In case you were wondering how fares Kris from Durham from last week’s episode, he has written to update us on how his ex-girlfriend continues to take advantage of him:
Last week she said the animal rescue she worked for needed help with posters for an event as their graphic designer had dropped them last minute. Guess which bloody muggins went and did the work! ME. OK, it was for “Charidee” and it saves little dogs’ and cats’ lives, but you’re right – she’s being a twat.
She even said “This is really fucked up, isn’t it? That I keep asking you for advice on him and all that jazz?” I’m aware it’s beyond cretinous of me to think that this gentleman (who she’s already expressing concerns over, due to his lack of texting in between their dates) has no future and that realistically I can and should try to win her back?
I don’t want to get all Romeo and Juliet on things, but I genuinely love her, it was just a bumpy patch and long distance is a twat at the best of times. Truth be told, we’d discussed the future, and she was drunk.
I’ve genuinely no idea what to do?
We already told you what to do, Kris: CUT OUT THIS SELFISH BITCH. She’s happy to keep stringing you along while she’s exploring other options; she has already shown gross insensitivity in regaling you with tales of her sexual exploits with somebody else; and now she’s also taking advantage of your professional skills for free! Why why why why WHY would you want to win back this prize piece?
Tough love time, Kris – here’s what you have to do:
i) stop answering her calls and emails;
ii) give yourself some time to grieve for the relationship, without her popping up all the time to ruin your progress with learning to live without her;
iii) get some self-respect;
iv) send her an invoice for the posters.
As we said last week, we are too lazy to decant canned foods, but Scott has been in touch to tell us how we can expect to die from doing so:
I work at a hotel so I’ve attended many a mandatory food safety training course. I can tell you as far as I know there are three (dubious) reasons why you shouldn’t store food in opened cans:
1. Botulism. Historically you could get botulism from canned food. Apparently the botulism spores stick to the inside of the can, so storing the food in the can will increase exposure to the spores. However with modern canning processes, botulism has been pretty much eradicated.
2. People tend to leave metal utensils in the cans as well. Two different metals in a liquid that is salty or acidic can create a battery. This electrolytic reaction can alter the chemical composition of the food which could be bad. i.e. corrode the metal in the can into the food.
3. In commercial kitchens chefs who don’t decant cans are lazy and therefore may be too lazy to have good hygiene practices. (This is the main reason I was given.)
I do know that if you own a commercial kitchen and you have a visit from an environmental health officer, there is a pretty hefty fine if they find any food stored in opened cans – I think it’s in the thousands.
Thanks, Scott! We are unlikely to change our lazy ways; in fact we will be intensifying the laziness by no longer answering the doorbell, in case it is an environmental health officer.
If you want some of the good stuff, Michael from Ealing knows someone who can get some for you:
With reference to Kevin’s dilemma about wanting to try cannabis – my dad said a very similar thing. However, he was 84 at the time. So, for his 85th birthday I gave him a joint. I was 55 at the time – yes, a child of the 60s, so had a tiny bit of previous! Nevertheless, hadn’t smoked in years, so I did have to source it from a young woman at work who I knew indulged (I run a funky kind of company). Anyway, I had the joy of getting stoned with my dad round the kitchen table. He didn’t know whether it was the joint or his ageing mind that made him keep forgetting things. But, boy, did we laugh!
He died four years later and I’m so glad I was able to fulfil one of his desires to fully experience the world before he went. I’m not advocating trying everything (now a venerable elder myself) and certainly the dope today is nowhere near as safe as it was, but experiencing life is what’s important as long as you don’t harm anyone or yourself. Mind you – that’s a huge debatable question in itself.
It is, it is – and if any of you want to debate that, you may use the comments as your own Model United Nations.
Meanwhile, does anyone else think that Michael’s story is perfect for a sweet multi-generation stoner comedy from one of Judd Apatow’s acolytes? Maybe with Christopher Plummer reprising his Beginners role as the dad, Tim Robbins as the son, Maggie Gyllenhaal as the dealer at work, and Paul Giamatti as the oddball neighbour who wants in on the action. Oh, and in the fictionalised version, Michael from Ealing also should have a strait-laced teenage son who disapproves (but, of course, comes around in the end when he sees how happy his grandpa is in his twilight years). Michael Cera’s a shoo-in.
This week, we learn that AMT is the name of a legal high. Seeing as legal highs are usually just brain-liquifying chemical syntheses that haven’t been made illegal yet, we cannot recommend trying it. We can, however, recommend AMT214, which is fully legal and will only have mildly detrimental effects upon your brain:
Today we contemplate:
facial fuzz as feminist issue The Beggar’s Opera Ziggy Stardust
‘club dancing’
crowd control
Häagen-Dazs vs. Cadbury’s Flake
death by tinned peaches
Kodak’s adventures in weapon development Forgetting Sarah Marshall transposed to Durham
stuffed vine leaves
a night of creamy indulgence
and
watching Alien stoned.
Plus: Olly doesn’t think Mila Kunis should be doing a desk job, even in these times of scarce employment; Helen wonders what Kim Kardashian would look like without the intervention of depilators; and Martin the Sound Man can pronounce ‘cyanoacrylate’, because he speaks industrial adhesive fluently.
This week’s Bit of Crap on the App (available for iDevices or Android) goes further than today’s question about Downing Street and wonders what is behind the famous door of Number 10. According to Olly, it is our nation’s leaders attending to their itchy arses.
If your own itchy arse ever allows you to use your hands for something else for a moment, use them to send us a QUESTION, either by writing an email to answermethispodcast@googlemail.com or picking up the phone and leaving a voicemail on the Question Line (dial 0208 123 5877 or Skype answermethis).
And finally: if we’ve ever made anyone puke through the podcast, we would like to take this opportunity to apologise.
Here’s a tale from Jordan from Bridgend which is shaping up to be a Welsh version of Pacific Heights:
I work once a week in my local charity shop and one week, this woman came in, clearly drunk and off her face on drugs by the way she was speaking and walking. She asked me where the childrens clothing was, so I kindly showed her. She collected two pairs of children’s jeans aged 12-13 and asked if she could try them on; I said it was fine and I showed her the changing rooms. She came out of the changing rooms and said that they were both a little bit loose on her so she would think about having them and come back again.
A few weeks later on my way home from college on the local bus, the same women got on and sat with me at the back of the bus. She was still in the same state as I last saw her, She recognized me from the charity shop. She was asking me all sorts of questions such as do I smoke, do I have tattoos, where do I live etc, and then she asked me if I was a buffer. But randomly I said yes even though I did not understand her question. After me saying yes I was a buffer, she did not say no more. I got off the bus and she stayed on it…
But two weeks ago my next door neighbour moved out, and to my despair I found out this women from the bus is now living next door with her boyfriend and I have been told that they are both alcoholic drug-taking mental freaks. Ever since I found out they live next door I have been hiding away in my room. Answer me this: what should I do? And what on god’s earth is a buffer? What have I let myself in for? Should I let her know I live next door!?
The answer to that last question is obviously NO. Although they will surely find out soon enough, when you run out of food and supplies and are smoked out of the house. You could try to confine your entrances and exits to, say, 7am, a time of day where the average commuter or parent of young children is up and at’em, but the average drugged-up alcoholic is not. Obviously, when they do discover your whereabouts, don’t feel pressured into inviting them round for some welcoming drinks and nibbles, or into lending them your lawnmower.
Readers, you’re more reliable than the OED – can you step in to define ‘buffer’ for Jordan? Presumably his neighbour was not referring to the social media app, the shock absorber for trains, or the velvety thing that makes your shoes shiny.
Gordon here has a problem that didn’t exist back in the days when people had to pay to develop photos:
One of my best friends from school uses a popular Face-themed Social Network that I also use.
I have her in my close friends list because she is nice, and I am interested in funny things she might say, and what she gets up to.
However, for the past year she has had a – admittedly cute – baby. Which she posts pictures of approximately 6 million times a day.
I’m beginning to think she may be a crazy baby lady in the same way I am becoming a crazy cat man.
Is there any way to make her stop posting so many baby pictures without putting her on my ‘acquaintances’ list?
I’ve been considering recreating all her baby pictures with my cats. Would this be too much? I plan to have a baby one day, but hope I can restrain myself from posting so many baby pictures, because it’s pretty annoying, and it’s kind of creepy in a way (babies need privacy!)
I’m right, right?
So answer me this: what do I do?
p.s. my wife agrees with me.
Good, Gordon, good – I’d hate to hear this VERY SERIOUS PROBLEM was causing a breach in your marriage on top of all the other havoc it is wreaking.
As a fellow Facebook user I am, of course, familiar with this scenario; but to be fair to the baby-owners, whenever they post a picture of it, everyone goes nuts over it, so perhaps your friend is just responding to demand. If you really want to deter her, you could start adding faintly lecherous comments to the photos, so that she’s too creeped out to post any more. She will probably also be too creeped out to be your friend any more, but as aforementioned, this is a VERY SERIOUS PROBLEM and thus demands radical solutions.
But, Gordon, since you confessed you are a Crazy Cat Man, I see you as even more of a problem than this woman: if I look to the future, when you have had that baby you talk about, you will forever thereafter crap all over your friends’ feeds with incessant pictures of both the baby AND the cat – and, inevitably, the pictures of the baby and the cat TOGETHER.
So I refuse to help you, but readers, you are welcome to go to the comments to dispense advice to Gordon. Or maybe you can just post pictures of your babies, to wind him up.
Mazel tov to our nearlywed next correspondent, Dominic:
I’m to be married to my beautiful fiancé Laura on Friday 11th May, and shortly afterwards we fly to Mexico for our honeymoon (so you can imagine how helpful it was to learn the history of nachos last week!). This will be an eleven-hour flight with just one problem – I have a pathological fear of flying. This is what happens when you utter the phrase “Wherever you want to go, darling…”
Anyway, answer me this – what can I do for eleven hours on a flight to distract myself from the fact that I am just the grace of God away from plummeting to my death?
Dominic! That’s what they have the in-flight entertainment system for! So that people like you don’t run up and down the aisles screaming with a rosary in your hand, but instead sit quietly watching recent cinema hits (NB take your own noise-cancelling headphones, partly because the ones the airline supplies are rubbish, and partly to block out the perfectly normal plane-creaks that you will interpret as a wing about to fall off).
If your airline is a primitive one with no seat-back TVs, substitute with a gripping airport novel. Or Valium.
Readers, any suggestions to quell Dominic’s terror? Unfortunately it is too short notice for hypnosis or any other form of phobia-curing therapy, so the best he can presently hope for is the psychological equivalent of a nicotine patch.
We’ve had a couple of bits of feedback on some slightly older episodes of AMT. Firstly, Stevie-Rhiannon and Tyler in Calgary pipe up:
During episode 207 you answered a question about the fountains in Trafalgar Square.
The pennies thrown into the water at “Its a Small World” in Walt Disney World are donated to the Make a Wish foundation and are cleaned out every six months. We both worked at EPCOT last year and have heard that the last amount gathered was over $1,000,000.
That is a very impressive and heart-warming fact! What a rare combo. However, Disney must somewhat benefit from the Make a Wish foundation, seeing as almost all the wishes are to go to Disney. I bet Disney also have stakes in a swimming-with-dolphins centre, just so they make a clean sweep.
Jessica from Launceston has a comment upon a longer-ago episode:
Do you remember episode 193 when you talked about “I Can’t Believe it’s not Butter”? Anyway, I was browsing the interwebs and found this:
I hope you find this significantly diverting.
Diverting indeed! I’m very taken by the idea of Schrödinger’s butter, although I’d worry that when I opened lid I’d find a dead cat inside.
There’s been a lot of talk of Mexican food lately on Answer Me This!. We make no apologies for this. It is a magnificent cuisine. Episode 213 continues the theme, as we chomp on the history of nachos; click below to chomp on the episode:
Plus: Olly apparently spends a lot of time looking at horses’ privates; Helen concocts an unusual analogy for Oliver Cromwell and the, er, Roundheads; and Martin the Sound Man somehow enjoys the company of this dickhead, who is likely to be cited as the co-respondent when Helen files the divorce papers.
This week’s Bit of Crap on the App (available for iDevices or Android) is a question from Harriet in York, concerning the self-replicating Magnum Infinity. Soon to be rebranded the Magnum Metaphor after an investigation by the Advertising Standards Authority.
There is additional noise for you to enjoy this week courtesy of Martin and the FIFTIETH episode of his Sound of the Ladies podcast. It’s a song about bears or Creation Records or something – click here to check it out.
Then, formulate a QUESTION and send it to us, as a voicemail to the Question Line (dial 0208 123 5877 or Skype answermethis) or an email to answermethispodcast@googlemail.com.
I have a female friend that has a boyfriend, but things with him are not going very well and they surely will break up soon. I really like my friend but I don’t want to look like I’m just waiting for her to break up to ask her out.
So answer me this: how can I confess to this girl without looking that I was with her all this time just waiting for her to break up with this boyfriend?
Does it actually matter that it looks that way? Surely the greater problem is the fact that she is still with her boyfriend. While you may be confident that they are on the rocks, that does not mean she is actually single, and/or open to new offers.
However, you’re clearly going to steam in and proposition her anyway, so I have no counsel for you. Readers, if you would be so kind in my stead, please go to the comments and coach Juan for this moment.
Wedding planning! So fraught. What if the band doesn’t match the chair-bows? Who has to sit next to racist Aunty Denise? And now Ross faces a problem that Queen Victoria didn’t have to consider prior to her nuptuals. He says:
I’m getting married in December and my girlfriend (we don’t use the ‘f’ word) and I both want quite a relaxed, non-traditional wedding that’s fun for us and our friends. However, I think some of her plans might have gone too far that route so please answer me this: should I let her book the bouncy castle that she wants for our reception?
I’m firmly in the ‘no’ camp because the men will be in suits, the women in dresses, they’ll all be hammered and I don’t want to have to clear vomit off a bouncy castle.
Also it’ll be December, and anyone who has ever bounced on a bouncy castle covered in rain and icicles knows THAT IS WHEN BROKEN NECKS HAPPEN.
Now, I’m all in favour of fun at weddings – everyone at mine thought that sitting mock Maths A-Level papers between the dinner and the dancing was a neat idea! – but I agree with Ross’s qualms about how this might not be the optimal type of fun. For a bunch of adults. Formally dressed. Who have been drinking for six hours already.
Instead I’d recommend diverting the bouncy castle funds towards the cheeseboard. The cheeseboard at my wedding was EPIC. Ask anybody who was there (apart from the two vegans).
In the interests of democracy, however, I invite you readers to vote:
Ishbel from Kinross-shire is able to shed some light upon last week’s question about why Agas are so miraculous:
I grew up with an Aga. I realise that makes it sound like throughout my childhood it loved and fed me like a mother. This is accurate. There’s two hot plates and two ovens. Top oven is cooking central, bottom oven is cooler and heats plates, slow cooks meringues, dries kindling. You name it.
What you probably wouldn’t name is this next story. My friend’s grandpa was born at home, as was the wont of people a century ago. He was premature and seemed to be stillborn. The doctor had to tend to his dying mother and gave the dead baby to his granny to dispose of. She was ever the Victorian optimist and fed the baby brandy, wrapped him in cloths and put him in the bottom oven of their Aga, WITH THE DOOR CLOSED and looked after him there for A WEEK. When the doctor returned to check on the mother, the granny showed him the surviving baby in the oven and the doctor fainted. Said baby went on to live to nearly one hundred years old.
I believe that the young Australian lady will agree that this story quashes any reservations that she had about how boring Agas are. Maybe now she can ask her friends if they intend to use theirs to nurse back to life undead babies.
Gosh! Now I’d like to venture forth a new theory: that Jesus Christ was not laid to rest in the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea, but in the warming oven of an Aga. Of course the gospels changed ‘cast iron enamel door’ to a large stone, just to make it sound a bit more Biblical.
stoned.
:
Answer Me This! Podcast 