Answer Me This! Podcast

After our allusion in Episode 90 to an addictive but seemingly pointless Japanese ball-bearing-based arcade game, several of you have been in touch to enlighten us about its mechanics and objectives. Firstly, a simple synopsis from Mike from Coventry:

Buy ball bearings
win ball bearings
weigh ball bearings
get pointless gift based on the weight of won ball bearings
go to pawn shop owned and normally next door to gambling place who exchange pointless gift for money.
It’s all something to do with gambling laws in Japan.

Keza from Nagoya elaborates:

I might be able to go some small way towards explaining the madness, as I’ve been living in Japan for a year or so and am exposed daily to this sort of nonsense. It’s called Pachinko, and it’s massive. They have department-store sized floors of pachinko in even tiny towns, full of Japanese salarymen pouring endless ball-bearings into endless rows of incessant noise-making machines.

Anyway, the reason that you an only win ball-bearings is that gambling for money is illegal in Japan. You can, though, exchange a few thousand ball-bearings for disproportionately small plastic objects and teddy bears in some parlours. The trick is that there is usually a small, distinct shop in close proximity to the pachinko parlour that just happens to buy said items for extremely large sums of money. Aha!

Mostly, though, people genuinely just seem to be playing to earn more ball bearings and be able to play for longer.

We read that pachinko addiction is a growing problem in Japan, although apparently not for Leo from West Sussex:

I recently came back from a week in Japan in February and I went to one of those very places you were just talking about! It’s absolutely insane, there are row upon row of these really boring pachinko machines which are sometimes inanely themed with hideously manga-fied Star Wars characters! After the working hours are finished they are packed with really bored-looking people poking buttons. We had a go at them, and I lost miserably, or at least I think I did, my Japanese is shit.

Pah! It sounds like my grandparents’ home-made bagatelle board, only with added manga. We’d rather stay in with a lovely jigsaw…

*UPDATE*: Kevin in Osaka adds:

There is one minor point that your authoritative source got wrong though – that when you’ve finished your session, you exchange all you accumulated metal balls for cash, or for sweets if you were not so successful. One of my former students at Kyoto University figured out the machines so well that he used to do pachinko instead of a part-time job, and made enough to support himself with a regular Saturday session.

Man cannot live on sweets alone, surely?

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** Click here for EPISODE 90 **

After the discussion in Episode 90 of how to tell people they have managed to get muck upon themselves, Jim in New Jersey supplies this delightful example:

An employee at a music shop I worked in years ago called to say he would be arriving a little late one morning, as he had had an accident while attempting to dispose of a bag of used cat litter. About an hour later, he shows up in a huff, and gets down to work. I don’t know who among the staff saw it first, but we suddenly realized that one of us was going to have to tell this guy that…he had a cat turd in his hair. Really. And he had taken the subway all the way downtown in such a state. I think you’ll agree that this is a step beyond awkward.

Indeed. What is the most tactful way to tell someone they have shit on their head? Assuming he wasn’t sporting the latest in scat-hat fashions:

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** Click here for Episode 89 **

Following her missive in Episode 89, Kat from Edinburgh has lifted the lid on Build a Bear. Prepare yourself for Shock! Scandal! Bears filled with drugs! Teddies with nine limbs! Or:

To answer your questions about Build a Bear, it’s only in America that you can actually get messages sewn onto them. If people change their mind, we take the bears into surgery, cut the thread at the back then take the stuffing out to put back into other bears. We then can re-stitch it and sell it again. You can record voice messages to put in them but there’s a button to delete them. You could most certainly put AMT messages into them. You would have to take a recording to the shop and play it into the Build a Sound which would then be put in the bear. Not sure if the quality would be that great though. And we personally don’t kiss the hearts. That would just be sad. The customer does it. If you are feeling mean you can get them to rub it on your tummy so it never gets hungry, rub it on your heart so it has lots of love, rub it on your head so its clever etc etc. The kids love it! As for the Uranium, I most definitely do not earn enough to buy any and I don’t think it would go down too well with the boss!

Huh. It sounds quite cute and civilised actually. Dammit.

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Michael from Hertfordshire from Episode 89, your ship has come in! Anastazia has furnished you with enough questions to keep your relationship going forever (or until your girlfriend gets sick of being interrogated all the time. Anastazia says:

My partner and I have used more than a few of these and whilst some are strange most are quite good. Michael is sure not to run out of questions before his gf.

(more…)

In Episode 88 we found a lot of conflicting stories about where vampires came from, then got sidetracked before working out the answer. So thankyou, Ray from Belfast, who has stepped forward to claim that vampires are a home team:

The whole Vampires mythology actually comes from Ireland. The O’Caithan legend (Pronounced Oh Ka-han) is the earliest known legend about blood eaters. Apparently in Dungiven, County Derry, there was a local baddy/boogie man who demanded to eat the blood of one person of every family in the town in retribution for wrongly convicting him of a crime.

I think you’ll find that there was no history of blood eaters in Eastern Europe before this.

Now. It seems perfectly convincing, but so did the Irishman who told me that there are no snakes, homosexuals or feminists in Ireland because St Patrick got rid of them all. So if anyone else wants to pipe up and tell us that in fact all vampire myths are based on Surrey commuters, comment below!

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