In case you were wondering about feline viral star Luna who appeared in AMT308, her manager/human owner Jess has been back in touch:
Just for clarity, I’d like to point out that despite being somewhat intially perturbed by her bath experience as a 8 week old kitten, Luna is now 6 yrs old and continues to investigate the bath EVERY SINGLE TIME I have one. She has fallen in several times whilst sitting on the edge (once with painful results for me…), so if anything she seems to enjoy falling in, or she has the memory of a goldfish.
OR she’s trying to get another viral hit out of it. But lightning doesn’t strike twice, Luna. You’re going to have to get your head stuck in the toilet seat or wear a funny outfit, otherwise everyone will think you’re just a one-trick pony cat.
Tom has cast light upon the question about human beatboxers’ hands from AMT307:
I do a bit of beatboxing and I find that the hand movements are pretty involuntary – I’d have to concentrate not to do them.
I think it’s just a natural impulse that helps keep time. I find that I do the same whenever I’m playing music and have a free hand, for example when playing a one-handed piano part, the free hand starts waving up and down or tapping on something of its own accord.
I know a couple of other beatboxers who say the same thing. No doubt there is some amount of people doing it on purpose for the reasons you mentioned, but I don’t even realise I’m doing it – every time I see a video of myself beatboxing it looks like I’m having some sort of episode.
Seems sensible enough, Tom. Now, can you account for Martin the Sound Man’s air drumming nearly everywhere he goes?
Nathan from Manchester has written to share his various brushes with fame:
Back in 2001 I worked in a Levi’s store in central Manchester. Often celebrities would come in to buy overpriced jeans so I served Hollyoaks and Corrie actors, premiership footballers and even the drummer from Oasis. But I didn’t recognise any of them. It became a bit of a running joke with my colleagues as I would serve someone, then they would give me clues so I could work out who I had just talked to.
The one exception was Ainsley Harriott who was unmistakable, mostly because of his size. I had seen him on TV but was still surprised with how big he was. (He said Levi’s was the only place he could buy non-custom jeans from.) I got him some huge jeans and he also tried on some imported Levi shoes from America but even the one size 12 pair we had were too small for him.
Anyway, answer me this: have you ever interacted with a celeb or star without realising it at the time? And how did you find out about it afterwards?
I have, Nathan – also when I worked in a shop, in this case Hall’s Bookshop in my home town of Tunbridge Wells. One morning in the late 90s, I sold two old French paperbacks to a man who seemed quite tipsy even at that early hour, and refused to to take his 20p change. Then after he left, another customer rushed in to ask which books Tom Baker had bought. Having been too unborn/young to see him play Doctor Who from 1974 to 1981, I was oblivious.
I had to email when I came across Munters in episode 16. While my wife Michelle turned up to our wedding in the fancy car, I arrived in my friend’s Munters Van!
Chicken and egg recipes keep rolling in. Robbie from Santa Barbara, California says:
I read about a Moroccan dish, which I can’t wait to try…it sounds delicious! Two ingredients in pastilla, sometimes called bastilla, are chicken and eggs, each being the main ingredient in one of the layers of this complex dish. Here’s a recipe.
Henrik writes:
Since AMT305, I’ve had a think about dishes with chicken and eggs on them, and in the Philippines we have at least one: chicken galantina, which is essentially stuffed whole chicken, with a hard boiled egg inside. And some versions of our adobo (a quintessential Filipino dish where meat is cooked in vinegar, garlic, peppers and soy sauce) has some hard boiled eggs in it. But then I had one more thought: what about dishes that have chicken and eggs that are not from chickens? Like quail egg. I’ve seen dishes with chicken and quail egg. Does it make things less morbid?
Good question, Henrik. I maintain that poultry doesn’t really go with eggs, texturally or flavourwise; but if you’re eggsperimenting, why not venture further afield? Say a dish of chicken and dinosaur egg? What do you reckon? Come on readers, I know at least one of you has tried it…
I was listening to your podcast and Olly mentioned that he had had afternoon tea – a treat he clearly enjoyed.
I love afternoon tea but my husband just doesn’t get it. He has said that next time I want to go I should take a friend instead, but I want to share the experience with him! How can I help him to ‘get’ how amazing afternoon tea is so we can keep on sharing the experience?
Thanks very much for your help – this is a very pressing problem in our relationship as you can no doubt tell!
The three of us all are afternoon tea fans, and obviously, Lou, we are all strongly on YOUR side. Your husband is lucky you’re standing by him, despite this absolute perversion of his. Such a monster doesn’t DESERVE afternoon tea. You could try showing him the saga of Olly’s conversion to tea in this video we made. Or perhaps you could jazz up his hot beverages with this tip from listener Chris:
In your Best Of, Martin commented about how he’d buy a breakfast with a dick’n’balls drawn in tomato sauce.
I live in Melbourne and sometimes Courtenay from Cup of Truth will draw me a dick’n’balls in my morning coffee:
Opinions are flooding in regarding Jenny from Vancouver’s question in AMT303 regarding whether the Phantom of the Opera phornicates with Christine.
Simon says:
Phantom of the Opera makes it clear that the Phantom did not sleep with Christine. When in the lair at the end of the musical, Christine asks him outright if he is (finally) going to rape her.
“Have you gouged yourself at last in your lust for blood?
Am I now to be prey to your lust for flesh?”
The lady doth protest to much methinks.
He answers,
“This fate this requires me to wallow in blood,
Has also denied me the joys of the flesh.”
So they’ve never had sex, he’s a virgin, and he’s impotent.
The less said about Love Never Dies the better….
Too bad for you, Simon, that Calico has written about precisely that subject:
In Love Never Dies (it is exactly as shit as you would assume), the whole thing of Christine and the Phantom having sex actually takes place after the end of the first musical. This is the same in the novel the musical is based on (yes, it’s a book. A terrible fucking book by Fredrick Forsyth).
Music of the Night is just about singing, I’d say the rape connotations don’t really hold as the last song basically has the Phantom say he is a virgin (“This face that condemned me to wallow in blood, has also denied me the joys of the flesh.”).
It’s also obvious in the book he doesn’t rape her because Erik’s (the Phantom) end speech to the Daroga (the melted troll doll dropped him from the naff musical) has him state that Christine kissed him on the forehead and it’s his first kiss and the only true touch of intimacy he ever had.
Thanks, literary detectives. I’m relieved to discover that non-consensual sex probably did not take place. But I’m the opposite of relieved to discover you lot spend so much time thinking about the Phantom’s phallus.
Following the discussion of paper round ageism in AMT302, Marina from London writes:
I am 26 and have never had a paper round, however I have just been for lunch with my boyfriend and his mum and her friend. The friend is in his eighties, and does a paper round every morning.
He was telling us about his paper round at lunch, and how the most popular paper on his round is The Telegraph. I asked him if he walked or cycled, and he replied, he drives! He drives about 30 miles every morning, delivering papers to lots of different villages, which takes him about an hour and a half.
He told us that he doesn’t get paid for doing this, some of his customers don’t even tip him, but the shop he delivers the papers for does cover his petrol. He says that the petrol expenses are enough to cover all his petrol, not just the paper round, and that’s the only reason he does it.
His payment is petrol! Very smart, especially if he’s charging them for the spare barrel he keeps in his car boot.
Here’s more paperboy correspondence from Ian in Cambridge:
You probably have way too many emails about this because there’s nothing nerds like more than someone being wrong on the Internet, but Paperboy wasn’t the first video game developed in the United States. It was the first game developed in the United States for the Nintendo Entertainment System, but there had been a number of video games developed in the USA long before the NES was invented.
Depending on how you define “video game”, the first one developed in the United States was either Tennis For Two (created in 1958 at the Brookhaven National Laboratory), Spacewar (Developed in 1962 at MIT) or the games of the first commercial home console, the Magnavox Odyssey (developed in 1972 by Ralph Baer). The first game for the Odyssey was Table Tennis.
This is way more information than you needed or asked for, but at least now it’s over.
This may be the most polite AND informative correction we have ever received. Thank you, Ian.
We love it when you listeners give us a peek behind the tight T-shirt curtain of your varied and interesting jobs, and following AMT301,
A Respectable Probate Attorney has been in touch – and not about probate:
As a probate attorney I would prefer to remain anonymous, but I’m happy to clarify that NO there is not a cup size requirement to be hired by Hooters.
However, there was an ass size requirement in 1999. On my first day of work I was asked what size shorts I wanted to wear; and when I asked for a size medium the manager gave me a size XXS. The short sizes available to servers were XS, XXS, and XXXS. One of the waitresses was able to get formal permission from Hooters Headquarters to wear a size small. The reason being that she was in college to become a certified public accountant and needed to dress more conservatively (less cheek showing).
To back what Olly said, Hooters servers do have to be charming. We were expected to wear our makeup and hair “like we were going to senior prom.” I would say it’s all harmless flirtation; we were never expected to dance or entertain for tips. If someone made advances, he’d be tossed out.
It’s also worth mentioning that in 1999 there was no policy that bathroom masturbators had to leave. The manager caught one of my customers in the bathroom and I still had to politely wait until he finished his meal to give him the bill. I’m glad to hear the policy has changed since.
So there we go! Perfectly standard workplace policies. Hooters really is all about the chicken wings, and NOTHING ELSE.
In AMT300, you had James from Glasgow ask about how to hide his rubber fetish collection from his girlfriend when they move in together.
I think he’s asking the wrong question.
If he’s hiding his fetish, he’s hiding something important about himself, and he’ll be lying to his girlfriend. Trying to hide something in a relationship is never good. Then think about the fireworks that will result when the girlfriend finds out – because she will. It’s practically impossible to keep something like this a secret. Whilst he’s trying to hide it, he’ll always be worrying that his girlfriend might find it.
He needs to have a chat with his girlfriend over his fetish. Is it the whole fetish that she’s against, or just the quantity of his collection? Also, if they’re moving in together and his girlfriend is not into latex, when does he expect to indulge his fetish? Whilst they’re living apart, James can go back to his place and indulge himself in private. But living together, there will be little alone time in their shared flat to indulge.
He needs to resolve this before they move in together.
I speak as someone who’s gone through this – and the arguments and break-ups that ensued.
So take it from Gordon, James: the couple that rubberizes together stays together.
In AMT299 we revealed how, in the matter of hitchhiking, none of us have ever given or received. But Jezz has written in with first-hand tales from the road:
Back in the early 1990s I spent about a year in total (over 4 years) hitchhiking around Southern Africa, Europe and Asia. During that time I had some lifts with some very interesting people, including a wealthy witch doctor from Lesotho.
The place where my girlfriend of the time and I got the strangest lifts was during our 3 weeks in Turkey. Whilst there we got a lift off a school bus full of children and a speedboat (we were trying for a car, but the speedboat did the trick). But the strangest of all was when a fire engine stopped for us. They told us to get on quickly (we did), and just few miles later we were told to get off quickly again (we did). We then watched the fire engine turn down a side road towards some smoke in the distance!
The easiest places to hitchhike, in my opinion, are Turkey, New Zealand – where there are no towns, and friendly people, so when you get picked up, you will usually go all the way to your destination – and Japan, where the locals don’t understand the rules. I once got a lift just outside the place where I was living, and was taken for about a 2-hour ride to the city I was intending to go to. When I was dropped off, I asked my lift where they were heading to next. It turned out that they were only planning to drive around the corner, and so had done a 4-hour round trip for no reason, other than that was where I said I was going to.
One last point: I got my first post-university job from hitchhiking. I had a 2-hour lift in France with an English guy, who turned out to be a metal trader. By the end of the lift, I had a job, and got to travel around the world on business trips – and also led me to getting my longest ever hitch of 13 days, when I went from the UK to Almaty, Kazakhstan to buy some Indium, but to have the experience of seeing Russia along the way. This was back in 1994, and it was a *very* interesting time to do that route.
Does anyone else have happy hitchhiking stories (ie ones which didn’t end with them being murdered by Rutger Hauer) to share in the comments?
And does anyone else feel, like me, that they’d rather pay to travel via some other method just so they don’t have to make chat for four hours with a stranger.
