Plus: even a customised Segway won’t bring back Olly’s childhood joy; Helen will consider being your late mother’s marketing consultant, but only for actual MONEY not some old shoes; and click here to see the picture of Martin the Sound Man that brought all the boys to the yard – however do bear in mind that it IS just a picture of a 34-year-old man drinking a strawberry milkshake, nothing special. Martin’s new album, on the other hand, is very special – it comes out next week so preorder your copy HERE.
In this week’s Bit of Crap on the App (available for iDevices and Android) Helen complains about one of her legion linguistic bugbears: the word ‘umami’. Then turns it into a song, in an effort to make her like it better.
You know what we do like a very great deal? No, NOT pig sex; your QUESTIONS. Email them to answermethispodcast@googlemail.com or leave voicemails on the Question Line by calling 0208 123 5877 or Skype ID answermethis.
I have been good friends with a boy since I was 12, when we met in high school. He has always made it very clear that he likes me, and I have always carefully turned him down so as not to hurt his feelings.
However, this morning, I received a…Crotch picture, and I need to tell him no means no, once and for all, but still remain friends.
Also, there is an opportunity for me to move in with him, his friend, and two other girls in about two months… Do I take it, or is it too risky?
It’s a dead cert that if you move in, you’ll be treated to some real life ‘Crotch pictures’ before you’ve even had enough time to unpack.
Wake up and smell the cock that he’s been dangling on your face whilst you sleepcoffee, Caity. ‘Carefully turning him down’ for several years has not proven effective. Perhaps he has interpreted your kindly rejections as you playing coy, in which case you need to be unequivocal in your declarations of non-interest. Agreeing to move in with him does not send the right message.
The right message is ‘I DO NOT WANT YOU SEXUALLY’ on the back of a postcard of Lorena Bobbitt.
Yes, the above book is from my own library, and why not? Australia’s slang is as thrillingly unusual as its indigenous wildlife, as demonstrated by Steve from Adelaide, South Australia who has donated the following suggestion to AMT236’s appeal for synonyms for ‘the bollocks’:
How about “She’s the duck’s guts”?
Very poetic, Steve. However, let’s not forget that in the question in question, Brad in Philadelphia’s wife was writing a letter of recommendation for a student. An expression evoking a duck with its entrails on display is perhaps not the most enticing for an employer, unless that employer is a Satanist or Fergus Henderson.
Passwords are like tattoos of the Bishop of Peterborough dressed as Elvis: we’ve all got them. RIGHT? On that subject, Dylan muses upon the question raised by Jack in AMT236:
There are plenty of opinions in the IT community to support the idea that a password change policy is actually not beneficial in a meaningful way. In fact in some cases it can harm security as users who are forced to regularly create new passwords are more likely to choose easy to remember (and potentially guess) passwords, or to write passwords down or record them in a file.
However it really is a good practice to use a different password for every site you visit. The method I’ve used and recommend to other people is to use part of the site’s name or URL within the password you use. You start with a reasonably complex password that’s common to all your sites, and then modify it slightly for any given site.
So you could have “R4gh1p5” as your common password. On eBay you might then use “eR4ghy1p5” on that site – the same password, but you’ve added the first letter of the site’s name at the beginning, and the last letter of the name before the “1” in the password. This way you have a unique password on every site, but only have to remember the base password and the rule you’ve come up with.
Good tip, Dylan. For the legion of people whose password continues to be ‘password’, I’ve made your life easier: you just need ‘epasswyord’ for eBay, ‘apasswnord’ for Amazon and ‘gpasswsord’ for Geocities. I assume those are the only websites you use.
Perhaps during AMT236 we opened a floodgate for all the lewd nun jokes that are neither comprehensible nor funny. Luca writes:
Two nuns were cycling down a cobbled a road. ‘I never came this way,’ said one nun. ‘It must be the cobbles,’ said the other.
Answer me this: why are nuns so sexual in jokes?
In my opinion, it is because the composers and repeaters of those jokes can hardly believe that sentient women would actively choose a life of celibacy. It is INCONCEIVABLE that they would waste their God-given BOOBS and LADYPARTS in this way. Since they have forsaken the public-facing singles scene, they MUST be getting their kicks elsewhere, and therefore a convent must be like a 24/7/365 Carry On film set in a boarding school for wayward girls.
To my mind, however, the real question is why a nun commits herself to marriage with a man who is not only dead, but cheating on her with all the other nuns.
Rub-a-dub-dub, two nuns in a tub – but what the blazes are they getting up to in there? Find out in Answer Me This! Episode 236:
Today we consider:
Roman wine
Roman semen
flamenco dancing
Roger vs. Wilco
wet bars vs. dry bars vs. swim-up bars
the Moorish influence on Span vs. Frank Muir’s influence on Spain
polluted peanuts
Sarah Palin’s password
laundry fragranczzzzzzz Pfalz Historical Museum drink options
the oldest continuously producing Cabernet Sauvignon vine
airport shopping
and
double disk drives.
Plus: Olly is a bit disappointed by his holiday hotel’s drink facilities, in that they did provide kettles but didn’t serve drinks through boobs; Helen doesn’t think you should trust Password Wallet any more than post-it notes; and Martin the Sound Man is never going to make it as a wedding singer if his set is just ‘Heartbeat‘ four times followed by ‘Magic Dance‘ as encore.
In this week’s Bit of Crap on the App (available for iDevices and Android) Olly reminisces about the time he had a wet bar in his student bedroom. People always think wet bars are so ritzy, but the Olly Mann twist on MTV Cribs fanciness can be yours for only £20 from Millets.
We are, as always, agog to receive your QUESTIONS, so please email them to answermethispodcast@googlemail.com or leave voicemails on the Question Line by calling 0208 123 5877 or Skype ID answermethis.
By the way, if you’re curious about spiders after today’s episode, our pal Jim Bell of Geekpop podcast is your spider man. NB Jim is not Spider-man, he is a normal man who doesn’t wear spandex and seems fairly unwracked by angst. He is just very keen on spiders, as his website demonstrates – in an entirely safe-for-work way, we assure you.
Less safe for work is our photo of Olly demonstrating that, like today’s questioneer Brad’s wife’s student, he is the bollocks. Click here to see. Don’t be scared – it’s much gentler than all that nasty Staplenuts business last year.
Anyway, rest assured, dear listeners, that we think you are all the bollocks. So please bring your beautiful bollocky selves back here next Thursday for AMT237.
In AMT235 we spoke of jobs none of us has experienced. But, being such a diverse bunch, you listeners have. Jess from Dorset writes:
In regards to your recent question about Asda FM: I work there and they repeat the music ALL DAY LONG and play the same adverts over and over again. Absolutely terrible and definitely for the customers not the staff!!!!!
I always had my suspicions that somebody has been developing a noise equivalent of chemical weaponry. Now I know.
Anyway, as for jobs outside of the retail sector, Elizabeth from Madison, Wisconsin informs us:
I can say that people going to the South Pole are definitely encouraged (one might say forced) to make sure that their teeth are in top shape before going there.
My husband is a physicist whose experiment is at the South Pole (IceCube Neutrino Observatory if you are interested) and in order to go there for a month one winter they made him get his remaining wisdom teeth out as a precautionary measure because they thought that one might have a cavity.
He was not keen on getting them out, but his desire to go to the frozen south was such that he did it anyway and brought me back a lot of pictures of snow.
I love the show, and listened to you while dissecting over 200 squid yesterday.
Thanks Elizabeth – we hope that was a work thing, rather than a nice day out to the aquarium that you decided to sabotage.
Much of the USA has already had a rough few days, and I’m sorry, but I’m about to make things even rougher.
Brace yourself for more bad news:
My mum is definitely not eligible to become the President of the USA.
Aside from the reasons for disqualification as listed in AMT235, she actually had to give up her US citizenship in 1970 when she married my father: they wouldn’t let her have dual nationality, so to allow my South African father to remain in the UK, she had to choose to be 100% British.
Of course now, after 41 years of darning his underpants and withstanding his puns, she might be regretting that decision.
Hey! AMTpals on the other side of the Atlantic, are you alright? We hope you and yours made it through the Extreme Weather Events, and we are relieved to have heard from some of you, sounding damp but resilient, like Emma from the Soggy Apple:
As a New Yorker, last week was pretty hectic. Hurricane Sandy turned out to a be quite a bitch.
Me, my two roommates, my roommate’s annoying dog, our friend who lives in Manhattan, and my roommate’s boyfriend were trapped in my Brooklyn apartment for days with very little to do but drink the mass amounts of beer we bought from the one open bodega in our neighborhood. We don’t have a tv, so we ended up playing lots of games.
One game we played for far too long was MASH, which is one of those playground games girls play to predict who they are going to marry, where they are going to live, how many kids they will have, etc. For instance, after one game I ended up living in Tokyo, married to Danny Devito, having no kids but 20 cats, getting around by helicopter, and working in a dildo factory. Would it actually be fun being married to Danny Devito as long as you didn’t have sex with him?
I’m not sure that would be your choice if married to Danny Devito, if there’s any truth in the rumours which sprouted after he and Rhea Perlman announced their separation last month. We learn that if fidelity is important to you in a relationship, don’t marry one of the stars of Twins.
Also if you’re deliberately entering into a sexless marriage and you have TWENTY cats, your life sounds like a mess no matter who your husband is.
Nichole had different means of seeing out the storm:
Great big slug pigs from hell, we survived the New York apocalypse known as hurricane Sandy! We roughed it out for FOUR days in our one bedroom apartment with no heat, no electricity, NO INTERNET, and water turning off and on with the wind.
Would you believe it? The husband and I managed the early darkening nights huddled around the soft light of candles and a thankfully charged iPad stocked only with Answer Me This! episodes from your early days of yore, episodes 62 to 90. It was like a drunken end of days with only the soft lull of you cracking whimsical over grandpa’s proverbial wireless.
Now we’re back and there are things we have to know! What happened to the on-again, off-again couple of Anastasia and Wade? Did Graham from Canada ever get a girlfriend in his own country?
The truth is: we don’t know! All those kids are now grown up, and unless they contact us, we can’t find out what’s going on with them since the government shut down our covert surveillance operation. So here’s an appeal:
Wade. Ana. Graham from Canada. If you’re reading this, please go to the comments and tell us what’s been happening in your life since we last heard from you circa 2009.
YES. There are still a few days left till the polls, so America, put all your support behind one AMTfan’s campaign to get Helen’s mum to be your president.
Also, everybody everywhere, listen to Answer Me This! Episode 235:
Plus: Olly looks into his political crystal ball and sees Condi there; Helen broke a letter chain as a child, so little wonder she is a lonely layabout now; and Martin the Sound Man needs to delete his search history before we all find out why he knows such a lot about horse fluffers.
In this week’s Bit of Crap on the App (available for iDevices and Android) we examine how the scandal raging around Jimmy Savile could have devastating effects…upon the cement industry.
If you’d like to see us hold forth about podcasting in front of a very yellow Powerpoint presentation, click here to view the video of our talk at Next Radio. And/or if you would like us to return next week with more AMT, send us QUESTIONS: email answermethispodcast@googlemail.com; leave voicemails on the Question Line by calling 0208 123 5877 or Skype ID answermethis.
Apropos of AMT234‘s contemplation of the sexual preferences of Agatha Christie’s fictional detectives, Hannah from Bedford writes:
I don’t know if this is something that comes up in the books, but in the ITV shows, Poirot does have a romantic relationship with a Russian woman, so seemingly he might be heterosexual. Obviously this doesn’t rule out the idea of him having repressed homosexual feelings like you were saying.
Similarly Miss Marple has an affair with a married soldier during WWII, he dies during the war and she doesn’t seem to have any other romantic relationships.
That stinks of TELLY MEDDLING. You know why? Firstly, because Marple does not seem the type to plant begonias in another woman’s herbaceous border. Secondly, because Miss Marple first appeared in print, already an elderly spinster, in 1926, thirteen years before the Second World War broke out. Although, as the final Miss Marple novel was written in 1971, it is possible that she did have that affair when already pretty ancient, then pined after him until her death at the age of 120 or so.
“Phwoar. Have him scrubbed and brought to my tent.”
Let us progress from sixth form problems to problems that may emerge afterwards, as outlined in the following email from Tom:
I have just finished a Gap Year which involved 4 months’ travelling around southern Asia.
Personally, my travelling was the most informative, exciting and interesting thing I’ve ever done. However, now I’ve started university, nobody cares! All I want to do is talk about it, but then I sound like a massive Gap Yar Twat, but I can’t help but bring it up sometimes because there are so many stories.
Is there anyway I can be cool about it? I did go to Thailand for a week, but I wasn’t there to party, I’m not a ‘lad’ who just went and slept with prostitutes; I just went because I wanted to experience different things. How to get across that I’m not a lad, and that I’m not a post travel twat?
It’s curious that you think the only things people might be interested in are Thailand, specifically parties and prostitutes therein. If that is the case, why are you hanging out with such arseholes?
Anyway. You’re surrounded by new people, and you can’t expect them automatically to care about you or your holidays. Especially not if you start every sentence with, ‘Yeah, well when I was in Laos/Cambodia/Macao…’
If you want to do some stealth gap year bragging, choose some funny, self-deprecating stories, where something absurd, slapstick, or mildly humiliating occurred. If you know that the punchline to the anecdote is ‘It was really spiritual, actually’ then shelve it in favour of a story about you having to eat an unusual insect, or getting the shits.
Readers, please go to the comments to give Tom advice about humblebragging; and if you too have some gap year stories you’re bursting to tell, you’re welcome to add them there too. Because unlike fellow students, comments can’t glaze over.
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