Archive for the ‘Answer Us Back! Your time to opine’ Category

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Ikea pencils

September 14, 2010

** Click here for Episode 149 **

I declare Ben from Italy to be a man with too many pencils:

In the last episode you were talking about Ikea pencils and it prompted a few questions as I have over 500 pencils myself:

1. Is it morally wrong to go to Ikea for the sole purpose of filling my pencil-case?

No. It’s not morally wrong; it’s unbelievably stupid. There are far more convenient places to get pencils than an out-of-town superstore, and moreover, one should never, NEVER go to Ikea unless one is in the direst need of furnishings.

2. After the checkout in Ikea there is a box where you put the pencils you’ve used. Do they then sharpen them and put them back? Surely that would mean that they were even shorter.

Now that I do not know. But surely there must be an Ikea employee amongst the AMT listenership: reader, if that is you, please tell us what happens to the little pencils that aren’t stolen by people like us. Do they find a good home, or are they ground down and reconstituted into Malm headboards?

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Posted in Answer Us Back! Your time to opine, User-generated answers | 1 Comment »

NSFW slugs

September 14, 2010

** Click here for Episode 149 **

Time for some raunch, thanks to John from Edinburgh:

I was just listening to podcast 148, and you discussed slug mating. I thought you might appreciate these links showing Leopard slugs having sex. It is one of the freakiest most amazing things you will ever see.

He’s right! Not to mention romantic. Skip forward to the 1min40 mark if you want to go straight to the hot slug-on-slug action with no flirtation beforehand:

If that’s got you in the mood for more X-rated mini-fauna, click here. You perv.

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Peanut butter death

September 1, 2010

** Click here for Episode 147 **

Alright food cowards, you win. You don’t have to try to be more adventurous and try cucumber or sandwiches or liquids or any of the other things you haven’t tried, not after this extremely cautionary tale from Lucy from Brighton:

After hearing about what common foods some people surprisingly hadn’t tried I thought I’d pitch in the following anecdote:

At the age of 17 I had never tried peanut butter, but sitting in the sixth form centre I suddenly had a MASSIVE craving for it. So a friend who was already on the way to the corner shop decided to buy some for me. I had about a teaspoonful before, lo and behold, my lips started to tingle, and my throat closed up.

It turns out I am woefully allergic to peanuts.

So, answer me this: Why, If they could kill me, was my body craving them??

Readers? Any ideas why Lucy’s body hates her thus?

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Not in my mouth, sunshine

August 31, 2010

** Click here for Episode 147 **

We’re thoroughly enjoying hearing about the mainstream foodstuffs you’ve never tried; here are some of your contributions, and below are some more:

Justin from Gloucester, Massachusetts: there are many things I have never eaten, including fish, apple pie, pickles and baked beans.

English Richard living in France: the mainstream food I have never tried is Walker’s Ready Salted crisps, due to my dislike of ready salted flavour.

Amy: I’m 17 and I’ve never had ANY fizzy drinks or coffee or tea – how unnatural is it to drink bubbles? blurghhhh and I wouldn’t like to be topped up with caffeine all day.

Jed in Glasgow: I have never tried poached egg or any kind of Caesar salad.

Eilidh from Dingwall, Scotland: apart from a little bit of haddock and fish fingers, I’ve not had fish! Another thing I’ve never had is a steak; I’ve no interest 🙂

Keep them coming, unadventurous-mouthed people!

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tea and toast

August 19, 2010

** Click here for Episode 145 **

A curio now from Chris from Barking:

In episode 145 you mentioned that you would rather dip a stick of celery in tea than a Nice biscuit.

This got me thinking of my friend who is from “up north” somewhere, he will frequently use his tea for dipping his toast in his tea!

He assures me that this is normal behaviour up north, so answer me this: is my friend a freak, or is it really normal up north? I’m suspicious as he also wipes his arse with baby wipes (which I am certain is not normal behaviour for an adult male!)

I have no trustworthy northern friends/acquaintances to ask and would like to continue mocking him but now with the confidence that I am right and what he is doing is odd and not just some regional peculiarity.

Northern readers, shed light on this phenomenon:

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spoon science

August 12, 2010

** Click here for Episode 144 **

Since I introduced Olly to the spoon-in-champagne-bottles tip in last week’s episode, many of you have written to tell me that the trick has been debunked by Mythbusters. Do I care? No! Because Kimon in East Dulwich has been in touch to mythbust Mythbusters:

Although it is often considered to be an old wives’ tale, there is a likely scientific basis, the key concepts being thermal conductivity and gas solubility in water.

Precisely the point I was going for, Kimon! (ahem) Carry on:

There were two very significant omissions from Helen’s spoon-in-champagne-bottle suggestion which I feel need to be addressed. a) It has to be a silver spoon and b) there’s no point unless you also put it in the fridge.

Carbon dioxide’s solubility decreases as the temperature of the water (or champagne) increases – so the really important thing, spoon or no spoon, is to put the bottle in the fridge.

So what’s the point of the spoon? Well, if the bottle has been out of the fridge, it follows that the champagne and air in the bottle is warmer than the fridge. However, glass itself is a pretty good insulator (i.e. it has low thermal conductivity, around 1.1k (Watts per metre per Kelvin)) which means that as well as keeping the champagne cool when it’s out of the fridge, if over time it gets warm, it will then keep it warm when you put it back in the fridge.

Silver, on the other hand, has excellent conductivity, higher than any other metal at around 429k. The spoon pokes out of the bottle, soaks up the cold air from the fridge, and radiates it down into the warm air inside the bottle. This in turn quickly cools the top layer of the champagne, meaning that any carbon dioxide escaping from the warmer liquid below has more chance of being captured by dissolving into the cooler liquid at the top.

You know, none of us would have got into this big flap about champagne bottles at all if only everyone were so sensible as to drink this classy substance instead.

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don’t try this at home. Or anywhere. Please.

July 29, 2010

** Click here for Episode 142 **

In response to last week’s question about walloping someone, Mark from Glasgow advises:

Hi guys 😀

I do lots of martial arts and just to let you know, the best place to hit someone is the chorotic nerve. It’s situated on the left hand side of the neck behind the ‘big muscly, tendon thingy’.

Thanks, Mark, for both the lessons in violence and in anatomical terminology.

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best man (well, best of three)

July 27, 2010

** Click here for Episode 142 **

Nearly a year has passed since we gave advice to Ahmed from Leicester, but at last we’ve heard the outcome:

Hi! Way back in episode 108, you helped me decide if I should let my flaky friend Rav be joint best man at my wedding.

Well, I’m pleased to let you know that I got married a couple of weeks ago and Rav did his job admirably! I think that his public humiliation made him step up his game a notch, and “New Rav” has been (relatively) reliable ever since.

I did, however, start my speech by thanking “My best men – Darren, Joe and to a lesser extent Rav”, which everyone in on the joke enjoyed.

A person redeemed, a friendship saved, and a happy ending at a wedding! How pleasing.

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vanilla phone death

July 14, 2010

** We’ll be back on July 15th; meanwhile click here
to listen to past episodes of Answer Me This! **

Here’s a long, sad story from Andreas in Sweden, but it’s a good one, so strap in:

Last week, while doing my job involving making food colouring, aromas and being cooked alive because it’s 30 cunting degrees in Sweden, you destroyed my phone and made my day shit overall.

I was going to produce something called “Vanilla Extract” to be sent off to a ice cream company for them to make vanilla ice cream. To get the obvious flavour of this concoction I needed to, through a tap mechanism, pour a undiluted mixture of ethanol and vanilla seeds into a bucket as an ingredient. This ingredient is kept in a big, cylindrical tank that holds 200 litres of the shit. To check if there was enough left in the tank for me to finish my assignment, I took the lid off of it and put it aside. Pleased with what I saw, I knocked off for lunch.

Upon my return I did what I always do when my boss is on a business trip (he’s a right shit, by the way): I got out my phone and put on some Answer Me This! To hear it better I put it on top of the tank. Instead of your funny banter streaming into my ears, I heard a splash, a gurgle and my phone hitting the bottom of the tank.

I hurried to find something to stand on. I got up on an empty cardboard box and from there climbed onto the tank and shoved my entire arm into the alcohol and vanilla. Having a bunch of tiny cuts on my hand did not make this a more pleasant experience.

I finally got the phone out of the tank and had by now sort of lost my footing on the side of the tank. I quickly put one foot on the box I had used to get up there. I had forgotten it was empty and put my big, fat foot right in the center of it. I fell onto my knee, hitting the shitting corner of the rig the tank rests on.

Long story short, you destroyed my phone and ruined my day.

We’re terribly sorry, Andreas, that your phone died in the effort to manufacture the most boring ice cream flavour. But we don’t feel directly responsible for your calamity, therefore will not be buying you a new phone. Or knee. Also, worse things have happened in the name of vanilla, viz:

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rate my eggs

July 14, 2010

** We’ll be back on July 15th; meanwhile click here
to listen to past episodes of Answer Me This! **

Here’s a frontline report from a bona fide turkey egg eater, Deborah from Camden, to crack the ovine mystery of Episode 139:

I had a turkey egg for the first time recently – my mother got it from some absurdly posh farmers’ market in Kent that sold stuff like quince trees alongside the usual foreribs and heritage carrots.

They looked fantastic – like very large hen’s eggs dusted with cocoa like Mini Eggs – and tasted good too (though maybe because I fried them in a pan I’d just used for bacon?).

I’d say they came third in the seven birds eggs I was tasting for my blog, below quail and ostrich but above hen, duck, goose and pheasant. The shell was very hard – probably because turkeys are so massive they’d crush them otherwise.

Full write-up of the 7 different eggs HERE.

Thankyou, Debbie, for your tireless eggy quest, saving us from having to rustle some turkey eggs from a poultry farm in the dead of night. Now, who can tell us what crocodile eggs taste like?

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So good they named it twice – and sang about it more than twice

July 14, 2010

** We’ll be back on July 15th; meanwhile click here
to listen to past episodes of Answer Me This! **

In Episode 140, Karen in East Grinstead expressed her desire to compile a New York-themed megamix. Turns out she’s been pipped to the post by Chris from Cambridge:

Approximately a year ago, for reasons beyond my recall, I put together a playlist of songs (tenuously) about New York City. So imagine my surprise when I discovered that a fellow listener was doing precisely the same thing!!! Perhaps they would be interested in what I came up with…

The East River – Jeffrey Lewis
You Said Something – PJ Harvey
Survival Car – Fountains of Wayne
New York City Fuck Off – Matson Jones
Me & Julio down by the Schoolyard – Paul Simon
New York Times – Bobbi Humphrey
Old Soul Song – Bright Eyes
Union Square – Tom Waits
Take the A-Train – Duke Ellington
Just because I’m Irish – Jonathan Richman
Living for the City – Stevie Wonder
New York, I love you, but you’re bringing me down – LCD Soundsystem
Frank Mills – The Lemonheads
Across 110th St – Bobby Womack
NYC’s like a graveyard – Moldy Peaches
Fairytale of New York – Pogues
Summer in the City – Regina Spektor (I always assumed it was about NYC, but admittedly have no proof…)
Harlem Shuffle – Bob & Earl
Tennessee Blues – Steve Earle

That looks like it would fill up almost an entire C90, but if you feel Chris has failed to include a copper-bottomed NYC classic, admonish him in the comments.

Next week: we compile the ultimate playlist about Swindon! Who’s in?

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duped!

July 4, 2010

** We’ll be back on July 15th; meanwhile click here
to listen to past episodes of Answer Me This! **

Gulling the gullible is a jolly good wheeze, as we found out in Episode 139, and M from London found out many years before that:

I might have one of the best dupes…it was delivered with scathing sarcasm, but the poor girl was so dense that she has never figured out the truth!

In 2004, I was working for the Red Cross and was coming back from an education session deep in the American South. A woman (aged 29ish at the time) I was working with began musing philosophically in the back of the van. After wobbling about for a bit, she asked me that she’d always wondered what black people were called outside of the USA…

I informed her that Africa was actually a country in South America, so there was no difference and all people of African origin could safely be called African American as they were all from the American continent. She said “Oh! That’s great. It totally makes sense. Thank you!”

Well…fast forward 6 years. She still believes this and reports from friends still working with her confirm that she regularly tells the snickering public about this. It’s so generally ridiculous that no one has ever corrected her. Who misses an entire continent and hundreds of years of the slave trade at school? I guess that question has already been answered.

Good work, M from London. If any of the rest of you have done a dupe as good and as long-lasting as that, please share it with us in the comments. We’re a bit dim, so will probably swallow it whole.

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