February 24, 2011 by Helen Zaltzman
** Click here for Episode 167 **
Now whoever could have predicted that the topic of famous Belgians would get you so hot and bothered? Here are just a few of the slew of emails we’ve had about it. First up are Elodia & Julian:
We were both born and brought up in Belgium, and together with our fellow expats we’ve been defending the reputation of the country we call home for as long as we can remember. So here is a list of famous Belgians, to quell once for the misapprehension that “there are no famous Belgians”.
Hergé (author of the Tintin comic books)
Kim Clijsters (professional tennis player)
Simenon (writer, author of the Maigret novels)
Eddy Merckx (professional cyclist)
Jean-Claude Van Damme (actor)
Adolphe Sax (invented the saxophone)
Erasme (politician, active in the creation of the Belgian constitution)
Georges Lemaitre (proposed what became the big bang theory)
Magritte (artist)
Rubens (Flemish baroque painter)
Peyot (author of the Smurf comic books)
K’s choice (pop-rock band)
Hooverphonic (pop/rock band)
Vaya con Dios (latin band)
……..there are more……..
We hope this clears up any confusion as to the importance of our dear old waffle-land.
Despite that valiant effort (which does ignore the rule imposed by my mean schoolteacher, who specified no sports players), this email from Chick from Leeds shows even Belgians don’t necessarily have great faith in their homeland’s position in the celebrity galaxy:
I remember when I was about 10 we were in a restaurant in Belgium, and we asked our Belgian waiter to name ten famous Belgians. Off the top of his head he got about four – Jean Claude Van Damme, Hergé, former footballer Giles de Bilde, and the King of Belgium(!) – before pondering for a moment and walking off saying ‘I’ll phone my mother’.
He’s a long way from Belgium, but Steve from Oakland, California still has nominees:
Aside from the Belgian Waffle I thought of three famous Belgians right away:
– Epic mass-murderer Leopold II
– Epic depictor-of-mostly-exposed-buttocks Peter Paul Rubens
– Epic kicker-of-faces Jean-Claude Van Damme.
So, it looks like the consensus nominates Van Damme and Hergé as the most famous Belgians, unlikely equals that they are. If you’re still in doubt, however, you may like to peruse this site that Michael from Brisbane kindly brought to our attention: famousbelgians.net. But take note that in their top 10 they include the not-Belgian Audrey Hepburn and the inventor of Bakelite. That’s all I’m saying.
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Posted in Answer Us Back! Your time to opine | 3 Comments »
February 23, 2011 by Helen Zaltzman
** Click here for Episode 167 **
History Corner now, which for reasons of economy this week will be combined with Bawdy Corner. Shaun from Canton, Massachusetts writes:
You recently requested examples of historical glory holes. I would suggest the hole in Pasiphaë’s hollow wooden bull through which she mated with a bull, producing the Minotaur.
Though the incident is mythological, it suggests that the concept would have been known to the Ancient Greeks, though they don’t seem to have properly worked out how best to use such powerful sexual technology.
How do you know, Shaun? For all we can tell, finding the wherewithal by which to allow humans to mate with unwitting bulls might have been the pinnacle of Grecian sexual ambition. Perhaps it is in fact we moderners who are missing out on the zenith of erotic joy.
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February 23, 2011 by Helen Zaltzman
Look, he's right there!
** Click here for Episode 167 **
You know how much we love getting feedback from the horse’s mouth, and in this case, we equally love getting feedback from the horse’s nephew’s mouth. Behold the following email from Marc:
I was explaining to my aunt your explanation about why Where’s Wally? is called Where’s Waldo? in the US, as she used to work in children’s publishing (for the company who published Where’s Wally?), and she is friends with Martin Handford. She got quite cross – but then she’s a bit mental and tends to get cross about most things – like errant apostrophes and men with obvious haircuts.
I’m afraid you got the Where’s Wally? thing wrong on both counts.
Martin Handford didn’t name the book. He was an illustrator who liked doing complex crowd scenes. A writer friend of his suggested that he do a kind of puzzle book in which you have to find a character in the crowd scene. So he drew this hapless stripy geeky bloke. An editor at Walker Books gave him the name Wally – because it was a word in popular usage at the time.
When they sold the rights to the US, the American publishers were worried about copyright infringement because there was already a children’s book called Where’s Wallace?. Waldo seemed like a good alternative. No focus groups were involved. Publishing, especially children’s book publishing, in the 1980s was not that advanced.
So hope that clears things up. We used to get hand drawn Christmas cards from Martin Handford back in the 80s – to be honest I always used to hate the Wally books though. We had all of them. Plus all the merchandise – such as it was. All shit. Much preferred TinTin and Asterix books.
OUCH. I hope Martin Handford is not reading this.
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February 22, 2011 by Helen Zaltzman
** Click here for Episode 167 **
The following email from Alan in Glasgow made my day, and possibly also my week, month and, dammit, year:
Hello! I’ve just been catching up on some of the last few podcasts and came across the Bouncy Roulette mention.
I can happily say this does exist, although it works more with the player sitting atop a spinning circular board then falling off onto a corresponding number.
Below is a picture of a slightly bemused bouncy roulette operator in a room that looks far too small for such an activity. The twat in the suit is myself.
‘Twat in the suit’? Alan, you are the king of kings!
And now I know what we’re going to be doing with the spare room.
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February 22, 2011 by Helen Zaltzman
** Click here for Episode 167 **
Here’s some feedback from unimpeachably chivalrous Luke from Stockport:
In response to the ‘nude-pictures-of-a-friend’ topic in episode 167:
My best female friends sent pictures of them in underwear to their boyfriends, and I decided to be trusting and didn’t look at it, even when it was shoved in my face by everybody who had it on their phones due to the boyfriends being dickheads.
To advise you, this had no benefits, they didn’t give a shit, so bonk off to the pictures before your friend finds them and tells you to delete them.
It’s like that adage, ‘regret the things you did do, not the things you didn’t’, isn’t it? Or is it like that adage, ‘keep your friends close, but not close enough to beat off over them’? It’s so hard to pick the right adage in a sticky situation.
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February 17, 2011 by Helen Zaltzman
MISSING: 35-year-old man, answers to the name ‘Nelly’. Last seen wearing a backwards cap and a T-shirt 5 sizes too big for him. If anyone has information leading to the safe return of Nelly, please call 0800-555-RECENTWORKDIDNOTMAKEANIMPACTINTHEUKCHARTS.
Then, while you wait anxiously for news, listen to Answer Me This! Episode 167:
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)
It’s not just Nelly missing. Where’s Wally? Where’s Waldo? Where’s Walter? It’s an epidemic of missing men… But not missing podcast-topics, which this week include:
electoral register unfairness
fake tan lines
John Krasinski
D-locks
Martin Handford
Lake Havasu City
TK Maxx vs. TJ Maxx
Walkers Crisps vs. the American War of Independence
the kingdom of Mercia vs. the kingdom of Wessex
Roger Federer vs. William Tell
Harry Potter vs. Queen Victoria
inappropriate poetry corner
massivesnouts.com
passive-aggressive chairs
Soulwax
the wrong London Bridge
the Ponte Vecchio
and
Mark Foster (whoooooo?).
Plus: Olly touches himself up – just in Photoshop, of course; Helen enjoys her own smutty courtroom drama; and Martin the Sound Man tells you what is cool – this is. So that’s 70s revival and spindly bridges on the style list for spring/summer 2011, OK?
This week’s Bit of Crap on the App (available for iPhone or Android) is a question from Ken in Brooklyn about the pickelhaube, one of the few headgear-styles yet to be revived by hipsters. Give them a few more weeks.
Now rack your brains for QUESTIONS, then send them to us in voicemail form to the Question Line (dial 0208 123 5877 or findanswermethis on Skype) or as emails to answermethispodcast@googlemail.com. Then we can weave more podcasts out of them. Score!
See you next week,
Helen & Olly
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Tags: Adam Ant, adaptations, America, American football, Arizona, arrow, arse, Barack Obama, barristers, Belgians, Belgium, Bernard Butler, Boadicea, books, Boudicca, Bourne, bridges, British Empire, British legal system, California, Canary Wharf, candids, celebrities, chairs, Christopher Lloyd, cinema, court, courtrooms, crime, crotch, CSI, Cupid, dentistry, Ed Balls, Elvis, emotions, etiquette, fake tan, fame, Fergie, fiction, fictional characters, film rights, films, Florence, Florence and the Machine, foreign adaptations, friendship, furniture, garlic, genitalia, genitals, German, Germany, gods, halitosis, Hercule Poirot, history, hygiene, innuendo, JFK, John Cusack, John Krasinski, judges, juries, jury, jury duty, jury service, lawyers, Lays, legal system, London, London Bridge, love, Madonna, market research, masturbation, Michael Jackson, Millennium Bridge, morality, motherhood, movie adaptations, movies, myth, Neil Simon, Nickelodeon, office politics, OJ Simpson, oral hygiene, overstepping boundaries, pelvic floor, petty grievances, photography, Poirot, pornography, Queen Elizabeth, Queen Victoria, Rafa Nadal, rivers, Roman Empire, Romans, Ronald Reagan, sex, sexy photos, Shakespeare, sport, Suede, Superbowl, Switzerland, tanning, tennis, the Queen, theater, theatre, Universal, USA, Walkers, Wally, wanking, war paint, Where's Waldo, Where's Wally, Zurich
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February 17, 2011 by Helen Zaltzman
** Click here for Episode 166 **
Seeing as it’s Valentine’s week (ie: heart-shaped boxes of Ferrero Rocher are now heavily discounted in the shops! Why are you still here??? Go, go!), let’s continue this run of romantical questions and consider the following missive from Nathan:
A while ago, my partner got a research job at Cardiff university. I decided not to leave my current job in Manchester until I had a job to go to in my specialist area – renewable energy engineering. However, it’s been six months now, and I’m getting really sick of doing the alternate-weekend thing.
So should I:
A) Leave where I am, and continue the job-search while wearing pyjamas in a front room in Cardiff?
B) Try to forget I spent all that time getting a masters degree and take a job calculating car insurance rates or something?
C) Keep job-searching in the evenings after work, and try to learn to love the sandwiches in Crewe train station?
I can’t vouch for Cardiff, car insurance rate calculation, or Crewe comestibles, so readers, I turn to you. Should Nathan move 200 miles for love, or keep the job and commute fortnightly? Go forth and decide whether the future of his relationship and career is to be A, B or C. Or even option D, if you think of one.
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Posted in extracurricular questions, User-generated answers | 3 Comments »
February 17, 2011 by Helen Zaltzman
** Click here for Episode 166 **
No way! Someone’s taken exception to sex advice from Olly Mann? Meredith from Framingham, Massachusetts tells him to shove his conception advice right back up into his man-womb:
I am writing because, respectfully, I thought that Olly’s advice to the lady calling in about her and her husband’s problems keeping sex sexy while trying for a baby was very off base.
When it came time for my husband and me to toss the pills and start our family, it took a couple of months to conceive and the process became very, very un-sexy. It was hard to get the end-game out of our minds. We had been programed so long to avoid pregnancy it took some doing to get over that.
What we discovered that we needed wasn’t to make the process more mechanized and route, but rather, more adventuresome and novel. Our solution: we went away together someplace romantic for a weekend, and had a very nice time in and out of the bedroom without thinking of the same old, same old things. This romantic weekend left us both reinvigorated, and while we didn’t conceive that weekend (which was not the point anyway) we did refocus our sex life on fun and removed the
stress and pressure from the situation. This enabled us to continue the sexy vibe upon returning home, and about eleven months later, our son Jackson was born.
My advice to the caller would be to take her partner someplace fun they haven’t been before for a long weekend, someplace with particularly comfortable beds and room service and to not even say the word “baby” the entire time…and see what might occur!
Egad, I officially know too much about the sex life of strangers now.
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February 16, 2011 by Helen Zaltzman
** Click here for Episode 166 **
Rosie from Birmingham has a problem we never had, seeing as Olly’s childhood was short on flings and mine was short on family holidays. She says:
I have a very big dilemma: in a couple of weeks my family are going on holiday with another family. In this family there is this boy, who many years ago I had a fling with. I’ve now discovered that he is a complete jerk. My boyfriend knows that I had a fling with him and knows that we are going on holiday with him. He’s worried that I may have another fling with him, and maybe get together. I absolutely cannot stand him and have tried many times to tell my boyfriend this, yet he is still worried. So answer me this: how can I prove to my boyfriend that nothing will happen with this guy when it most certainly won’t?
1. Take your boyfriend with you on holiday; or 2. chastity belt. The latter doubles as a handy place to stow your foreign currency where pickpockets won’t find it. However you may need to pack some WD40 if swimming is on the cards.
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February 10, 2011 by Helen Zaltzman
Dear podcast-listeners,
There have been three times in his life where Olly Mann couldn’t speak French, so he let the funky music do the talking: 1) his GCSE French oral exam, which is why he received a D grade; 2) one mad, hot night at the Bruni-Sarkozy holiday bungalow; and 3) in Answer Me This! Episode 166:
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)
En Anglais, we talk of:
Blu-Tack sunblock
J.Lo’s nipple tweaker
the tragic end of Bobby in Home and Away
Bernard of Chartres
John Scurlock
Pyramus and Thisbe
Oasis
the Tower of London
James Bond: babyfather
the oldest underwater foot-tunnel (with some qualification)
disgruntled Beefeaters
Pretty Woman, Kate Middleton-style
bouncy bungalows
bouncy Roulette
Mike Flowers Pops
the Sea Life Centre vs. the Chunnel
sexy salad servers
Coventry
and
Teri Hatcher.
Plus: mainstream Olly prefers vaginas when a baby isn’t being shunted out of them; Helen discovers her new favourite TV channel; and Martin the Sound Man claims that when his dad said he was just “off to the glory hole”, there was a perfectly innocent explanation. Keep drinking the kool-aid, Martin!
This week’s Bit of Crap on the App (available for iPhone or Android, yessir) is a question from Gareth about what’s the oldest thing still in use today. My dad’s underpants. HA. (Seriously: 40+ years’ service and still going strong.)
Please keep bombarding us with your QUESTIONS, by leaving us a voicemail on the Question Line (dial 0208 123 5877 or findanswermethis on Skype) or sending us an email to answermethispodcast@googlemail.com.
See you next Thursday!
Helen & Olly
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Tags: 007, 1990s, 90s, Aardman animation, £2, babies, blowies, Blu-Tack, boobs, boring equipment, bouncing, bouncy castles, bra, bras, bridges, cats, Channel Tunnel, children, children's telly, coins, conception, condoms, construction, crown jewels, crowns, currency, Europe, Eurotunnel, ex-military, fellatio, films, frames, France, French, Friends, fun, games, glass-blowing, glory holes, Halle Berry, history, homosexuality, insanity, irony, J.Lo, James Bond, Jennifer Aniston, Jennifer Lopez, jewellery, jewels, Kate Middleton, kids, La Manche, ladies' undergarments, lingerie, London, M&S, Midlands, military, mining, Mitterand, monarchy, money, nipples, Noel Gallagher, Oliver Cromwell, olives, Olly's cat, parties, people who like animals more than people, perversion, pets, Pretty Woman, Prince Charles, Prince William, Princess Diana, prisons, procreation, rabies, rates, rats, Robert Hooke, Roulette, royalty, safe sex, scuba-builders, sex, Sir Isaac Newton, soap operas, stationery, STDs, sterling, STIs, stoners, students, technology, telly, Tellytubbies, Thatcher, the Beatles, the Channel, the Queen, the ring of death, tourist attractions, Tower of London, tunnelling, TV, undergarments, underwater, underwear, unsafe sex, video, wifi, Wills'n'Kate, wood
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February 9, 2011 by Helen Zaltzman
** Click here for Episode 165 **
Remember Jessii, the perforated lady from St Helens? Well hallelujah, she has succeeded in finding new bits of her body to puncture! Ours not to reason why, etc etc. She says, through swollen face:
I recently got my tongue pierced (venoms).
Well I am in a lot of pain at the moment because my tongue is swollen.
Sorry to hear that, Jessii – I am totally surprised that firing bolts through a nerve-rich chunk of muscle could have negative side effects! Really I am…
I can’t eat or talk and even swallowing is a bit of a chore.
It’s way worse than getting the one piercing in the middle.
So, answer me this:
What is the most painful thing you have ever done to yourself or had done to you willingly?
Mine will remain between me and the lady at the family planning clinic, thanks; but readers, go to the comments and reveal your self-inflicted agonies.
yes dear, it looks lovely
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Posted in extracurricular questions, User-generated answers | 4 Comments »
February 9, 2011 by Helen Zaltzman
** Click here for Episode 165 **
Emma in Bristol:
A couple of years ago I walked out on my long-term partner. I decided that I was too young to be stuck in a passionless relationship. As I was the evil bitch who left, he got custody of all of our mutual friends.
Olly answer me this: if Helen finds someone better and ditches Martin, where would your loyalties lie? Would you stick with her and find a new sound man, or side with Martin and find a new sidekick?
Olly refused to answer this question, perhaps having seen too many barbs fly across the AMT studio and feeling terror and woe deep in his soul. But if it’s any comfort, Emma, in the event of an irrevocable breach Martin and I would pursue a joint custody arrangement. Even though I SAW HIM FIRST.
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Answer Me This! Podcast 