Anon in Australia has been doing an informal survey which might be a ripe subject for a PhD thesis:
In my work as a pharmacist I dispense enormous quantities of medications for children with ADD or ADHD. “The Man” dictates that I am to keep handwritten records of each dispensing in a special book. Whilst auditing this book recently, I noticed something interesting about the Christian names of children in this book.
Compared to other children that required mundane things like antibiotics and what-not, the ones getting prescriptions for ADD medications overwhelmingly had exotic or alternatively spelled names. And no, I’m not alluding to “foreign” names. I looked at a popular baby-name website and found that while some of these Christian names have been very popular over the last ten years (most in the top 50 baby names), 20 years ago none of them were even in the top 100!
So answer me this; WTF is going on here? Is naming your baby “Jayden”, “Harley” or “Taylah” sentencing the poor child to a life of petty arson and inattentiveness at school? Will a traditional name like “Bruce” avert this life path?
Readers, strap on your snobbery-bonnets and tell Anon in the comments whether you have found sound scientific evidence corroborating this theory.
Here’s a letter to Penthouse, which James accidentally sent to us instead:
I am a surveyor and I am a very courteous surveyor at that. If, for example, I am given the key for flat to inspect, rather than just barging in, I will always knock on the door and after allowing plenty of time for a reply, I will poke my head through the door and then announce my presence before entering the flat.
So imagine my surprise, having inspected the master bedroom, to walk into the en suite bathroom to find two girls in the shower. Furthermore, these were not the boot-wearing, shaved head, short and stocky type that you might see on a gay pride parade but two beautiful Japanese girls that you are more likely to see in a movie.
So Helen and Olly answer me this: what excuse can I use to accidentally walk in on the girls again? Please bear in mind that I have now accidentally walked in on them 34 times.
Erm, something about leaking pipes? Exploding boilers in the downstairs area? Readers, we expect you have been in this situation more often than we have, so go to the comments and leave your suggestions for James to be a big pervert.
We can’t let Great British Questions go quite yet. Here’s the last hurrah from our video-making road trip:
Helen and Olly’s Great British Bloopers
Here are responses to a few of the questions you asked about the series:
• “Where did you get your sunglasses from?” They were 3 for £10 from a market stall in Camden. Nothing but the best for us. • “What’s wrong with Olly’s eyes?” Nothing! They are both entirely fine, with the full complement of pupils, irises and whites. • “What happened to the cheese-rolling where they run down a steep hill?” Shut down because of health and safety, alas. Watching this, we simply cannot understand why… • “Where’s Martin the Sound Man?” He has a real job, you know. • “How funny are the YouTube closed captions?” VERY funny. Everybody, if you haven’t already, go and watch the videos again but click on the red ‘CC’ button and select ‘Transcribe Audio’.
Additional things we learnt on the road:
• In the war of the regional plum loaves, Lincolnshire plum loaf beats Lancashire plum loaf hands down.
• If there’s anything more depressing than Blackpool on a Friday night, it is Blackpool on a Thursday night when everything is shut and there’s not even a single stag-night livening the place up.
• During the trip, we sampled many Great British Breakfasts, much to the chagrin of our arteries. Standards varied wildly, and to our surprise, our favourite was to be found at the Preston Marriott. An entire roomful of self-service hot and cold breakfast buffet? We’ll take it! In fact, we will take far more than we want to eat, just on principle.
• Whereas the Bath Travelodge serves your breakfast in a bag. This feels disproportionately dehumanising.
• The hotels we liked the best were the White Hart, Moretonhampstead, Devon; Ten Hill Place, Edinburgh; and the Westmoreland Hotel, Tebay services – we defy you to tell us of a nicer motorway services hotel in the country!
• This year, all hotel toiletries smell of lemongrass. What’s your tip for the top scent for mini-shampoo in 2011?
• Top in-car entertainment: Backstreet Boys greatest hits; Fern Britton’s autobiography audiobook.
• Deep-fried Mars Bars are surprisingly nice. Deep-fried Galaxy bars are even nicer. I’m unlikely ever to submit my arteries to such an experience again, but if I did, I’d like to take a punt on deep-fried Snickers being the best of all.
So that’s it! Many thanks to Tess Longfield and Rachel Aked of VisitBritain for setting the whole up, and to you lot for watching.
This week, in Answer Me This! Episode 146, we turn to prayer. Don’t worry though; we counterbalance that with computer-game sadism.
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)
Appearing this week in our speech are:
exploding Anthea Turner (don’t worry, she survived!) The Daily Bra (a bit NSFW)
‘Whistle While You Work’ vs. ‘Girls and Boys Come Out To Play’ vs. ‘Greensleeves’
Theme Park
Katamari Damacy
you singular vs. you plural
young Mann’s evil marketing ruses
Skype at a wedding
the Siemens TJ 10500 Dressman Spaced
busy Henry VIII
the JFK death-film
and
Queen Victoria’s forbidden thunderbox
Plus: windy Olly has to choose between his girlfriend and his trouser-press; Helen is going to Hell for what she did to the Lord’s Prayer; and Martin the Sound Man says something sensible about balls for once. We’re also delighted to hear that love blooms between you listeners in even the unlikeliest of places (namely facebook.com/answermethis)
Meanwhile, over on the AMT app, there’s a very curious question from Kiki in Manchester about the Amelie-ish discovery of a mysterious photo of a baby surrounded by matchsticks. Have any of you mislaid such a thing? And in this week’s episode of Great British Questions, our toilet humour knows no bounds. The series is now finished, but come back next week for our Great British Outtakes reel.
Next week, in episode 147, we’ll be joined by special guest Ian Collins of the Late Show on talkSPORT; so send your QUESTIONS for Ian (and us) by leaving a voice message on 0208 123 5877 or Skype IDanswermethis, or firing off an email to answermethispodcast@googlemail.com.
In episode 145 you mentioned that you would rather dip a stick of celery in tea than a Nice biscuit.
This got me thinking of my friend who is from “up north” somewhere, he will frequently use his tea for dipping his toast in his tea!
He assures me that this is normal behaviour up north, so answer me this: is my friend a freak, or is it really normal up north? I’m suspicious as he also wipes his arse with baby wipes (which I am certain is not normal behaviour for an adult male!)
I have no trustworthy northern friends/acquaintances to ask and would like to continue mocking him but now with the confidence that I am right and what he is doing is odd and not just some regional peculiarity.
Fire in the hold! It’s a question from Keith in Goole, Yorkshire:
In 1968 I was a member of the Sea Cadet Corps in Goole when one evening we were having training regarding dealing with fire on board a ship. Our instructor, an ex-Royal Navy man, said that if we ever discovered a fire we should go smartly to the nearest fire alarm, grab the handle AND WANK IT!!!. These last words were actually emphasized by the officer with an accompanying hand gesture like that of pulling a pint.
At this point, twenty or so adolescent sea cadets hopelessly struggled to contain their laughter whilst the instructor harangued us asking what we found so funny. In all other respects this man was well respected by us, so I believed that wanking a handle in the Royal Navy must be OK.
Answer me this: is it or has it ever been acceptable to use use the term ‘wank’ in any proper adult conversation?
Well, Keith, if you were old enough to be conscious in 1968, and we met and conversed about it, it would be a highly proper adult conversation. SURELY.
Meanwhile, if any of the rest of you upstanding citizens of the web know of any use of the word ‘wank’ which is not the obvious, put it into a nice sentence then put that nice sentence into a comment on this post.
I’m sure I have intimated as much on previous podcasts (clue: begins with a ‘C’, rhymes with ‘Bolumbo’. Binspector Borse runs a close second) so, rather than repeat myself, I want to know who your favourite TV detective is. Poirot? Holmes? Creek? Get thee to the comments to tell me!
In order of splashdown, the temples of hygiene we visited are:
• The Round Room at the Portobello Hotel, London. The tub in question is known as a ‘Victorian bathing machine’, which is appropriately sexy-sounding for a room with a circular bed in it. • Garderobe at Little Moreton Hall, Congleton, Cheshire. We can see why garderobes like this fell out of favour: 1) very drafty; 2) it’s not nice surrounding your home with a moat of shit; 3) danger of buttock-splinters. • The Ladies’ Room at the George Hotel, Stamford, Lincolnshire. Note to all of you: if you’re planning on filming yourself monologuing in a public convenience, make sure there’s nobody else in it first. • The sewers, Brighton. If you want to go on one of the regular sewer tours, book soon because they fill up months in advance. Especially Valentine’s Day. • Little Chef, Popham. If more than one person is using the talking lavatories at once, the combined effect is quite hectoring, so it’s not for the faint-hearted. • Castle Drogo, Devon, a 1920s folly with a very squirty bathtub and, downstairs, a fantastic collection of copper jelly-moulds. • Car-park loos at the Eden Project, Cornwall. Sure, other people go there for the indoor rainforest, the world’s largest greenhouse, Sir Robert McAlpine’s iconic domes; we just go for the bogs. • Bovine sewage-works at Rodda’s dairy farm, Cornwall. Watching a giant shit-stirrer is surprisingly relaxing – like a massive, stinky office toy. • Hotel Missoni, Edinburgh, where even the bathwater comes out stripy. • The Roman baths and the Thermae Bath Spa, Bath. It’s a big win for the city of Bath.
We’re also flushed with thanks to:
The nice gentlemen at the Hotel Missoni and Rodda’s, for patiently agreeing to our various ridiculous requests.
Rachel Bowers at the Thermae Bath Spa, for kindly filming us in our bathers – how did her eyes survive?
And the rubber duckie of gratitude goes to Tess Longfield and Rachel Aked of VisitBritain.
This week, there’s no finer entertainment than the live footage of Charles Taylor’s trial at the Hague. But second in the chart, and hopefully less upsetting to Mia Farrow, is Answer Me This! Episode 145:
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)
Amongst the evidence we disclose are such exhibits as:
Bombalurina
kopi luwak
Brixton
Gwen Stefani’s stockings
sewer gas lamps vs. energy-saving lightbulbs
Nice biscuits vs. nice biscuits vs. no biscuits
Morrison’s sausages Inside Nature’s Giants
Ben de Lisi’s new gig
interspecies romance
crotch branding
steam power
and
the frozen pea goldfish detox
Plus: Olly teaches the etiquette demanded of an interaction with the police (1. curtsey; 2. hold your kid gloves in your left hand at all times; 3. turn widdershins only); Helen prioritises which side to expose to a wardfull of patients; and Martin the Sound Man takes a big bubbly bath in listener love for his new album (out now on iTunes, Amazon and in pretty physical form, Martyfans! Go on, make an old man very happy).
Now don’t just sit there, bursting with pent-up QUESTIONS; send them to us instead! We like them in the form of a voice message on 0208 123 5877 or Skype IDanswermethis, or an email to answermethispodcast@googlemail.com. They will come in really handy for Episode 146, which you can hear next Thursday; and on Tuesday, come back for the final episode of Great British Questions, in which we take toilet humour to new levels.
No All-Bran or Nutrigrain bars for Haggered Wood, who asks:
Bagels Or Croissants for breakfast?
Pros and cons for each, as toast has lost its shine for me.
I grieve for you, Haggered Wood; for he who is tired of toast is tired of life (as well as toast). Here be my pros and cons:
Bagel pros: will keep hunger at bay for longer. Lends itself to myriad fillings. Might have seeds on it. Bagel cons: bit too much of a challenge early-morning if you have to assemble it yourself. Can make you feel like you’ve swallowed a stone fist.
Croissant pros: cheerfully frou-frou and indulgent-seeming. Ready to go in one tidy package. Is better for dunking into coffee than a bagel. Croissant cons: most of the ones in this country are horrific. Nutritionally horrific. Will cover you in flakes of pastry.
Readers, head to the comments and tell us which is the winner. I vote for crumpets.
Since I introduced Olly to the spoon-in-champagne-bottles tip in last week’s episode, many of you have written to tell me that the trick has been debunked by Mythbusters. Do I care? No! Because Kimon in East Dulwich has been in touch to mythbust Mythbusters:
Although it is often considered to be an old wives’ tale, there is a likely scientific basis, the key concepts being thermal conductivity and gas solubility in water.
Precisely the point I was going for, Kimon! (ahem) Carry on:
There were two very significant omissions from Helen’s spoon-in-champagne-bottle suggestion which I feel need to be addressed. a) It has to be a silver spoon and b) there’s no point unless you also put it in the fridge.
Carbon dioxide’s solubility decreases as the temperature of the water (or champagne) increases – so the really important thing, spoon or no spoon, is to put the bottle in the fridge.
So what’s the point of the spoon? Well, if the bottle has been out of the fridge, it follows that the champagne and air in the bottle is warmer than the fridge. However, glass itself is a pretty good insulator (i.e. it has low thermal conductivity, around 1.1k (Watts per metre per Kelvin)) which means that as well as keeping the champagne cool when it’s out of the fridge, if over time it gets warm, it will then keep it warm when you put it back in the fridge.
Silver, on the other hand, has excellent conductivity, higher than any other metal at around 429k. The spoon pokes out of the bottle, soaks up the cold air from the fridge, and radiates it down into the warm air inside the bottle. This in turn quickly cools the top layer of the champagne, meaning that any carbon dioxide escaping from the warmer liquid below has more chance of being captured by dissolving into the cooler liquid at the top.
You know, none of us would have got into this big flap about champagne bottles at all if only everyone were so sensible as to drink this classy substance instead.
I had an argument with my partner the other day about whether or not women are more mature than men. I’ve heard this idea thrown about time and time again but is there actually any truth in it?
There’s only one way to settle this: FIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIGHT!
Answer Me This! Podcast 