No Such Thing as The Long Kiss Good Brie is the 422nd episode of No Such Thing As A Fish, the 6th episode of the ninth year, and the 15th episode of 2022.
Description[]
In our Easter Special Compilation, James, Anna, Andrew and Dan send lawbreaking emails, potentially libel the Royal Family, get a warm welcome in Dublin and are hounded out of Newcastle.
Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes.
Facts[]
- Someone died within the last 10 years of a brain-eating amoeba that they caught from a potted plant. Except, don’t worry, it's not a true amoeba—it's a shape-shifting amoeboflagellate excavate. (Harkin)
- A woman called Avril Shepherd has created a website listing every weird festival in Britain, and she's been going to as many of these as she can for the past 10-11 years in order to personally review them. For instance, in February, there's a Rhubarb Festival in Wakefield where you can get a tour of the forcing sheds. Then in March, there's the Slaithwaite Moonraking Festival, where the locals try to take the moon out of the lake. In 2013, Shepherd turned up to the Moonraking Festival but there was no one there because they'd all gone to the Rhubarb Festival. (Ptaszynski)
- The Texas Mosquito Festival has a mascot named Willie Manchew. (Murray)
- In 1988, a woman called Michelle Anderson infiltrated the Miss California competition as a spy in order to make a feminist statement. For many months, she dieted, trained, tanned, and feigned the beliefs of beauty pageant competitors, and wound up making it all the way to the final round of the competition. Then seconds before the winner was announced, she unfurled from her cleavage a silk banner that read 'pageants hurt all women' and started waving it around before being wrestled off stage. (Murray)
- Yūichirō Miura is a Japanese sportsman who became the oldest person in the world to climb Mt. Everest at age 70. Five years after that at age 75, he did it again—and he's done it again at age 80, 85, and 90. (Murray)
- The Menai Strait—which confusingly is not a straight strait but quite wiggly—connects the island of Anglesey and the mainland of Wales. At its narrowest point it's only about 200m wide, which historically forced Welsh drovers to swim their cattle and pigs across. (Ptaszynski)
- The record for the most unread emails—4,294,967,257—belongs to a guy called Joey Manassala in America. (Harkin)
- Research suggests that if you have a lot of unread emails in your inbox you might be a more well-adjusted person because you do things based on your own needs rather than always doing what other people want you to do. (Harkin)
- In the 1951 election in which Winston Churchill was elected Prime Minister, the Labour Government got more votes than any other winning or losing party in any election before it and until 1992—and they still lost the election. The Torries won. (Ptaszynski)
- The first parody I found of Conan Doyle was an article in a newspaper in Portsmouth by someone called Donan Coyle in 1888. Very early in Conan Doyle’s time, he had written an article called, ‘On the Geographical Distribution of British Intellect.’ He had developed a theory that people in the South were adept at poetry, music, and art, and that people in the North were really good at science, theology, and engineering. …Really he was just raving about the South and throwing the North a bit of a bone. (Harkin)
- Japanese swimmer, Mieko Nagaoka, has retired at age 106 after a 25-year-long swimming career in which she set 18 world records…and she only started swimming in her early 80’s. (Ptaszynski)
- There was a sort-of famous actor called Chris Robinson who played Dr. Rick Webber on the American soap opera General Hospital, and he invested around $100,000 in beanie babies—which was basically all of his kids’ college money—and he lost every penny. But on the plus side, he now has 20,000 beanie babies. (Harkin)
- Kiddly Wink bars were started by a man called Kiddly Wink—Mr. Kiddly Wink. Also the singer Meat Loaf—first name Meat, second name Loaf. He’s Mr. Loaf. (Schreiber)
- The name “porter”, as in the drink, does originally come from it being a drink for porters. (Ptaszynski)
- It’s estimated that in the 18th century a manual worker would get about 2,000 calories a day that they needed in their working life from beer. (Ptaszynski)
- The initiation ritual for when someone became a porter was to drop the badge of office into a mug of strong ale, and you had to extract it from the mug with your teeth without spilling any. (Ptaszynski)
- In 2012, scientists at the University of Manchester made a magic carpet. (Murray)
- In 1974, nunchucks were banned in New York. The ban lasted more than 40 years, and it was struck down in 2018 by one guy—one nunchuck nut—called James Maloney who loved his nunchucks. He’d been arrested in 1981 for doing a public demonstration and so he went to court and argued how crap they are as a weapon. The judge agreed and lifted the ban. (Murray)
- The Japanese have a saying: “You must never forget your duty [to your neighbor] or your fundoshi.” According to one older Japanese gentleman: “If you don’t wear your fundoshi, everyone can see your willy!” (Ptaszynski)
- In 2018, a guy called Steve Robertson bought a house with the tenant still living on the property. The tenant moved out in 2019 and Steve tried to claim $5,166 from the old tenant, claiming that the tenant had moved a 10-ton rock onto the property since Steve bought the house. The tenant denied doing so and even produced a photo from 2016 clearly showing the massive rock was already on the property. (Schreiber)
- In 2018, there was a court case in which the jury had the read all 218 pages of a book called Behind The Artichokes. The judge said it was believed that this was the first time since Lady Chatterley’s Lover that a jury has been asked to read an entire book. The case centers around a massive row between three sisters, one of which is the author of the book. (Ptaszynski)
- In 2003, a Nobel Prize was awarded to Peter Lauterbur and Peter Mansfield for essentially developing MRI technology—but there’s a guy called Raymond Demadian who claims he really invented the technology so he should have been awarded the Nobel Prize. The Nobel committee disagreed and so Raymond took out several full page ads which cost him hundreds of thousands of dollars in the New York Times, the Washington Post… angrily proclaiming how he was wronged. (Ptaszynski)
- Walter Koenig, a senior scientist of Cornell Lab of Ornithology, suggests a simple three-point plan for dealing with damage caused by woodpeckers: move out of your house, bulldoze it, then rebuild it using stucco. (Schreiber)
- The record for the most pairs of underpants anyone has ever worn all at once is 302. In 2012, a guy called Gary Craig broke his own record of 211. (Murray)
- The record for the most number of socks anyone has ever worn on one foot all at once is 180. (Schreiber)
- The first Miss World competition happened by accident at The Festival of Britain in 1951. A guy called Eric Morley wanted to add something more to the festival so he added a bikini contest. It was only supposed to be a local event, but there were so many foreigners who entered the contest, they decided it was a global event. The winner was a woman from Sweden, Kiki Haakonson, who was the first person ever to be crowned the winner of an event while wearing a bikini. Meanwhile, Eric Morley went on to create Strictly Come Dancing. (Schreiber)
- The 1951 Festival of Britain also had a cinema called the Telly Cinema where they only hired red-headed usherettes because they thought redheads would look best in the green uniforms. (Harkin)
- The emblem of the 1951 Festival of Britain was a red, white, and blue image of Britannia’s head over the top of a compass—and this emblem was everywhere. It was on cups, flower beds, pub signs, you name it. There were also 604 gallstones that had been removed from a single patient, that were then colored, arranged in the shape of them emblem, and then displayed at the festival. (Harkin)
- Gilbert and Sullivan were doing a show called Gondoliers where part of the preliminary cost of doing the show was the carpet that had to be laid at the front of the theatre, which the theatre then charged Gilbert and Sullivan for. This caused such an argument between the two—Gilbert was outraged to have received the bill and Sullivan didn’t care about the charge—that it caused them to split up. (Schreiber)
- There’s a whole series of detective books written by Avery Ames which are all cheese shop mysteries. Titles include: To Brie or Not to Brie, Lost and Fondue, For Cheddar or Worse, As Gouda As Dead, and The Long Quiche Goodbye. (Schreiber)