lab, there was a course which was effectively a southern accent reduction where they got all of the most southern sounding employees together and said, we're going to teach you to soften your accent so that people can understand you. I reckon if I was at a nuclear lab and anyone called it new, nuclear, that's what people

say, isn't it? Nuclear instead of nuclear. I think I just wouldn't do what they said. So they said, oh my God, the nuclear reactor is about to blow. You need to turn this down. I'd be like, sorry, what reactor? Handing them a pamphlet to the accent neutralization classes. Do you know the language that is most similar genetically to English?

This is kind of, we'll come back to accents. This will weave back around. I would have said like German or Dutch maybe. That's pretty close. This is Frisian. So this is the closest language to old English, we believe. So basically it's genetically close because we're mostly descended from Frisian. And so Frisian is from like north of the Netherlands.

And one of the really cool things about it is that if you take an English sentence, which is very full of old English words, so you don't have all of that Ponzi Romance language stuff that came in with the French, then it suddenly can sound really similar to this quite obscure language. So bread, butter and green cheese is good English and good Frisian is a sentence in English. And in Frisian, I can't say it very well. But in Frisian it is bread, butter and green cheese is good Ingelsk and good Frisian. And sorry if you're a Frisian speaker.

Wow. I mean, Anna, that just sounded like you after you've had a few drinks. I make so much sense to the Dutch though. OK, that's it. That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast, we can all be found on our Twitter accounts.

I'm on at Shriverland, James. At James Harkin. Andy. At Andrew Hunter M. And Anna. You can email podcast at qi.com. Yep, where you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing or our website, no such thing as a fish.com.

You can check out all of our previous episodes up there. Also, we're going back on the road. We've got a tour. Go check out the dates and see if we're coming to a town near you. Otherwise, we'll see you again next week with another episode. Goodbye. I've just realized that I had one other thing. Ants do sleep.

Sorry, I should have mentioned it. Really? Should I mention it? I don't believe you. I do not believe you. Oh, no. No. No.

No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No.

No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No.