So that unfeasibly rich child from Two and a Half Men says you should not watch Two and a Half Men because it is pisspoor FILTH and THE ENEMY’S PLAN.
As usual there’s some mild FILTH in Answer Me This! Episode 239. Can’t disclose the enemy’s plans; you’ll have to interpret them yourself when you listen:
Plus: Olly blows bubbles out of his bum; Helen calls for tougher gum laws; and Martin the Sound Man is pleased you all seem to like his package.
This week’s Bit of Crap on the App (available for iDevices and Android) is more hot air from Olly, as he recounts how he burped into a stranger’s face. Luckily, because Olly couldn’t hear it at the time, it DID NOT COUNT.
Your QUESTIONS definitely do count, so please email them to answermethispodcast@googlemail.com or leave voicemails on the Question Line by calling 0208 123 5877 or Skype ID answermethis.
Here’s a question of ticks from Tammi from Blackburg, Virginia:
I recently found a deer tick attached to my earlobe. It hurt for days after I removed it! I starting talking with my hubbie and he said he once found one in his belly button and it itched for months!
So where are the most unusual places y’all have found ticks before?
On my dog’s neck. Other than that…um…well, we three all live in London, not a very tick-heavy place. But readers – some of you must live in the humid sandy deer-populated lands which ticks favour. Go to the comments to delight Tammi with your tick stories. Tell you what: we’ll open this out to any other parasites. Emotionally draining humans DO count.
Many of the world’s greatest minds have puzzled over Kelis’s ‘Milkshake‘ – people on Yahoo Answers, us in AMT237, and now Benji in Bristol:
I favour a literal interpretation of Kelis’s ‘Milkshake’; I think that she really is talking about actual milkshake. However, I have noticed something peculiar about the lyrics. Kelis bangs on and on about how good her milkshake is, but then she also keeps saying “La la la la la, warm it up”.
Warm milkshake? Yuck! Milkshake should of course be served cold. I’m beginning to suspect that her milkshake-making prowess might not be all it’s cracked up to be. Is it possible that the boys have some ulterior motive for coming to Kelis’s yard? I’d hazard a guess that what brings all the boys to the yard is not the prospect of a delicious, wholesome milkshake, but rather a desire to indulge in a spot of ogling. Kelis is, after all, a very attractive young lady.
Imagine a poor, somewhat plain-looking woman who wishes that all the boys would come to her yard, and in order to achieve this she forks out a load of money on milkshaking lessons from Kelis. She masters all the basic and advanced techniques for shaking milk. She then refines and improves upon Kelis’s original milkshake recipe, by keeping it cold and putting some whipped cream and a maraschino cherry on top. After all that time, effort and expense it must be terribly upsetting for her to see all the boys forsake her superior milkshake and avoid her yard. How it must enrage her to see those silly, sleazy boys sitting there, perving at Kelis while sipping their tepid, shoddy shakes.
What you’ve done there, Benji, is take the plot of Dreamgirls and reset it in the milkshaking industry. I like it. Have a two-page synopsis on my desk by Monday.
Our next questioneer Chris needs your help adding the ‘fun’ to ‘draising’:
Next July I am participating in a charity rally that starts in London and finishes in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. My team mate has decided we should drive the 10,000 mile route in an ambulance, which we then donate to the charity organising the event.
It turns out that these high-tech life saving vehicles are quite expensive on the second hand market as people want them for camper van conversions.
We have tried approaching companies for sponsorship, but so far have been turned down by almost every one.
We thought of holding a black tie charity dinner, but soon realised we didn’t know anyone that wouldn’t be turned away at the door for being too poor.
So answer me this: how do we raise enough money to buy the ambulance, pay for the visas, fuel, food and accommodation plus raise a respectable amount for the charities we are supporting?
Look at us, Chris. Do we appear to be the kind of people who have any idea of how to make money? [chokes back a sob]
However! Readers, you are ingenious and, in some cases, wealthy. If you can be of any help to Chris in his efforts, either go to the comments and donate a Plan of Action, or donate him enough cash to buy an ambulance.
Information about his endeavour and the charities which will benefit can be found at www.alphabadger.com.
When Martin the Sound Man is not enabling us to make sounds, he makes sounds of his own under his musical alter ego The Sound of the Ladies. For his brand-new album The City of Gold and Lead, he not only made the sounds, but also the pop-up CD sleeve you see in the photo above, which is almost as pretty as the music within.
You can buy the album in CD or MP3 form from HERE, and you’ll make an old sound man very happy if you do.
Unlike Whigfield, we don’t spend our Saturday nights dancing by ourselves in front of a mirror. (That is, of course, our official Tuesday night business.) Instead we trot off to talk about the week’s most thrilling internet events on BBC 5 Live’s Saturday Edition.
Many of you have previously asked whether the show is available as a podcast. Hitherto, the answer has been ‘No’, but now, it is ‘YES!’ It is called Let’s Talk About Tech and you can get it HERE. Also includes tech, cars, gaming and other matters of interest.
Happy Thanksgiving, American chums! While you bust a gut on deep-fried turkey and marshmallow-topped yams, perverts that you are, everyone else can get on with listening to Answer Me This! Episode 238:
In which we give thanks for such traditional American foods as onion loaf and Big Mac special sauce. We also talk of:
Plus: Olly’s lack of confidence (and grade D in GCSE French) held him back from pursuing his dream career at Disney; Helen’s grammatical tips encourage solipsism; and Martin the Sound Man won’t give you any of his blood because he’s a wuss when it comes to needles. But not when it comes to albums – his lovely new longplayer The City of Gold and Lead is out tomorrow, so click HERE to obtain your copy, in digital format or fancy hand-made papercut CD package.
There’s more food in this week’s Bit of Crap on the App (available for iDevices and Android), as questioneer Ollie asks whether he can gorge himself on raw biscuit batter. And survive.
We would like to gorge ourselves (and survive) on 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.
Revenge is a frequent theme at AMT, as is the pettiness born of cohabitation. It is little surprise that those topics combine. Add a fractious sibling relationship, and you have household napalm. Luca from Malta is ready to detonate:
I have a younger brother who constantly eats my food. It is fine when I make enough for both. But if I prepare a sandwich or a salad and leave it in the fridge for when I have work or school, it always goes missing – invariably, he eats it.
I have confronted him about this and have told him, SPECIFICALLY, ‘Do not eat my food.’ Last night, I spent 3 hours making the most beautiful and delicious pizza. I could only eat a quarter and left the rest in the fridge with a paper saying ‘Please, do not eat!’ for I had a long day at work and needed something to cheer me up for when I got home. He ate my pizza and he just laughed and laughed about it.
If I poison some food, leave it in the fridge, with a sign saying “Please do not eat”, yet my brother eats it anyway, and dies, will I be sent to prison?
I’m not well versed in Maltese law, but yes, you probably would, as your intent was to endanger life. But even if you wormed your way out of a prison sentence, for killing your brother your parents would send you to your room till the end of time, so it’s the same result either way. Plus, you’re ruling yourself out of eating your own food, too. Everybody loses in this scenario, as with the piss-laced soy milk we recently refused to drink.
It seems to have taken you a remarkably long time to realise that your notes are not only failing to deter your brother from theft, but are even spurring him on to commit mischief. The only thing more delicious to him than contraband food is your annoyance.
He would probably continue to eat your food if you deploy reverse psychology in your notes, eg “Go ahead and eat my pizza” – face it, if he can see your pizza, he is going to eat your pizza. So…prevent him from seeing your pizza. Construct a disguise. Get yourself a Tupperware container and dress it up to look like your brother’s least favourite food – or just pop a plastic turd on top. That is cheaper than buying your own fridge and a padlock, which is the other option.
Readers, please go to the comments to lend Luca your ideas – both to defend his food from his brother, and to deal with his stress levels and controlling urges.
Tyler from San Francisco is movin’ on up, movin’ on out, movin’ on up, nothing can stop him:
I broke up with my boyfriend about one month ago after nearly two years (in gay culture, this is a quite long relationship). We share a large group of mutual friends here in San Francisco which has made things a bit awkward. I have only briefly encountered my ex in passing. I’m now starting to date new people. Is this too soon? I don’t want to be insensitive, but we’re finished and I’m moving on.
Answer me this: how long should I wait before publicly dating or bringing a new gentleman to a party or event with this circle of mutual friends?
As we established last week: if the new relationship is with a close relative, WAIT FOREVER.
Otherwise – three months? Readers, what do you reckon? Since age gaps can be governed mathematically, surely there is an equation to compute the value of y (length of post-relationship public singledom) as a proportion of x (length of relationship). Add your calculation to the comments.
In the last episode, we decided that a relationship with your first cousin who also happens to be young enough to be your child equals ICK. But Sarah writes:
I utterly adore your podcast. So imagine my chagrin when, in the last episode, you guys ranted about the unsuitability of relationships such as mine. No, I am not dating my cousin. But my girlfriend and I are 23 years apart in age, precisely the same as your anonymous questioner and his girlfriend. Answer me this: what’s is so wrong with that?
Jenny and I are coming up on our five year anniversary. We have a circle of mutual friends that doesn’t suffer from the fact that they’re of different generations. Jenny is only seven years younger than my mom and nine years younger than my dad but that didn’t stop them from welcoming her into our family, something Jenny really appreciated as her own family, believing same-sex relationships to be wrong, have distanced themselves from her.
Come on, guys – you’re too smart to believe that age difference in a relationship is inherently wrong or icky or exploitative.
We agree that age difference isn’t inherently wrong, but this is influenced by the age of the youngest half of the couple. For example, although Courtney Stodden and Doug Hutchison would always seem an insanitary pairing, the 35-year age gap wouldn’t have appeared as bad had she been 26 or 36 when they got married, rather than 16.
Had our questioneer been 54 and his cousin-lover been 31, perhaps we would have been more generous to him (although, obviously not, because SHE IS STILL HIS FIRST COUSIN), and if children were not involved. You don’t mention, Sarah, whether Jenny has children that are almost the same age as you. Children are prone to being freaked out by their parents’ relationships, but surely more so when the new partner was in the same nursery school as them. (And even more so when said partner IS A BLOOD RELATIVE.) You see the difference between your relationship and his, we hope!
Mark from New Zealand chips in with an equation:
In terms of what a minimum age for a partner is, the standard creepiness rule: don’t date under (age÷2)+7 seems reasonable, so on that score your mid life crisis cuz-banger falls a bit short.
As you have stated on many occasions, you are yet to be blessed with the fruit of your loins; a point emphasized by the comment, “How do parents make it through kids’ films?”
As a father of three beautiful children I can assure you that the guff churned out by Pixar, Disney and Dreamworks is indeed proof of God’s existence.
The cinema means that kids are in a safe environment, they are being entertained by someone other than yourself in a moralizing and amusing fashion and have a trough of popcorn to stop their hands from punching each other.
Knowing this, I sit back and get the best sleep ever. At the end of each film I feel as though I have slept for a fortnight and can wake to find the kids still in one piece both physically and psychologically.
Recently I slept through The Avengers which, from what I can gather from my seven-year-old film critic, had explosions, crashes and fights all the way through. I missed them all. Nothing can keep me awake. Brilliant.
And are there films which work the opposite way round, ie keep the parent lively while sending the sprogs off to Snoozeford? Chip in, people, via the comments. If a DVD of Black Narcissus is all it takes to sedate my gaggle of niecephews, it’s far cheaper and safer than Ritalin.
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.
Answer Me This! Podcast 