So many wangs in Answer Me This! Episode 205. Big ones. Little ones. Extended ones. Stone ones. Religious ones. Cold ones. Coal-fired ones…
We also consider:
Cillian Murphy in Batman
Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert
cemetery etiquette
snowman conformity
scarecrows
steam-power
phallus-power
naked shame
vibrators for health
Akzidenz-Grotesk
prudes vs. exhibitionists
traffic lights vs. policemen
and
pirated story tapes.
Plus: Olly doesn’t pull in Pret A Manger; Helen explains why Death By Vagina was a pretty unavoidable option for the sexually active Victorian lady; and Martin the Sound Man strips off at festivals, because he likes to evoke the bacchanalia of Burning Man all over the place. Or, rather, because he wants to go on the waterslides.
In this week’s Bit of Crap on the App (available for iDevices or Android), Olly explains how he could have prevented a decade of war, had the pull of literature not been too strong.
Next week, all going according to plan, we will be joined by a special guest: legendary comedian Jackie Mason! So send us QUESTIONS for him, marked ‘For Jackie’: email answermethispodcast@googlemail.com or leave a voicemail on the Question Line (dial 0208 123 5877 or Skype answermethis).
…but if that’s your aspiration, there’s something very wrong with your life.
However, if you’ve ever fancied starting a podcast but have no idea how to go about it, I’ve mined our 5+ years of podcasting glorypersistence and come up with a potted guide to podcasting for beginners. Click here to read it, then go forth and podcast.
Here’s a hairy situation from Patrick from Nottingham:
My barber runs a very enticing deal of buy 10, get one free. Living in the beautiful East Midlands, my haircuts cost me merely £8, which as male tradition dictates must be rounded up to £10.
After over two years of religiously attending the same barber, I have finally achieved the glorious achievement of my tenth haircut. This now presents me with a problem: when I go for my freebie, is the tip included as a freebie? It seems that free should mean free: but should I pay the regular and expected £2, or does that seem mean?
Hmm. That’s a tough one. I’m one of those arseholes who doesn’t habitually tip after a haircut – because i) the hairdresser’s hourly salary is at least ten times mine and ii) they never do what I want – so have no idea about the correct answer. Readers, step into the comments and help out this polite-sounding man, otherwise he might panic about going to the barber’s until his hair is so long, it’s a trip hazard.
I was at a house party last Friday, and got very merry. Feeling empowered to be nice, I sought the nearest unhappy person, who in this case, happened to be a lonely-looking man sat on the kitchen worktop. I asked him to dance, which he did, and continued to dance with him for the rest of the night. He seemed shy, although very nice and polite.
After a drive home and a kiss goodbye, I left him with my number and forgot all about him; then a week later, I received a text asking me out to dinner. I obliged, and was taken to a nice Thai restaurant in town. However…
When sober, HE IS THE RUDEST MAN IN THE WORLD.
He called me a ‘chunky girl, you know, the top end of curvy’ (I’m a size 10), he called our mutual friend a dirty slut, spat food everywhere when he ate, went to the toilet, came back and discussed his ‘fucking…King Kong of a shit. Like one of the faces on mount rushmore. Smelt like a horse’s corpse’.
Then he went on to bitch about our ginger waiter, complain that there was no signal on his iPhone in here to anyone who would listen, laughed at a woman who fell over, was adamant that our two gay friends getting together recently was ‘sick shit’ and then at the end of the night, gave me a soft mint and tried to suck my face off.
He then said he wants to see me again, and invited me to dinner next weekend, ‘With maybe some playtime in the ballpit…’
So, answer me this:
HOW DO I GET RID OF THIS TWAT?! He won’t leave me alone 😦
By ignoring all of his comms? Shouldn’t be too difficult. Then he can bitch to his next victim all about his uptight lardy ex who wouldn’t put out.
(By the way, does anyone else get the impression that he’s so nervous when he’s sober, compounded by the usual nerve-wrack of being on a first date, that he tries to be funny, but is unfortunately terrible at it?)
Girls are sooooooooo confusing, as poor Harry in Luton has lately discovered:
Valentine’s Day seems to have become a day where people who are already in relationships give each other stuff and walk around holding hands and being generally lovey-dovey, but this year I decided to use Valentine’s Day for its original purpose.
Commemorating a martyr who was beheaded for his Christian beliefs? Very retro, Harry.
I decided to give a Valentine’s card to the girl who I’d fancied for a while, and duly bought it and posted it to her house. Having delivered my card, I bought myself a lovely doughnut – with hundreds and thousands, of course – and sat in the park, fairly certain that I was going to get some form of date from this whole arrangement.
Later on that day I received a message from the girl saying how grateful she was for the card, but that we might just be “really good friends”. She also put a load of kisses at the end of the message, and then sent me another message saying, “See you at school, unless you want to meet up?” with a bunch more kisses.
It’s at this point that I become confused…
Answer me this: Does this girl actually want to meet up with me? And if she does, then would it be a date?
Ooof. She’s either undecided, playing hard to get, or deliberately toying with you with no intention to follow through with Romance. Readers, which do you think it is? In the comments, please guide this poor boy.
Elisa sees my John Thaw enrapturement in last week’s episode, and raises:
I think I might win the age gap contest regarding celebrity crushes. I’ve been in love with Michael Caine for years. I first discovered my love for him in 2007 after the movie The Prestige – I was 19, and he was 74.
Eurghhh! Michael Caine at any age….shudder.
Readers, the gauntlet has thrown down. Are you able to beat Elisa’s age gap crush? Moreover, SHOULD you be able to?
Happy 200th birthday, Charles Dickens! We hope you had a super party at the Retirement Home for Victorian Novelists. William Thackeray ordered in the cupcakes, Anthony Trollope bought a keg, and Henry James cooked up a batch of his Special Brownies. We’ll just leave Answer Me This! Episode 204 on the gift table:
Plus: Olly narrowly escapes Death by Chicken Kiev; Helen had peculiar taste in men for a 13-year-old; and Martin the Sound Man compares feminine sexual moisture to Cadbury’s Creme Eggs. Women don’t have YOLKS, Martin!
In this week’s Bit of Crap on the App (available for iDevices or Android), Olly explains that as a teenager, he didn’t get a fake ID: he invented a whole fake identity. Will the real Olly Mann please stand up? OK, sit down, you look exactly like the fake one.
As every week, we want your QUESTIONS: deliver them as voicemails to the Question Line (dial 0208 123 5877 or Skype answermethis) or as emails to answermethispodcast@googlemail.com.
See you next Thursday,
Helen & Olly
PS: for all of you who, like our final questioneer of the day, have ever mis-sent a text or email:
You might think towels are boring, but a little theatre can make them fun! As this email from Toby demonstrates:
Further to your discussion in AMT202 about the use of heated handtowels in Indian restaurants, I have a tepid towel-related question that I am sure will blow your minds…
Eating in an Indian restaurant recently, a bowl of what I thought were mints was placed on our table at the end of the meal. Just as I was about to gleefully pop one into my mouth (an action which would have, unbeknownst to me, surely led to a slow, suffocating death), a waiter appeared and poured hot water into the bowl. The small, white, spheres which were NOT mints suddenly expanded and revealed themselves to be rolled-up handtowels.
Answer Me This: what the Heston Blumenthal was going on?! Was this magic?
ENCROYABLE! Is that restaurant staffed by waiters, or SORCERERS? It’s the greatest towel-based show on Earth!
That restaurant is very smart for choosing this towel showmanship, though: firstly, because it’s an impressive thing to do right before you hand somebody the bill; secondly, they can fit the entire evening’s towels in a shoebox; thirdly, it gives the diner the reassurance that their towel is virgin, freshly hatched in front of their eyes, never to have frotted the crevices of another curry fan.
The downside is, as you hint, the trail of death. Being suffocated by a towel you mistook for a Mint Imperial is not a noble exit from this plane.
My friend has asked me to do a reading at her wedding in April. It’s a church wedding, but as I am a massive atheist she has said I can do the non-religious one; however she would like me to choose something myself. In the past, I have been required to say the words ‘fondle’, ‘fart’ and ‘arse’ in wedding readings, but am not sure this sort of thing is appropriate in a house of God.
I have a degree in English Literature, but managed to get through two poetry courses without going to a single lecture and passed by writing 9000 words on nonsense verse, so I am not very well qualified and everything I have found online is twee and nauseating, or has been done to death. Help!
I CAN’T! The poems that are good for the purpose have indeed been done to death; you know why? Because most poets are
a) miserable
b) lovelorn
c) death-obsessed
d) fanatically religious
e) all of the above.
Any of these traits are incompatible with the majority of wedding ceremonies. At least with the nauseating twee poems, there’s little danger of you realising only as you clear your throat at the lectern that you’re about to read a graphic metaphor for erections and death in iambic pentameter.
I wonder why your friend is insisting you choose the reading yourself. Is it a test for you, to see how much you understand her? Is it so that she has some reason to freak out at you? Is it because she just can’t be arsed to search for one herself? (Fair enough.) At one recent wedding, the groom asked me to read a page of a biography of Bobby Fischer. Being a passage about children’s chess clubs in New York, it was in no way relevant to weddings or romance; the congregation was baffled; but my friend was happy, which of course was the primary objective.
But, if your friend indeed insists upon putting you through the literary wringer, consider recourse to prose – preferably of a more romantic, less esoteric nature than biographies of chess prodigies, but a touch of non-bawdy humour might be welcome. Alternatively, perhaps you could read the lyrics of a song that they both like? Hey, if Kylie can do it, so can you.
Readers, help Jo out: in the comments, either suggest failsafe poems that HAVEN’T been done at all the weddings, or ideas for a different sort of reading entirely. NB: the phone book, Roger’s Profanisaurus, or Penthouse Readers’ Wives are not acceptable sources.
Whatever you choose, though, choose something SHORT. There have been weddings where I’ve actually been hoping for the Oscars band to strike up just so that I could stop orating.
Hot on the heels of last episode’s wedding-attending dilemma, here’s another from Jane in Wellington, New Zealand:
I’ve been invited to the wedding of my ex-partner (and father to my child) – should I go?
We split when my son was very young and I’ve done such a good job of being friendly and civil that he just expected that I’d be going… hence the invite to the reception.
I still get on well with the rest of the family, I even quite like the bride (although my ex is still a cock). Do I go and have a laugh and it be a bit weird, or steer well clear and disappoint my son?
I hope I’m not missing something, but what’s the problem here? Your relationship is cordial, and your ex appears to think well of you even though you don’t return his favour. Your attendance will make your son happy. You’ll see people you like. You don’t appear to harbour a wish to reunite with your ex, so are unlikely to elbow the bride out of the way at the critical point of the vows. So go!
Hey, it’s Groundhog Day! The day where a large rodent prognosticates the weather, and also the day when Answer Me This! Episode 203 enters the world.
Hey, it’s Groundhog Day! The day where a large rodent prognosticates the weather, and also the day when Answer Me This! Episode 203 enters the world.
Hey, it’s Groundhog Day! The day where a large rodent prognosticates the weather, and also the day when Answer Me This! Episode 203 enters the w- OK, I’m bored of this joke now. On with the show:
Today we talk about:
cats up trees
hemp seeds iTunes Ping (anyone? Anyone?)
‘Affirmation‘ vs. Baz Luhrmann vs. ‘If‘
gamekeepers
too much texting
Mark Zuckerberg’s businesswear Cowboys and Aliens
national stereotypes
lessons in love from Sleepless in Seattle
and
the hat that won the West.
Plus: Olly explains the reason for the famous British emotional stuntednessstiff upper lip; Helen says “Nooooooooooo!” to apple eugenics; and Martin the Sound Man generously doles out songwriting tips to Savage Garden. If you want to hear what makes Martin such an authority on the topic, direct yourself to his latest music output HERE.
This week’s Bit of Crap on the App (available for iDevices or Android) is a question from Alex from Northampton about calorie-counting bores. Talking about calorie-counting makes you put ON weight, dullards!
Thankfully you lot are the opposite of dullards, if your QUESTIONS are anything to go by: send those to us as voicemails on the Question Line (dial 0208 123 5877 or Skype answermethis) or as emails to answermethispodcast@googlemail.com. No questions, no show! We’re not too polite to resort to blackmail.
Answer Me This! Podcast 