Little Fish: This Is A Song

No Such Thing As A Fish

In this episode of Little Fish, the hosts present a series of listener-submitted trivia facts ranging from linguistic oddities to historical

Key takeaways

Egypt is constructing a new capital city that has struggled to find a permanent name beyond 'the new capital'.
The town of Buttsville, New Jersey, was named by Michael Robert Butts in honor of his son L.L. Butts.

Main topics

Egypt's new capital naming
Vampires as economic indicators

Notable quotes

I am the running back. I put in the legwork.

Conclusion

A fast-paced exploration of random knowledge that highlights the unexp

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:13) Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Little Fish, the little version of Big Fish, no such thing as a fish. This is where we look at all the delicious, delectable, gorgeous, beautiful facts that you've sent into our inbox and we repeat them and get the credit for them. My name is Anna Tyshinsky and I'm sitting here with James Harkin. Hi James. Hi Speaker 3 (0:37) Anna. I'm going to credit the people who send them in, but fine. Speaker 1 (0:41) Is that how we do it? Speaker 3 (0:42) Okay, Speaker 1 (0:43) I need to stop claiming these as my own. Hi, Andrew Hunter-Murray. I'm also sitting here with you. Hello. Hi. Speaker 2 (0:48) Hi. Speaker 1 (0:49) And you're the one who's been compiling all of these facts and sending them through to us. Speaker 2 (0:53) It's a team effort, but yes. Speaker 1 (0:57) Thanks for that. You're the quarterback, and then we're just all the other irrelevant ones in the team. Isn't that how American football works? The quarterback is just the whole team, and then everyone else stands there cheering them on? A simplification, Speaker 3 (1:09) but I see where you're coming from. Speaker 2 (1:11) I've got to say, I've heard some dodgy intros in my time, most of them by me. This one is coming very close to the heights. Speaker 1 (1:18) Thank you. Well, I learned from the best, Andy. You're very much Speaker 2 (1:22) the water boy. You have no such thing as a fish, are Speaker 3 (1:24) you? That's like the worst person in the team. You can't even get on the team and has to bring the water to the Speaker 2 (1:30) other team. Oh. Ouch. Who are you in the team, James? Speaker 3 (1:33) I am the running back. Speaker 2 (1:35) Okay. Yeah, Speaker 3 (1:36) I put in the legwork. Speaker 1 (1:37) And who's Dan? Speaker 2 (1:39) Dan is the little kid who comes on at the start of the match to sing God Save America. Is that what it's called? Speaker 1 (1:46) Yeah. God Save America. God Save America. Speaker 3 (1:50) I don't know why people came up with their own national anthems when you could literally just put your own country name. Speaker 3 (1:58) God save the Central African Republic. It works. It absolutely works. It Speaker 1 (2:03) works. There you go. All right, should we do some facts? Oh, Speaker 2 (2:05) yeah. No, I think we're out of time, I'm afraid. Speaker 3 (2:08) Can I do a quiz? Oh, yeah. You know what? My quizzes on this are usually a little bit oblique and difficult to get, so we'll go for a simple one. What is the capital of Egypt? Speaker 2 (2:17) Cairo. Speaker 3 (2:19) Incorrect. Anna? Is it Aswan? Good. knowledge of another place in Egypt, but no, it isn't. I only know one more. It's the new capital. What? The new capital. Okay. It's just called the new capital. Sorry? So Egypt has got itself a new capital Speaker 2 (2:37) and it's called it the Speaker 3 (2:39) new capital. Speaker 2 (2:41) What is going on? Basically, they Speaker 3 (2:43) decided to Speaker 2 (2:43) move Speaker 3 (2:44) the government out of Cairo because Cairo was getting so big compared to the rest of the country. They thought if we move a lot of the stuff to another place, a new special city, like lots of countries have done that. Yes. And we will for now just call it the new capital. And over the years, they've tried to come up with new names, but they've just been unable to. Speaker 1 (3:03) No way. They keep Speaker 3 (3:04) having competitions where someone can name the city and then no good answers come. So they think that maybe they might call it Memphis after the old capital of... Oh, Speaker 2 (3:15) nice. Speaker 3 (3:15) I Speaker 2 (3:15) think New Memphis would be absolutely fine or something, like New York or lots of places you can do that with. Well, New Speaker 3 (3:21) York, of course, wasn't named after old York. What? New York was named after the Duke of York, not Prince Andrew. Speaker 2 (3:29) As you're back in Windsor, as he is now. Speaker 3 (3:31) Not him. I did not know that. Are you serious? And then they kept the new because it was called New Amsterdam. Speaker 1 (3:37) Oh, wow. It Speaker 3 (3:38) wasn't Speaker 2 (3:39) named after Old York. Speaker 1 (3:40) That's a great fact. That's a Speaker 2 (3:41) thing that's named after a person. Oh, my God. Speaker 1 (3:46) I'm doing it by accident now. Speaker 2 (3:49) It's Speaker 3 (3:49) a Speaker 2 (3:49) book. Speaker 1 (3:50) But Speaker 3 (3:50) other places that are called capital. Seoul means capital. in Korean. Astana means capital in Kazakh. Cool. Beijing means northern capital in Chinese. Some kind of Chinese. And Kyoto means capital city, but isn't the capital. Speaker 2 (4:09) But Tokyo is the other way around, isn't it? Yeah, Speaker 3 (4:12) but that To means I think eastern or western or northern or something. Because To means different, it has different meanings. But yeah, Kyoto means capital city. Is that because it used to be Speaker 1 (4:24) the capital? Yes, it was. It has Speaker 3 (4:26) been the capital. But Tokyo means like, let's say it's eastern capital. So the Kyo means capital, but then the Toh meant eastern. So nice. So good. So it's not that Speaker 2 (4:37) unusual. That's great. Did you say who sent that in? Speaker 1 (4:39) That Speaker 3 (4:39) was sent, of course, by David Leifertilli, because Speaker 2 (4:42) I always credit the people. Speaker 2 (4:46) Just Speaker 3 (4:46) to say, like I always do, I would never, ever forget that because that would be a terrible thing to do. No, indeed. Especially after I've just made a big deal of it. Speaker 2 (4:55) Here's one. This is about a place name. It's not as famous as Kyoto and not as famous as Cairo, but it's a place which our correspondent Dan Cohansby lives about 10 minutes from and it's Buttsville, New Jersey. Speaker 2 (5:10) Named after, obviously, Nicky Butts, the footballer. Well, it's named after a man named L.L. Butts. Oh, yeah, okay. By his father, Michael Robert Butts. Butts Speaker 3 (5:21) with Speaker 2 (5:21) a Z? Yeah, yeah, B-U-T-T-Z. Population about 200. Hang on, so it Speaker 1 (5:26) was named after someone by that person's dad as sort of a gift to his son? Speaker 2 (5:30) Yes, Michael Butts named it after his son, L.L. Badly named. Yeah, yeah. And just that's New Jersey for you. Speaker 1 (5:37) Only two famous LLs then, him and Cool J, hey? Yeah, I get it. Speaker 3 (5:43) LL Cool J, of course, is short for Ladies Love Cool James. Speaker 1 (5:46) And I think the same is true of... Ladies Love Butts. Yeah, I suppose. Never a truer word was spoken. Yeah. That's a very good fact. Speaker 2 (5:55) LL, middle name, Big Butts. Brackets, and I cannot lie. Yeah, so there you go. Speaker 1 (6:01) I've got a fact here from Jill Rogers. Oh, yeah. Jill Rogers said that my fact is that vampires are a recession indicator. The more vampires you get, the worse the economy is going. Interesting. So the last Speaker 3 (6:13) big vampire thing I would say would have been Twilight. Speaker 1 (6:16) Yeah. Speaker 3 (6:16) Did that come during the financial crisis? It Speaker 1 (6:19) did. It did. Now, I don't like to read out someone's fact and then take a slight issue with it. But yes, that's the example that she uses, along with a few other vampire things that were released during that particular recession. And I would say it could just be that that was a time when vampires were trendy and it happened to coincide with the recession. But apparently this is a big pop culture theory. What Speaker 3 (6:40) about Speaker 1 (6:40) that Speaker 3 (6:40) sort of like vampire stuff with Michael Jackson and stuff, right? You know, Thriller and all that kind of thing. Is that vampires? Speaker 1 (6:48) No. Speaker 2 (6:49) It's just general spooky stuff in thriller, isn't it? Speaker 3 (6:52) Because I thought that might coincide with like Margaret Thatcher closing the mining pits. I Speaker 1 (6:57) see. In Speaker 2 (6:58) America it was more Ronald Reagan-y, wasn't it? I don't know how he left the economy. I Speaker 1 (7:03) think it's these kind of stretches which lead to these spurious correlation and causation things. Anne Rice, nice. Don't know, not cited here. Speaker 2 (7:10) What about... John Polidori, who wrote the first ever vampire story in Lake Geneva with Byron and Mary Shelley and Percy Shelley when she wrote Frankenstein. And that was because there was the year without a summer. Do you remember this? 1816, because the volcano had erupted and crops were ruined everywhere. Unquestionably a recession. Speaker 1 (7:27) Yeah, so I'm surprised she doesn't cite that. That would have made her case. Does she cite any other? Speaker 3 (7:31) Like, are we doing all the hard work here or what? Speaker 1 (7:33) You are, yeah. And it is hard work, Jill. So next time. No, she mostly is citing a theory.