Following the discussion of paper round ageism in AMT302, Marina from London writes:
I am 26 and have never had a paper round, however I have just been for lunch with my boyfriend and his mum and her friend. The friend is in his eighties, and does a paper round every morning.
He was telling us about his paper round at lunch, and how the most popular paper on his round is The Telegraph. I asked him if he walked or cycled, and he replied, he drives! He drives about 30 miles every morning, delivering papers to lots of different villages, which takes him about an hour and a half.
He told us that he doesn’t get paid for doing this, some of his customers don’t even tip him, but the shop he delivers the papers for does cover his petrol. He says that the petrol expenses are enough to cover all his petrol, not just the paper round, and that’s the only reason he does it.
His payment is petrol! Very smart, especially if he’s charging them for the spare barrel he keeps in his car boot.
Here’s more paperboy correspondence from Ian in Cambridge:
You probably have way too many emails about this because there’s nothing nerds like more than someone being wrong on the Internet, but Paperboy wasn’t the first video game developed in the United States. It was the first game developed in the United States for the Nintendo Entertainment System, but there had been a number of video games developed in the USA long before the NES was invented.
Depending on how you define “video game”, the first one developed in the United States was either Tennis For Two (created in 1958 at the Brookhaven National Laboratory), Spacewar (Developed in 1962 at MIT) or the games of the first commercial home console, the Magnavox Odyssey (developed in 1972 by Ralph Baer). The first game for the Odyssey was Table Tennis.
This is way more information than you needed or asked for, but at least now it’s over.
This may be the most polite AND informative correction we have ever received. Thank you, Ian.
ARE YOU READY for your AUDIO TROLLEY DASH? On your marks: you’ve got precisely 43 minutes and 46 seconds to listen to Answer Me This! Episode 302. GO GO GO GO GO!!!
Topics thrown into the trolley of our discourse include:
paperboys Paperboy
David Bowie’s palms
TLC’s ‘busters’
decaffeinated Bob Geldof
sushi grass
the courtship of Cheryl & Ashley Cole
BB cream
trolley dashes
hamster funerals
sushi vs sashimi
hyperemesis gravidarum vs ginger biscuits Twin Peaks vs Supermarket Sweep Fire Walk With Me fanfic
Mario Mario
rice
and
the problem with Dale Winton.
Plus: Olly regrets doing this podcast instead of YouTube beauty tutorials; hypocrite Helen is shamed by her inability to pronounce American names correctly; and Martin the Sound Man would rather be sick than drink peppermint cordial to cure the sicks.
Today’s Bonus Bit of Crap on the App (available for your iDevices, Android and Windows gadgets), Olly relishes funny fail videos along the following guidelines: being hit in the balls IS a funny fail, car crashes are NOT funny fails.
Thanks very much to Squarespace.com for supporting this episode, and for giving you 10% off their website-building and -hosting services for a year if you use the code ‘answer’. So use the code ‘answer’. Why wouldn’t you? Don’t you want to treat yourself nicely? Of course you do!
We’ll be back with AMT303 on 27th November 2014; stay strong,
Helen & Olly
••• AMT302 Child-Friendly Rating: 76%. Just a couple of second-tier swears. Small amount of light bawdy content. Pet death may be cause for concern. •••
Answer Me This! Podcast 