Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish,
a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden.
My name is Dan Schreiber and I am sitting at a very comfortable distance from Anna Tyshensky,
Andrew Hunter Murray and James Harkin and once again we have gathered round the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order here we go.
Starting with fact number one that is Anna.
My fact this week is that in 1877 all able-bodied men in Nebraska were required by law to spend up to 12 days killing grasshoppers.
Wow.
Wait a minute, I'm always looking for the loophole.
Up to 12 days?
It was well it was they had to spend two days definitely so you can't get out of a weekend and then
if there was further work needed then the government state government could call on you to do an extra 10 days.
So it was up to 12 days
because some people enjoyed it so much it started looks like a pathic and it's like all right we need to cut you off here.
Yeah exactly.
You can't devote 365 to it.
How many grasshoppers can there be that everyone I mean I know Nebraska even
though is quite sparsely populated but that's a lot of grasshoppers to kill isn't it?
Definitely more than one grasshopper per person so it was a lot.
This was the Rocky Mountain Locust which is a grasshopper and it was this massive scourge in the 1870s and the 1860s.
It basically ruined the kind of Great Plains area so like Kansas, Nebraska,