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No Such Thing As A Fish
No Such Thing As A Fish

No Such Thing As The Mice Of The Fruit Bowl

July 30, 2026 • 55m

Summary

⏱️ 6 min read

Overview

Dan, Anna, James, and Andy discuss fascinating facts about Europe's largest supermarket, Nobel Prize-winning literature with extremely long sentences, zebrafish used in scientific research, and the world's most tattooed people. The episode covers shopping psychology, literary techniques, fish biology, and the bizarre world of Guinness World Records with their characteristic wit and tangential conversations.

Europe's Mega-Supermarket and the Evolution of Shopping

The team explores Gekas Ullared in Sweden, the biggest supermarket in Europe with 12 full-time coat hanger sorters. This massive store attracts four million visitors annually and has its own reality TV show with 11 series. The discussion expands to cover supermarket psychology, including tactics like piping fresh bread smells and playing French music to boost wine sales, plus the history of self-service shopping from Piggly Wiggly to modern self-checkouts.

  • Gekas Ullared employs 12 people full-time just to sort coat hangers in a supermarket spanning 114,000 square metres
  • The supermarket is Sweden's biggest tourist attraction, getting four million visitors yearly and surpassing museums like the Vasa ship museum
  • Staff fill 400 trolleys daily of items customers have discarded in wrong locations
  • The supermarket has its own reality TV show that's run for 11 series and is the most watched program on Sweden's Channel 5
  • Supermarkets use psychological tricks like playing slow music to slow customer pace and French music to increase French wine sales
  • Out-of-town superstores were controversial in the 1960s for destroying in-town shops, with the first 'windowless store' opening in Nottinghamshire in 1964
" The biggest supermarket in Europe has 12 people whose entire job is to sort out coat hangers. "
" It is the biggest tourist attraction in Sweden. It gets four million visitors every year. "

Nobel Literature Winner's One-Sentence Novel

Anna introduces László Krasznahorkai, the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature winner who wrote a 400-page novel consisting of a single sentence. The Hungarian author composes entirely in his head before writing, uses minimal punctuation to mimic human speech patterns, and was inspired to become a writer after a traumatic job holding piglets for castration. The discussion covers literary sentence length trends, from Victorian verbosity to Hemingway's minimalism.

  • László Krasznahorkai wrote a novel called 'Hushed 07769' that is one 400-page-long sentence
  • The author composes novels entirely in his head and only writes them down when ready, using minimal punctuation to mimic human speech
  • His first novel was inspired by watching pigs in a field during one of his many jobs in Cold War Hungary, including night watchman for cows and holding piglets for castration
  • Translation can take up to three years because translating a single sentence requires making it work as one cohesive unit
  • Sentences in bestselling books have shortened by one-third over the past century, from 22 words average to 15 words, largely due to Hemingway and Orwell's influence
  • Samuel Beckett's novel 'How It Is' has no punctuation and follows a character crawling through mud
" Hope is a mistake. "
" My older brother got angry at me because up there, on his shoulders, something frequently happened in my little trousers. It was not so pleasant for my brother. "

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