Excitement in the AMT camp

July 4, 2010 by

** We’ll be back on July 15th; meanwhile click here
to listen to past episodes of Answer Me This! **

Hello chums! If you’ve missed the sound of our various voices during our month off, solace is at hand.

1. Following our New Year’s Eve web awards extravaganza, BBC 5 Live were kind enough to ask us to do another show about all the latest japery online. Click here to listen to it.
Web 2010 with Helen and Olly includes interviews with writer and documentary-maker Jon Ronson, fashionista Trinny Woodall, and fellow podcasters Stephen Brook of the Guardian’s Media Talk and Luke Moore of The Football Ramble.
We sure hope you enjoy the show! It’s available on BBC iPlayer until 7pm Sunday 11th July; if you’re interested in the websites and things we talk about, there’s a list of links HERE.

2. Very good news for those of you who’ve been missing the voice of Martin the Sound Man: he has released his first album! Ten spiffing tracks by his musical alter ego The Sound of the Ladies are available to download HERE; you decide the price you want to pay for them. Neato!

So, we hope those things tide you over, and that you’ve been keeping well in our absence. See you on 15th July for Answer Me This! Episode 141.

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Posted in extracurricular activities, Martin the Sound Man, News | 1 Comment »

duped!

July 4, 2010 by

** We’ll be back on July 15th; meanwhile click here
to listen to past episodes of Answer Me This! **

Gulling the gullible is a jolly good wheeze, as we found out in Episode 139, and M from London found out many years before that:

I might have one of the best dupes…it was delivered with scathing sarcasm, but the poor girl was so dense that she has never figured out the truth!

In 2004, I was working for the Red Cross and was coming back from an education session deep in the American South. A woman (aged 29ish at the time) I was working with began musing philosophically in the back of the van. After wobbling about for a bit, she asked me that she’d always wondered what black people were called outside of the USA…

I informed her that Africa was actually a country in South America, so there was no difference and all people of African origin could safely be called African American as they were all from the American continent. She said “Oh! That’s great. It totally makes sense. Thank you!”

Well…fast forward 6 years. She still believes this and reports from friends still working with her confirm that she regularly tells the snickering public about this. It’s so generally ridiculous that no one has ever corrected her. Who misses an entire continent and hundreds of years of the slave trade at school? I guess that question has already been answered.

Good work, M from London. If any of the rest of you have done a dupe as good and as long-lasting as that, please share it with us in the comments. We’re a bit dim, so will probably swallow it whole.

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Posted in Answer Us Back! Your time to opine, User-generated answers | 3 Comments »

Love thy mother-in-law

July 4, 2010 by

** We’ll be back on July 15th; meanwhile click here
to listen to past episodes of Answer Me This! **

The voice of experience emanates from Cher in Kentucky in response to Andrew in Australia’s question featured in Episode 140:

A fellow listener asked about ways to suck up to the parents of one’s significant other. Having been married three times, engaged seven times before that, I have significant experience in that department.

Rule No. 1: Choose your battles. When the parent presents as an intractable bitch, leave it and go for the other parent. At first sight of my, my first husband’s mother’s first words to me were, “Jesus, you’re not a Catholic, are you?” She said it more to the crucifix at my throat (at which she bared her fangs) than to me.

I promptly ignored her and asked his father to tell me about the Battle of the Bulge. He pulled out maps, memorabilia, and held my ear for hours. When the bitch’s boy turned out to be gay and a tree-worshiping Pagan (bit of your own back, Ma!), I missed his dad more than I missed him.

Rule No. 2: To thine own self be true; they’ll figure you out eventually. Prior to the Bitch, for several fiances I converted to their religion (to impress the parents), one Protestant faith being the same as any other. Eventually I would get found out, though. What was I thinking, you ask? I was quite young, and it was Mississippi.

Rule No. 3: Find the deal-breaker, and don’t break it. With my mother-in-law, “living in sin” and pre-marital sex were a huge deal breaker. Let me add that she’s 90. She nagged my husband and his brother into their prior marriages so that they would discontinue living in sin. Forearmed with that knowledge, when I visited before our marriage, I was prepared when she asked me whether I would sleep in the guest room with my then fiance or on the couch. “I can’t sleep with him, ma’am. We aren’t married yet.” BINGO, we have a winner!

Rule No. 4: Take care of them. His people are my people. If you want them to like you and care about you, like them and care about them. It might not work, but it’s a good place to start. When you marry a person, you marry into a family, like it or not.

In that case, Cher has a MASSIVE extended family. I’m trying to picture how one can find oneself engaged as many as seven times, not even counting the ones that culminated in marriage, but it turns out I simply do not have sufficient imagination. She offers very sensible advice though, so we can all benefit without enduring the hassle of ten engagements.

Incidentally if any of you readers have managed to be betrothed more times than that, let us know in the comments! The first one to notch up twenty fiance(e)s wins a prize.

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Posted in Answer Us Back! Your time to opine, User-generated answers | Leave a Comment »

Human Centipede

June 29, 2010 by

** We’ll be back on July 15th; meanwhile click here
to listen to past episodes of Answer Me This! **


Uh oh, Kat from London is angry. At us. Must’ve been something we said in Episode 140:

Dear Helen and Olly – or, as you shall be known hereafter, you utter bastards.

There I was, happily walking to work and enjoying the double chocolate-chip goodness of my breakfast cookie treat, when suddenly Helen starts talking about mouth-to-anus films.

I haven’t been able to look at a double choc-chip biscuit OR get that horrible image out of my head since, and I can’t even listen to the podcast in case Helen strays from her usual topics of classical education and word games and starts dissecting Two Girls one Cup instead.

So answer me this: how the fuckety balls do I get the image of a human centipede out of my head? Is a lobotomy really the only way?

Fortunately, Kat, we have found another way. Stare for long enough at this cheerful chap, and all thoughts of horrible mouth-stitched-to-anus-until-everyone-chokes-on-faeces movies will be banished from your mind.

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Posted in Answer Us Back! Your time to opine, contrition | 2 Comments »

it’s not rocket science; it’s marketing for rocket science

June 29, 2010 by

** We’ll be back on July 15th; meanwhile click here
to listen to past episodes of Answer Me This! **


The following is a problem which is surely not too common amongst you, yet is certainly quite pressing for Malika, Head of Marketing at the National Space Centre:

I wonder if you can save my sanity and put to an end the number of people who use the following phrase when speaking to me on a daily basis…

IT’S NOT EXACTLY ROCKET SCIENCE, IS IT!

Yes I work at the National Space Centre and we have rockets and real science happening all around us, but as I work in marketing I realise what I do is not rocket science, so answer me this – how can I politely explain to people that I have heard this about a thousand times this year alone and it just isn’t funny any more!

Mosey to the comments, readers, and sharpen up some fine ripostes for Malika to fire at these jokesters.

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Posted in extracurricular questions, User-generated answers | 5 Comments »

Swimmers vs. trumpeters: the sexual battle royale

June 22, 2010 by

** We’ll be back on July 15th; meanwhile click here
to listen to past episodes of Answer Me This! **

Katy from south Wales wades in on the age-old quandary we considered in Episode 140:

I wanted to give you my insight to the question ‘Would you rather sleep with a swimmer or a trumpet player?’ I was rather, um, slaggish in uni and slept with a trumpet player AND a few swimmers (swimmers are rather slaggish too! Could have been why I joined the swim team) and I would definitely say that swimmers are much better. They have the hip action and are not as shy!

Informative, but a one-woman survey needs corroboration if we are to solve this question scientifically. So please, consider very carefully, then answer us this:

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Posted in Answer Us Back! Your time to opine, Rock the Vote, User-generated answers | 3 Comments »

University essentials

June 22, 2010 by

** We’ll be back on July 15th; meanwhile click here to listen to
past episodes of Answer Me This! **

Liz from Aberdeenshire is about to take a step into a wider world. But what should she pack into her satchel before she does?

I’m heading off to University in three months’ time and I know I’ll need to start getting some stuff together reasonably soon and I have no idea what I need to get.

Answer me this: what is the one VERY important, cannot-attend-University-without item that I should get my hands on before I move? Thanks.

When we trotted off the Ira Glass Academy For Advanced Podcasting, we made sure we were equipped with such dull-but-useful items as extension leads, kettle, our own bedding, capsule collection of kitchen knives, vitamin pills, mugs, teapot, rudimentary first aid kit, bottle-opener, spare bottle-opener, respectable dressing gown for early-morning fire alarms, fourteen dictionaries, photo montage, camera, crumpets, toy moose’s head, washing powder, fairy lights, flashing neon clock and a poster for a film that was halfway between populist and obscure. But what was the one item that YOU insisted upon? Tell Liz in the comments, do.

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Posted in extracurricular questions, User-generated answers | 16 Comments »

Turkey eggs: the inside scoop

June 22, 2010 by

** We’ll be back on July 15th; meanwhile click here to listen to
past episodes of Answer Me This! **

Rowena from New Zealand is fully qualified to put to bed the turkey eggs question from Episode 139. Why? Because she grew up on a turkey farm, that’s why:

Turkey eggs are slightly larger than chicken eggs, their shells are a bit harder to break and their yolks are larger and more yellow than orange.

Ironically I don’t actually eat eggs so couldn’t tell you first hand what the taste is like, but I know my family prefer them to chicken eggs and when I asked my mum she said, “They’re more wholesome and heaps better for you because the turkeys are happy (I think she was just saying that because our turkeys are free range!) and the yolk is a little thicker and richer.” So that’s straight from the turkey farmer’s wife!

We don’t usually sell our eggs as we use them all for hatching more turkeys but do sell the cracked ones that we can’t incubate locally if people want them.

Thanks for assuming the yolk of responsibility, Rowena. I think we’ve finally cracked this mystery. We shell wonder no more. Etc.

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Posted in Answer Us Back! Your time to opine, inside scoop | Leave a Comment »

EPISODE 140 – ratemyparents.com

June 17, 2010 by

Here it is folks, the final Answer Me This! of the second quarter – Episode 140:


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)

As we clear out our desks for the break, we give the following topics an airing:

Wills’n’Harry
eggnog
Anjou
the new Mentos + Coke
Duncan Goodhew vs. Dizzy Gillespie
Leonard Cohen vs. Magnetic Fields
Siberian husky dogs vs. Paula Radcliffe
wedding pyromania
hotel breakfast buffets
goat dowry
Freecycle surprise party
revolving restaurants
and
Narnia in Canada.

Plus: it turns out Olly can multitask after all, but only in hotel bathrooms; Helen manages to make prunes even more boring than you already thought they were; and Martin the Sound Man gives a line reading of The Human Centipede, which is as close as we ever want to get to actually seeing that film.

We hereby bid you adieu for a month, but we’ll be popping back here every week to post up some choice words – and to display the results of the Berocca Challenge that we set you this episode, should any of you choose to rise to it! You can also keep in touch with us via Twitter and Facebook, but more importantly by sending us your QUESTIONS – call 0208 123 5877, Skype answermethis or email answermethispodcast@googlemail.com.

Parting is such sweet sorrow. We’ll be back on 15th July. Have a smashing month!

Helen and Olly

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Posted in PODCASTS | 1 Comment »

Making up muck-up day

June 15, 2010 by

** Click here for Episode 139 **

Thanks everyone for sending in your tales of muck-day, to fill Olly in on what he missed at his happy hippy school. This one from Alice tickled us particularly:

The best school prank I have heard of was at a friend’s sister’s school: they stole 4 sheep and labeled them 1,2,3 and 5 and set them loose in the school, causing mayhem as the teachers tried to find the elusive sheep no. 4!

“What a hoot!” we thought.

Until we ploughed further through our inbox, and found the very same story from nigh a dozen different sources! And we know they’re not all regaling us about the same sheep jape, as the different versions were geographically diverse, took place at various points over the past decade, and sometimes starred goats rather than sheep. Further lighting the gaslamp of suspicion was the fact that none were first-hand accounts, all being as indirect as Alice’s friend’s sister. So:

HAVE ANY OF YOU ACTUALLY DONE THIS PRANK?

REALLY?

We’ll believe you only if you provide supplementary evidence. As Luke has:

I attended Christ’s Hospital school in the 80s – you know the one, where Gene Simmonds did the Rock School shit for Channel 4 some years ago, with the daft uniforms and grandiose architecture.

Here are some photographs of the final day of the year and the japes that were performed by leavers. Always unsanctioned, rarely punished, they were an early introduction into anarchy lite.

The Waller Bus pushed by leavers into the main quad, where these events usually occurred overnight, thus affording the entire school a view of the efforts as we marched (yes, marched) into breakfast.


Toilet doors removed and stacked elegantly.


Bread crates.

See? That is how you get us to believe in your pranks. Love your work with the toilet doors, Luke.

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Posted in Answer Us Back! Your time to opine | 4 Comments »

therapist.com

June 15, 2010 by

** Click here for Episode 139 **

Morg from Dublin flags up a very 21st-century problem:

Why do people who set up websites not sit back and have a think about the URL first….:

www.muffdivingclub.ie (don’t worry it’s safe for work).

Is this not a case of false advertising?

What are the worst URLs you have seen?

Readers, head to the comments and amuse us with your own sightings of unfortunate URLs. Ones that link to actual muff-diving do not count.

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Posted in extracurricular questions, frippery | 12 Comments »

EPISODE 139 – nothing about a stork makes me horny. Nothing!

June 10, 2010 by

Cover your kiddies’ ears during Answer Me This! Episode 139. Not just because of the usual effing and blinding (although that can’t be wholesome for them, surely?), but because this week, we talk about [whisper] Where Babies Come From [/whisper]. Shudder!


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)

Aside from the role of birds in the human reproductive process, we speak of:

Sauron’s bird feeders
Billy Kennedy’s fluffy dice
posset
turkey farming
‘shimmering apricot mould’
bloodworm
Kia-Ora
the Virgin Mary vs. pelicans
Ted Heath vs. Hugh Grant
chum salmon vs. chambermates
Chambourcy Hippopotamousse
and
the correct classification of pasta salad.

Plus: Olly turns his fishbowl into a scene from Cannibal Holocaust; Helen busts out another member of her Nauseating Cookery Book collection; and Martin the Sound Man seems to know more than the average sound man about clinical trials, although he was born and raised in a petri dish in a GlaxoSmithKline laboratory…

Now don’t get upset, but after next week’s episode, we’ll be taking a month off to rest our voices. So get your QUESTIONS in, quick! Call 0208 123 5877, Skype answermethis or email answermethispodcast@googlemail.com. See you next Thursday, and we’ll make that precious time together count, ok?

Helen and Olly

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Posted in PODCASTS | 9 Comments »

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