“Why Miss Figgins…y-y-you’re beautiful!” people far and wide have stammered at Alec, as he took off his spectacles and shook out his prim bun (or similar):
I am a 28 year old shop supervisor, working in Oxford.
Until very recently my sartorial preference could be described as “windswept extra in a Nirvana video”. I wear beaten up old jeans, converse boots and a variety of black t-shirts and open shirts. Moreover, I had a massive mop of extremely curly, shoulder length, blondish-brown hair.
Last Wednesday, however, I finally got sick of the effort required in keeping my hair clean and tangle-free. I went to my local hairdresser and I was given a much more trendy short back and sides. Upon arrival at work on Thursday, there was a collective intake of breath of surprise at the change. Additionally some very regular customers asked me if I had just started (I’ve been there for nearly 3 years).
General consensus on my new look is that I now “look cool”. Given that I am still tall and lanky and still dress like 1992 never ended, I am somewhat sceptical of this new opinion.
So, please answer me this:
My whole life, have I only ever been a £25 haircut away from looking cool? Really? Is that all it took?
Yes! In fact, sometimes it only takes a careful blow-dry and a dressing-up montage – have you never seen any Hollywood films ever, Alec? But never forget that you’re still the same old dorky Alec beneath the hair, so even though Freddie Prinze Jr is now proudly taking you to the dance, to the shock of the In Crowd, you want to make sure that he’ll love the ugly duckling you really are.
The morals of the story are a) people are shallow, b) a decent haircut CAN be a passage to a new improved life, c) the 90s revival is only going to work with 21st-century styling.
Seeing as covert surveillance on unsuspecting targets seems such a hot topic in the British media lately, let’s address the following question from Melissa from Kansas:
Recently my ex-boyfriend came back on leave from being injured like a ridiculous idiot tripping like a lunatic in the middle of a flipping war.
Anyway, I saw him in the parking lot of a local store and wondered what he was up to so I tried to check out his Facebook page, but he had blocked me. So my question is, would it be creepy if I made a separate Facebook profile just to keep tabs on the asswipe?
Of course it would be creepy! That is, if he’d even agree accept the friend request of someone he’s never heard of who has zero other friends (unless you were planning to track several other estranged acquaintances too). Casting yourself in a Psycho Ex-Girlfriend role would hardly reflect well on you either; nor would the decision to such lengths to spy upon somebody whom you believe to be an ‘asswipe’, rather than moving the hell on and avoiding psychological attrition at your own hand. Lastly, you do NOT want to be like any of the people in this story, you really don’t.
Sanctimonious lecturing over, let’s look at Melissa’s supplementary question:
Have any of you ever felt the impulse to check up on an ex?
Of course! Who hasn’t? We like to make sure that our former paramours are mere shells of human beings after we’ve finished with them, drifting through their drab wretched half-lives, ever bereft without us…or we at least like to know that they are aging prematurely. However we never stooped to such schemes as Melissa’s; we prefer to use flying monkeys for those dirty jobs.
Anyway, readers, have you ever in the past yielded to your inner Glenn Mulcaire and found out anything exciting about your ex? And how far did you go in the endeavour? Moving in next door would count as ‘far’. This would count as ‘definitely too far’.
Have you lost the key to your padlocked shed and desperately need to get your lawnmower out? Are you yearning to break out of a very spindly prison cell? Or do you just like threatening-looking tools? If so, call on Brigade for assistance:
Last Friday I parked my bike at a quiet train station, before taking the train to see my parents in the countryside. When I returned Sunday afternoon, I unlocked it, packed my stuff onto it, and then spent a few minutes not understanding why it wouldn’t move. It turned out that somebody else had locked it to the bike stand (why, oh why? My boyfriend suggests some teenagers having fun, but what kind of fun is that? In my days, we vandalised bikes, we did not make them
extra-unstealable).
The next day, I shelled out the equivalent of £37 to buy a bolt cutter (since no-one I knew had one I could borrow), and went back to regain control over my bike. Amazingly, no-one seemed to find anything remarkable about a 30ish woman cutting a wire lock in plain view at midday.
I went home with my bike and my bolt cutter, wondering if I would ever use this tool again. However, spending £37 just to retrieve a bike seems a bit on the expensive side, and I would like to get a bit more out of my purchase, if at all possible. So, answer me this: What (non-criminal) uses for a bolt cutter can you think of?
Easy: insinuate yourself with the band of vagabonds who did this to your bike, and linger at the bike stands with which they’ve recently interfered with. When the owners of the shackled bikes turn up, offer to cut the locks for them for a small fee. You’ll recoup the £37 in no time!
This week we, like you and every other breathing humanoid on this planet and the next, are transfixed by Wills’n’Kate’s working holiday in Canada. WHOSE HAND WILL THEY SHAKE NEXT? The suspense! Yet somehow we have torn ourselves away from the 24-hour royalwatch Jumbotron long enough to bring you Answer Me This! Episode 182:
This classic episode is available to BUY NOW for just 79p at the Answer Me This! Store, through a secure server, without DRM restriction. CLICK HERE to find out more and support our podcast. (This helps keep our most recent episodes free)
On our tour of topics, we respectfully nod at the following:
literal popcorn entertainment
Latin puns
orgiastic decor
the Leaning Tower of Pisa vs. the Windsor Crooked House
Jaws vs. Jurassic Park
Frank Gehry
top-down social change
moviedeaths.com
careless fingering
pocket fraud
and
Wetherspoons trainer snobs.
Plus: Olly doesn’t care what he looks like from behind, so hairdressers, let your imaginations run riot; Helen feels the full benefit of Olly’s wonderful manners; and Martin the Sound Man tells you how to customise your underpants for free. This week’s Bonus Bit of Crap on the App (available on iPhone or Android) is a treatise on why James Cameron’s forthcoming Titanic 3D must be stopped, and not just because nobody needs to see “I’m the king of the wooooooorld!” any more vividly realised.
We’re keen to collect as many QUESTIONS as Queen Middleton has bouquets from Canadian children – and to present them to us, you don’t even need to line the streets waving! You merely need to leave voicemails on the Question Line (dial 0208 123 5877 or find answermethis on Skype) or send emails to answermethispodcast@googlemail.com. But by all means imagine us clutching the questions affectionately to our bosoms, asking you a polite question about your charitable works, then moving on to the next prole.
Do you ever look in the mirror and see a stranger staring back? Or even, like Terri from Stockwell, found yourself in the midst of a getaway or near-death experience? Terri writes:
What’s the most inexplicable or out of character thing you’ve ever done? Earlier this year I tried to run out of a fish and chip shop without paying for my haddock and got chased down the street by the shop owner… I’d never previously stolen anything apart from stationery, and have to put it down to having broken up with my girlfriend two days previously and being a bit temporarily unhinged. Also, I once tried to climb a massive cliff with no safety equipment and almost died. But that was when I was 13.
Once I threw a newspaper in the bin rather than recycle it… Thankfully, readers, you seem an erratic bunch, with lives full of personal folly. So go forth to the comments and tell us your tales, which I’m sure will cheer up Terri as she awaits her trial for haddock theft.
Our next correspondent asked that their name and address be redacted, so they will henceforth be known as Captain Scammington:
I have hit on a way to get anything you want for what you want to pay – yes really, and this isn’t junk mail I promise.
On, shall we say, certain well-known online retail outlets, as well as buying new tat, you can sell your old tat. On certain well-known online retail outlets you will find a few big timers, using clever software, will always undercut your price by a penny – several times a day.
So you simply decide what it is you want to buy and the price you would like to pay for it. Check to see if big timer has the item (one doesn’t want to shit on one’s peers) and then tell a tiny fib that you have one already and put it up for sale. They will then lower the price of theirs to a penny under the price you’d like to pay for it – at which point you buy it. It’s very unlikely that someone will buy the one you ‘have’ in the meantime and if they do it’s very easy task to cancel the transaction. I ‘reckon’ you could get away with this maybe a half dozen times a year.
Now answer me this: is it so terribly wrong to fraudulently offer something for sale you don’t have (big business would never do that, would it?)? Or is it sticking it to the man and to be applauded?
Readers, you sit on all points of the moral compass. Is there something noble about sticking it to Big Business with a bit of petty crime? Is one foolish not to use the mildly naughty means at your disposal to bag yourself a bargain? Or is wrongdoing just plain wrong?
Whatever you say, though, I’m sure Captain Scammington will continue their cheapskate ruse until either they cook up an even better one, or they get struck by lightening.
If you’ve ever wondered what Martin the Sound Man does in his day job of “physicist”, take a look at this video here, and try not to get as much of a shock as Krish did:
Looking at the technology section on the BBC website, I clicked on the video link called ‘data visualisation’, being a 3D visualiser myself.
I paid half attention to the video, just seeing a chap being interviewed by a journalist, and saw the name Martin come up. I recognised the voice, it was the Sound Man. I saw the hairy scarf wrapped round his neck and that confirmed it for me. It’s well known to AMT listeners Martin is a hairy man.
How often does he appear on TV? Will he knock Brian Cox off his mantle by appearing on more TV shows?
I thought he did very well. I would be glad to see more TV appearances from Martin.
Wouldn’t we all! We’re still waiting to hear back from the casting director of BBC3’s Help! Everyone Keeps Mistaking Me For a Bear, but if any of the rest of you want to employ Martin on the TV networks that you run, do get in touch. Surely Professor Cox must be feeling a bit weary of sitting on the edge of cliffs explaining about atoms by now.
Craig from Louisville, Kentucky has some feedback which sounds like bollo to me:
US Sailors’ asymmetric ear-piercing is determined by which ocean they are deployed from. Left ear Atlantic, right ear Pacific. The right ear being for gays is due to US east coast bias that gays come from California.
Of course, there’s not a single gay on the east coast. Not in New York, Fire Island, Cape Cod, no!
Mark in Portland, Oregon also writes to us concerning something which sounds like bullshit (and in this case looks a bit like it too):
Recently a conversation came up about chocolate milk and a couple of my friends told me that chocolate milk is the pus and blood-tainted milk which is then covered up with the chocolatey color and smell so we don’t know it is, well, pus and blood. I half believe them and half hope that this is either no longer the case or simply myth. Please, for the sake of children everywhere, let us know!
I’d heard that most intensively-produced milk contains a few shots of pus, but now I’ll start looking out for a delicate pinkish tinge as well. If any of you readers work in the chocolate milk industry – or, better yet, are disgruntled former employees of the chocolate milk industry with an axe to grind – go to the comments to tell Mark whether or not he’s drinking pus and blood. Frankly a glass of that doesn’t sound much worse than flavoured milk to me.
Look. We don’t want to point fingers or anything, but if you are the person who rifled through Olly’s desk and stole the gold jacket he bought at the Strictly Come Dancing costume auction, GIVE IT BACK. It may have been years ago now, but as you can hear in Answer Me This! Episode 181, the pain is still all too raw:
This classic episode is available to BUY NOW for just 79p at the Answer Me This! Store, through a secure server, without DRM restriction. CLICK HERE to find out more and support our podcast. (This helps keep our most recent episodes free)
This week we also contemplate:
stagnant white scabs
fluorotrousers Rhydian
grievous misuse of the Keith and the Girl book
black pudding
Black Eyed Peas
manuka honey
Henry Holland aquarium pimp-shoes
Fruit and Fibre
Napoleon-compatible party themes
psychiatric facility reading matter
fish sausages
Baci
bees vs. babies
ice cream vs. ice lollies
globalisation vs. jokes
Seth Rogen vs. Olly Mann
our pitch for Wonderland
and
Elliott Gould.
Also – Olly’s not going to be inviting Mark Ronson on a trip to Topman anytime soon; Helen wonders about the secret life of Russell Brand and Katy Perry; and Martin the Sound Man finds the thing that keeps our conflict-strewn crazy world together: sausages. If only the UN would hurry up and realise.
This week’s Bonus Bit of Crap on the App (available on iPhone or Android) explains how Olly’s youthful ambition to be the next Christopher Pike was derailed by his innocence. Which is why he’s slumming it at AMT now rather than living in the gothy house that childish horror built.
You can be part of the childish horror that is next week’s episode by sending us your QUESTIONS – leave voicemails on the Question Line (dial 0208 123 5877 or find answermethis on Skype) or send emails to answermethispodcast@googlemail.com. Of course we will struggle to emulate this childish horror, but it’s good to have goals in life.
Pete from Lancaster has a workplace grievance crossed with a moral dilemma:
I work with some people who are freelance and I know for a fact they don’t pay tax! They work at a telesales company and arse around a lot when they should be bringing money in. Annoying.
Please answer me this:
Should I grass them up to the taxman in this age of austerity? Or is unfair to do that?
Aww, Team AMT has its own little late-period Howard Hughes! Molly from London writes:
In episode 157, you discussed what one could with spare hair. One of the options given was to send of the a charity that used it for cleaning up oil spills. Having long, thick hair that is prone to shedding, I began to collect it in an old, clean, Nutella jar.
When people I know heard this, they tended to react negatively, and my boyfriend wouldn’t stay over in my room. However, I was righteous, and knew that I could take a little mockery if it meant that the people and animals suffering because of oil spills could be helped in a small way by me.
The jar was getting very full, and starting to become reminiscent of the exhibition I saw at Auschwitz, of all the Jewish hair the Nazis had collected for clothing, so I decided to send it off to the charity. However, when I looked it up, I found that they were no longer collecting hair!
Noooooo! But let’s not allow that lovely jar of hair go to waste. Anyone here want it? Perhaps you’ve got a small oil-spill in the kitchen that needs taking care of; or you’re in need of a witch jar.
This seems an intelligent thesis from Tom from San Francisco: A couple of episodes back, you discussed why plain nuts are more expensive than salted, dry-roasted or other flavored nuts, even though it seems like they should cost less.
I’m not in the industry, but I do have another theory in addition to the ones you offered: when making salted or seasoned nuts, it’s possible to use lower quality (and thus cheaper) nuts in the process, and the salts and flavours hide the fact that the quality is lower.
Plain nuts, by comparison, need to taste good in order to sell, and they could be using more expensive high-quality nuts for this purpose.
Are any of you readers in the nut industry? Can you confirm Tom’s theory, or reveal the darker secret of the nut pricing disparity? The world deserves to know.
was derailed by his innocence. Which is why he’s slumming it at AMT now rather than living in the gothy house that childish horror built.
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