No Such Thing As A Fish is a team of researchers who work on the BBC TV show QI. They are James Harkin, Andrew Hunter Murray, Anna Ptaszynski and Dan Schreiber. They have produced a chunky stocking filler of a book in an A-Z format with side notes adding more stories.
So go to “Holes” and you have entries for black, glory and pot varieties plus you learn that Shropshire kids were allowed to name the county’s pothole filling machines and called them Harry Pothole and Fill-I-Am. Not quite Boaty McBoatface but potential for the future.
If you spend time on Facebook, did you know that Mark Zuckerberg gets 10 votes for every share he owns so he owns 60 percent of any company vote so when shareholders voted to reduce his power he defeated them?
It’s not all fun for him, though. In 2018 he spent $22.6m on security alone including having bodyguards sitting near him made up to look like “normal Facebook staff” – geeks with super strength?
Talking of billion dollar companies according to a survey by Lego more British and American children want to be YouTubers rather than astronauts.
One farmer makes five times more money from his YouTube channel than he does from his farm.
One of his most popular videos is 11 minutes of him trying to free a tractor stuck in the mud.
There are plenty of stories about politics in the book.
Some lead you around the houses: Change UK tells you to go Change UK – The Independent Group (which is the entry directly below), that tells you to go to Continuity Change UK, that tells you to go to The Independent Group for Change. Once you get there – assuming you haven’t lost the will to live – you get redirected to Indecisive Politicians where you see a big article.
The B-word is blanked out in the book but it still gets a good few mentions.
Another fine book of odd stories from No Such Thing As A Fish.
I look forward to next year’s edition.