For months now this is a question that has been bothering me profoundly.
We all love Haribo, kids and grown ups alike. It says so in the song. And as is tradition with jelly-type sweets of the Haribo kind, they often come in the shape of something, eg a heart, a Coke bottle, cherries etc.
But there is always one in the bag that I just can’t fathom as to what it is:
Some of my friends agree with me in my bemusement, while others seem to think it’s a baby’s dummy. But what sort of freaking dummy looks like that?!
What kind of heart, Lottie, is made of red and white gunk? What kind of bear is translucent and green? One must suspend some disbelief when eating sweets. However if you crave realism coated in citric acid, then reconcile yourself to the contentious curiosity being a jelly rendering of one of the following:
1. a key
2. an ankh
3. the little plastic thing you blow bubbles through
4. a blackhead remover
5. a noose
6. a magnifying glass
7. an absinthe spoon.
Sports nutritionists and environmentalists, please go to the comments to offer a more useful response than I can to this question from Charlotte:
As a professional circus artist I’ve always heard that I should eat bananas to avoid muscle cramps, apparently because the potassium in the bananas does some electrolyte magic on my muscles.
I perform a handbalance act that includes balancing en pointe (on my toes) on little tiny platforms, so getting cramps in the arches of my feet is a definite problem. But I’m trying to eat in an environmentally responsible way, buying fruits and vegetables that are grown close to wherever I am, which is usually in North America or Western Europe and definitely very far away from wherever bananas come from.
So answer me this: does eating bananas actually prevent me getting cramps in my feet? Is there something else (with less of a carbon footprint) that I could eat instead?
Since you’re travelling around, I can’t gauge the potential carbon footprint of every item you might eat whilst on two continents. Bear in mind that pumpkin and sunflower seeds, cocoa, paprika, chervil, avocados, nuts, salmon, orange juice, potato skin, beans, spinach, dried apricots and whelks are potasstic, so mix them all together into a delicious paste and carry it wherever you go for a portable potassium banquet.
Readers, you may offer your advice in the comments to our next questioneer, A Confused Girl:
I have a close male friend who has recently started displaying signals that he wants to take our friendship to the next level, but I’m not interested because I don’t want to ruin the friendship with him.
I’ve tried to make it clear to him and he has definitely toned down the flirting lately, so that’s good, but he keeps buying me things!
I’ve been unemployed for many months now and he’s been a great friend in helping me out of financial jams, but now the things he’s paying for me are just becoming too much!
Honestly, I can’t say that I’m not enjoying his gifts but I feel really guilty!
How do I tell my friend that he’s becoming far too generous without suggesting that I think he’s trying to bribe me into bed with him?
Here’s an idea: STOP ACCEPTING HIS GIFTS. Uncomfortable feelings of obligation, over!
As an aside: when somebody says they don’t want to get together with somebody lest they ‘ruin the friendship’, they should be honest and revise that statement to ‘because really I don’t fancy him/her’. Right?
With the Great British Sports Day in full swing, we’ve had a record-breaking number of emails asking the same question, to whit:
Have you ever noticed that the London 2012 Olympics symbol looks like Maggie Simpson giving a blow job?
Actually, questioneers, in the five years since said logo was unveiled then plastered over every available surface in our home city, it has been noted.
Here’s a far more observant Olympics question from Maddy:
Why is John Inverdale so creepy?
It’s not a scientific answer, but I think it’s because something about the arrangement of his face suggests he’s a lost Gelfling from Dark Crystal.
Guys. Why are you bothering with the London Olympics, when you need to preserve your energy for the year’s most important contest? That’s right – the British Firework Championships are only days away! And at least one of Team AMT should be looking to start a new career there, as we discover in Answer Me This! Episode 226. Prepare to detonate:
Also going off in the episode:
Mass Market Muesli
clutch bags for the Third World
immersive theatre
psychic jurors
hipster aprons
teacher sadism by proxy
Routemaster buses
the Penguin Shwopping vs. consumerism
Captain Hook vs. Gordon Ramsay us vs. Bob Dylan
and
‘London’s Best Scare Experience 2008-2011’.
Plus: Olly has a damp stinky manbag; Helen errs by bringing actual fruit to the Apple store; and Martin the Sound Man recommends not trying to multitask during sexual activity if you’re a novice.
This week’s Bit of Crap on the App is a question from Kenny, about whether he was wrong to fuck over his work buddy in order to score a promotion. Is it a fair case of survival of the fittest, or survival of the fuckiest? Find out on iDevices and Android.
You can also find out a whole lot if you listen to the AMT Sports Day. Most of that lot will be about sport, but since the Olympics is currently in full swing, you’d only be having to listen to sports commentators rabbiting on anyway whenever you turn on the television. Us or them, US OR THEM???
It only remains for us to ask you to ask us something: send your QUESTIONS as voicemails to the Question Line (Skype answermethis or dial 0208 123 5877) or as emails to answermethispodcast@googlemail.com.
Readers, here is a question for you to chew on from David from Whitstable:
I love Pick’n’Mix. It is ace. My bag/tub always contains white mice, fizzy cola bottles, those prawn things, those white buttons with hundreds and thousands. Maybe a jelly snake.
Answer me this: What is your strategy at Pick’n’Mix? Do you go for variety, or quantity? Or do you always get the same ones?
Well obviously variety rather than a large quantity of one thing, which one could buy elsewhere for less money. But with experience, one learns not to dally with the rubbish ones – the coconut mushrooms, the rum balls, the fudge which is invariably disappointing. One hones one’s selection, and also cannily avoids the heavy ones, though personally I’ll make an exception for the chocolate Brazils.
Since Olly has already elaborated upon his tactics in the AMT book, it’s up to you to go to the comments and enlighten David upon your own Pick’n’Mixing strategy.
Something unlikely in last week’s episode stirred the neurones of George here:
Regarding your offhand comments regarding the propensity of nooks by comparison to crannies: I though that crannies were the raised spaces surrounded by nooks. Thus, a cranny is defined by the absence created by nooks.
Assuming that is correct, then the world at large is mostly crannies, due to the relatively few nooks.
So, please answer me this, how far wrong is my assumption?
So far wrong that you are the very opposite of right, George! Observe how the dictionary defines ‘cranny’:
A small out-of-the-way place or obscure corner; nook.
If it’s any comfort, there IS another sense of cranny. But the dictionary has yet to validate it:
Let us know whether that mug can survive a few rounds with the hippies, Sage. In fact, buy a range of different mugs, keep a spreadsheet of how each model fares over a few months in the squat, then in a few months try to get your findings published in an academic journal. I’m sure they’ve all been waiting for a comparative study of mugs versus hippies.
“Yikes! I think I just saw Gerard Butler skulking in the corner.”
Apparently if you’re born ugly, you’re allowed to act like a total dick! That’s what we have learnt from today’s lesson in classic French literature from Chris from Cardiff, Australia:
In AMT225, you discussed whether the Phantom is good or evil.
I can’t speak for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s intentions, but having read the original novel by Gaston Leroux I can say that his impression of Erik (the Phantom) is that he was a genius driven to a violent distrust of humanity resulting from being so hideously deformed from birth, and thus that his actions were the result of desperation. Erik’s actions were undoubtedly evil, but nevertheless he deserves to be pitied for the life he was forced to lead by society:
Poor, unhappy Erik! Shall we pity him? Shall we curse him? He asked only to be “some one”, like everybody else. But he was too ugly! And he had to hide his genius or use it to play tricks with, when, with an ordinary face, he would have been one of the most distinguished of mankind! He had a heart that could have held the empire of the world; and, in the end, he had to content himself with a cellar. Ah, yes, we must needs pity the Opera Ghost.
Of course, it’s hardly surprising that he turned out evil… There aren’t many “good guys” who would build a vast underground forest out of iron in which people could hang themselves or be baked alive.
Good point, Chris, but we should also bear in mind that anybody who decides to spend considerable time and resources building a fancy subterrannean torture chamber is probably evil beforehand, rather than becoming so as a result of having access to such a place.
Unless the Phantom did have perfectly innocent reasons for building it. Perhaps he had expected the baking-hot room with the iron trees would be the perfect place in which to dry his laundry. Even ugly opera ghosts should have the right to wear underwear that isn’t damp!
Here’s another eerie case of mistaken identity, from Jen in Wisconsin:
One day I was out hiking while a football (American football) game was happening in the stadium downtown. When I got home, my answering machine was full of worried messages from far and wide inquiring after my health and safety, sympathies, and telling me not to worry about coming in to work the next day.
Baffled, I returned one of the calls to discover that there had been a stampede of fans at the stadium earlier in the day, and the media had gotten many shots of a young woman who must have looked terribly similar to me trapped against a chain fence and crying. It had been picked up by CNN and run nation-wide, hence the phone calls.
Several years later, I was in a bar, when a somewhat older man asked me out on a date. He remarked that he and his wife were splitting up, and how much I resembled his kids’ former au pair. (Won’t go into the creepiness factor of that here.) I responded that that was the second time I’d heard I had a twin in town, and I repeated the story I just told you. Small world – his French au pair was the girl who had been at that football game and had gotten caught in the crush. I’m happy to say that she was, in the end, all right. I’m sure her family got her the hell out of America after that.
And did you get the hell out of that bar, Jen, or do chat-up lines about au pairs’ near death experiences actually work?
When you woke up this morning, listeners, did you realise this would be the day that Olly revealed how he is in possession of the local equivalent of one of John Wayne Gacy’s prison paintings?
Well, it is that day. Assuming you go ahead and listen to Answer Me This! Episode 225 rather than choose to continue living in ignorance:
Wherein we contemplate:
Danny Boyle
morality in musicals
shouting at children
Ramadan for Olympians
masks
hippie housemates
Maroon 5 vs. pole vaulters
Chicago vs. Bury St Edmunds
Outer Mongolia vs. Darkest Peru Mrs Lovett vs. Wagamama
the Phantom of the Opera vs. The Collector
Timbuktu
what Mein Kampf is missing (aside from a GSOH of course)
ostentatious eccentricity nooks and crannies Coinstar
Hitler’s watercolours
and
Sesame Snaps.
Plus: climbing upon Nelson’s Column, Olly almost exposes his own column; Helen misses the cupboard in which she hid from childhood; and Martin the Sound Man discovers his spirit flower.
This week’s Bit of Crap on the App (available on iDevices and Android) includes the next episode in the series begun by Lauren from Brooklyn in AMT224, ‘Is it OK to steal?’ In today’s thrilling installment, Mike from Crofton Park asks whether he’s allowed to steal his broadband package. How can it be stealing when you can’t even SEE it, right?
If, like Mike and Lauren, you’re tussling with your moral compass – or any other query is bothering you – allow us to solve your problems for you: send your QUESTIONS as voicemails to the Question Line (dial 0208 123 5877 or Skype answermethis) or emails to answermethispodcast@googlemail.com.
You should click here if you’re in the market for a hippie-proof AMT mug, which must be nigh indestructable if it’s survived five years in our company. If you want to survive 59 minutes 33 seconds more of our company, please invest in the AMT Sports Day too, because on the eve of the Olympics, it would be impolite not to.
I’m completely bored of Fifty Shades of Grey, and I haven’t even read it. I’m even bored of all the humorous deconstruction of it, but our next questioneer Mike from Shropshire may have hit on a way to quell some of the public enthusiasm for the phapping phenomenon:
Many women I know are putting status updates on Facebook telling us all that they are reading Fifty Shades of Grey. Some of these people are also professional colleagues of mine.
In view of this new openness about reading of pornography, answer me this – is it now acceptable for me to tell the world on Facebook what porn videos I am watching?
Readers, what do you reckon? Tell us in the comments – if you’re not too busy being tied to your bedposts by an arrogant businessman, or whatever.
As a 
Answer Me This! Podcast 