Answer Me This! Podcast

The new series of Answer Me This! is mere hours away, yet there remains plenty of business still to be attended to from the previous series (yep, we’ve a bit lazy. We’ve had puzzles to complete, dammit!).

So let’s cut straight to the chase and take a look at the following email from Arianne, sent in response to Episode 51:

I’ve been amused recently by hearing about these people on your podcast who deliberately change their names to things like “Flash” and “Boom”. Unfortunately I was given at birth the middle name Storm (in addition to an already weird first name) – and bearing in mind the flak I received when I was younger and the horror that was my school years (partially thanks to the X-Men series of movies) I’m amazed that people actually choose to give themselves such names. But I suppose that when you get to adulthood names like this do seem to be more interesting to other people now they are older than they were when you were young. I don’t think people should be allowed to give themselves such “cool” sounding names once grown up without having gone through a childhood of misery first! You need to EARN it dammit!

So that’s you told, John Raspberry Clark and Eileen Flamingo Norris! Although, Arianne, you should feel a bit lucky; for if a middle name is not interesting, what’s the point of them at all? I would have much preferred mine to be something to do with weather systems, rather than just being given the moniker of whichever great-aunt had the least rubbish name. It was a pretty thin field. One of them is actually called ‘Toby’.

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** Answer Me This! returns on May 15th; meanwhile click HERE to listen to the back catalogue **

I’ve an apology and a plea to make to an unknown questioneer. The other day I was clearing our spam folder of the several hundred messages offering to ‘enlarge the thing between your legs’ (the inseam of my trousers? No thanks, it’s an entirely appropriate size already). In the brief seconds between me clicking ‘Delete Forever’ and the spams being flushed away into the internet’s sewer-pipe, I noticed a proper email nestled among the wang-embiggeners, from someone possibly called Jessica, asking a question about Ray Liotta.

But by that point it was too late, and poor Jessica(?)’s question was consigned to a purgatorial eternity along with the money-scams and Hot Rude Babes.

Jessica(?), if you’re out there, please send us your Ray Liotta question again. Or, if you know Ray Liotta-fan Jessica(?), do beseach her to email us again at answermethispodcast@googlemail.com and perhaps it’ll be not too late to make it right.

Here, as Jessica-bait, is a picture of Ray Liotta:

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** Click here to listen to EPISODE 47 **

Thanks ever so much to all of you who’ve been sending us questions. It has been a great treat, and very vexing for us that we haven’t been able to answer them all in the podcast. So here are a few in non-audio form, starting with one from Chris in Kansas:

In your January 9th YouTube, Helen, you were working away with knitting needles in the car. So, Helen, Please answer me this…What were you knitting?

Well spotted, Chris! Indeed I was passing the time on the way to our Amazing Adventure In Luxembourg by knitting a kangaroo for my niece’s Christmas present. It turned out something like this:

And if you fancy making your own woollen marsupial, the pattern is in World of Knitted Toys by Kath Dalmeny.

Meanwhile, David in Maldon asks:

I want to know how come my 13-year-old daughter can spend hours getting her hair and make-up just perfect but her room always looks like an explosion that blew up a branch of Claire’s Accessories inside a New Look store. How can I make her keep her room tidy?

If bribery and pleading have thus far not worked, try taking all her possessions away. That should do it.

In other questioneering, George from London wonders:

Jaffa Cake: Cake or Biscuit?

This is a highly contentious issue, given the Jaffa Cake‘s cakey texture but biscuity dimensions and appearance. However in the 1991 court case of McVitie’s vs HM Customs and Excise, Jaffa Cakes were ruled to be cakes not biscuits, on the grounds that like a cake they go hard when stale, whereas biscuits go soft. Which leads us to a question from Sean from Paris:

Why when you leave bread out does it go hard and why when you leave biscuits out do they go soft???? I have been agonising over this for years and at last the route of enlightenment may be ahead…

Get ready, Sean, for the mystery of your life to be solved! This phenomenon arises because biscuits are designed to be hard, with the moisture baked out of them; thus they have lower water content than the surrounding atmosphere, from which moisture infiltrates an uncovered biscuit, rendering it uncrunchy. In contrast, bread (likewise cake) is moister than the air, so if you neglect to use your bread-bin, the water will evaporate leaving a big bready brick.

There. We’ve all learnt something, and it’s barely even lunchtime.

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* Click here to listen to EPISODE 14 *

It’s the question on everyone’s lips. Well, not quite everyone – mainly the lips of the This Morning royal stalker James Whittaker, old ladies and readers of Hello! Magazine. And also, as it turns out, listener Mark:

What is the real reason for the untimely breakup of William Windsor and Kate Middleton? Is it because they kept putting cameras up her skirt?

I have not been this upset since Busted.

Oh Mark. Are you upset because you’d invested all your savings in the Woolworths’ Wills’n’Kate wedding souvenir range? Surely, any couple in their early-mid-20s would find that level of premature wedding-commemoration rather too much pressure on their relationship, but particularly when coupled with Hello! frenziedly announcing each week: “Look, they’re SMILING! He’s bound to propose ANY DAY NOW! She’s got a HEART-SHAPED KEYRING! Because he’s GOING TO PROPOSE!”

But I think the real reason for their split, Mark, is that with every passing day Prince William looks more and more like the Jabberwocky. And if that’s the case when he’s 24, in twenty years’ time it would be like waking up next to an industrial mincer.

Love can only conquer so much.

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* Click here to listen to EPISODE 7 *

Sharp-eared listeners will have intuited that I, Helen Zaltzman, am quite fond of a dictionary. It’s true, it’s true; in fact a quick sweep of my bookshelves revealed more than thirty dictionaries of various kinds, plus a couple of dozen other books which are basically dictionaries only don’t have the word ‘dictionary’ in the title (such as the most amusingly titled book in my collection, 7000 Words Often Mispronounced. Why the hell is that out of print nowadays, eh?).

So no wonder listener Colin hied directly to Answer Me This! with this query:

How big a dictionary should I have at home to convince visitors that I’m quite intelligent?

It’s not as straightforward as ‘As big as a family-sized box of Rice Krispies’. No matter the size, a picture dictionary or Roger’s Profanisaurus won’t impress your intelligence upon very many people. On the other hand, if you spend your pin money on all twenty volumes of the complete Oxford English Dictionary, they might think you’re trying too hard; and, for the money and the amount of space it would take up in your house, you might have better results if you invest in a baby elephant. Concise dictionaries are for fence-sitters. And strewing around a few clever-looking lexicons of tricky foreign languages is just asking for trouble, of the “Hey Colin, tell us some of those Finnish epigrams you know!” type.

So, as a happy compromise, I suggest you get a Compact Oxford English Dictionary. It is sufficiently hefty to make a fine doorstop or bedside table, but won’t require you to reinforce your bookshelf-bearing walls; its one or two volumes contain the ENTIRE 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary in miniaturised form; and, coolest of all, it has a little drawer containing a magnifying glass. You can get them in second-hand shops for about £20, which is a very good price, Colin, for making your visitors think you are way intelligent, and a little bit of a lovable eccentric to boot. Accessorise with corduroy elbow-patches, and they’ll be asking you to present Open University documentaries within the twelvemonth.

If you want to wow your visitors even more, and you’ve run out of Bombay Mix, you would do well to also get an etymological dictionary. It’s not got anything as fun as its own magnifying glass, but it will prove handy during those late night conversations of the “But why do they call them lemons?” ilk.

Now if you’ll please excuse me, I must go and write another letter to Countdown, asking if I can go on Dictionary Corner if Susie Dent were to meet with a mysterious accident.

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* To listen to episode 2 of Answer Me This!, click here*

Inquisitive listener Alicky, undaunted by the tangled mess Olly made of her name in Episode 2, asks us this:

Helen and Olly, Answer Me This: what is the precise difference between saline and brine?

Alicky, I do hope this is nothing to do with your habit of disembowelling your suitors and measuring the stretchiness of their intestines. Are you pickling them in brine for posterity? I thought we’d already made it clear that Answer Me This! cannot aid and abet such ghoulish behaviour.

(But if we were to pickle a man’s stolen intestines, we would probably opt for vinegar.)

Here comes the semantics bit. Concentrate!

saline (noun) = 1. a metallic salt, containing magnesium, potassium or sodium, used in medicine as a cathartic; 2. salty water.

Whereas:

brine (noun) = 1. water containing a large amount of salt; 2. sea-water; 3. salty pickling fluid; 4. any saline solution.

So I suppose you could say that saline is brine’s mothership.

Hey, come back – there’s more! ‘Brine’ as a verb means to pickle in brine (Alicky, put that pile of guts DOWN).

But the plot thickens if you look at ‘saline’ as an adjective, because in this form it can mean each of these things:
1. of, containing, or resembling table salt;
2. of or pertaining to a chemical salt, especially of sodium, potassium and magnesium, as used as a cathartic.

Confusing these two could ruin your breakfast.

And that’s not the end of the confusion, I’m afraid. For the third adjectival sense of saline is: ‘of or pertaining to a method of abortion involving injection of hypertonic saline solution into the amniotic cavity during the second trimester.’

Now that really could ruin your breakfast.
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* Click here for the latest edition of our podcast *

Because time flies when we’re gasbagging on our podcast, not all the questions we are sent get answered. So in a bid to redress this tricksy situation, let’s have a tardy look at this question from Nadia:

Helen and Olly, answer me this: how can I possibly afford to do an Edinburgh show?
Now, it’s a shame Olly’s not here right now, because last year he actually succeeded in not being financially crippled by his Edinburgh show, a feat matched by few. What the heck is his secret?

I, however, was not similarly fortunate, as just acting in an Edinburgh play managed to net me -£1200, and I am still sour about it 5 1/2 years later. That’s right, Producer Russell! If I ever see you again, you’d better have a cheque ready.

Anyway, Nadia. Have you considered persuading a company to give you some cash in exchange for product placement, such as seems to be proliferating in music videos lately? I don’t know whether making numerous phone calls on a mobile phone/taking pictures of your friends on a mobile phone/conspicuous demonstration of the particular features of a mobile phone figure highly in the dramatic arc of your proposed show, but perhaps you could find a way to fit them in.

Failing that, try the Free Fringe. Or put the show on in the street.
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