Welcome back AMT for one special new episode! So much has changed since we retired nearly two years ago, but what remains is our desire to answer YOUR QUESTIONS. Thanks so much for sending them, we loved hearing from you again.
Content notes/child-friendly ratings: discussion of alcoholic drinks with mention of drunkenness. A handful of swears. A question at the end about looking at your own sperm through microscopes.
• Wondrium, the streaming library of tutorials, lectures, documentaries, how-to videos, travel, craft and much more! AMT listeners get a month of free access to the whole library at wondrium.com/answer. • Squarespace. Want to build a website? Go to squarespace.com/answer, and get a 10% discount on your first purchase of a website or domain with the code ‘ANSWER’.
Summon up all your capacity for doomed adolescent romance, lean over the parapet and cry, “Wherefore art thou, Answer Me This! Episode 318?” In which we discuss:
Plus: as a result of today’s questioneer, Olly has cancelled his vasectomy; Helen has no time for ‘ye olde’; and Martin the Sound Man is keeping up with the movements of Tiffany, mutually bonded forever by familiarity with Staffordshire.
In today’s Bonus Bit of Crap on the App (available for iThings, Android and Windows devices) we continue to consider Bluetooth, and wonder when our connected household appliances will start embarrassing us on social media. Oh, they already have? Shurrup, kettle, or you’re going in the bin.
if you want to try the early ‘experimental’ phase of AMT, our vintage episodes are available on iTunes, Amazon, and our very own corporate megagiant operation answermethisstore.com, built using today’s sponsor Squarespace.com. Try them out – there’s a free two-week trial, then you can have 10% off their website-building and -hosting services for a year if you use the code ‘ANSWER‘. So do!
We’ll return on 23rd July 2015 with AMT319. Keep polishing your boobs till then.
Helen & Olly
••• AMT318 Child-Friendly Rating: 55%. A few swears. At the end, there is question about vasectomies; if your child hears it, it could necessitate you having The Chat: either the ‘how babies are made’ one, or the ‘Daddy, do you actually wish you’d prevented me from being born?’ one. •••
Here’s an email from Claire from Brooklyn, NY. Don’t read it while eating, because it contains the term ‘rancid spunk’. Thanks Claire!
When my husband and I first moved into our current apartment it was a slight fixer upper and I spent an afternoon deep cleaning the kitchen (scrubbing all surfaces, soaping up the fridge, going through cabinets and drawers, etc).
In the process I discovered a used ‘French letter’ wrapped in some takeout napkins. Not to gross you out too much, but the stench was alarmingly horrific! You seem like nice people, so I hope you never have to find out what rancid human spunk smells like. I think being forced to actually realize that rancid spunk is a thing felt as much like a punch in the face as the actual, repellant particles hitting my nose did.
Anyway, we still wonder whether this lovely cadeau was courtesy of our building superintendent (an illicit encounter during the pre-move-in renovation?), or of the previous tenant having a last hurrah after all the trash cans had been loaded into the moving truck.
Who do you think is the likely culprit, and if this had been you, would you have tried to exploit the situation for a deal on rent or other perk? We didn’t say anything-we just speculated ad nauseam about such questions and over a year later, I still think about it sometimes!
By leaving it for more than a year, you’ve rather spunked the opportunity to use this as leverage for cheaper rent. But if you’re so hell-bent on identifying the culprit, Claire, send off that putrid prophylactic to a lab – there’s plenty DNA to be swabbed.
Readers, have you ever found an unpleasant surprise left behind in your new home? Let us know in the comments.
PS Claire, I do admire that you used such a coy expression as ‘French letter’ in the same breath as ‘rancid spunk’.
We’re as surprised as you to discover that Answer Me This! Episode 221 opens with a heated discussion upon the topic, ‘What is art?’ Check us out with our high brows!
Naturally our brows don’t stay high for long; in decreasing order of highfalutingness, we talk about:
Edward Lear
double-ended ice cream
Tracey Emin Jeremy Deller‘s teenage parties
the Marquis de Sade
firefighters
bridesmaids
pole dancing
Charlie Chaplin drowning horribly
the pull-out method
and Annabel Chong.
Plus: Olly is horrified to discover that there’s a boarding school-style communal wanking game that he’d never heard of; Helen knows how to make anything unsexy, using ham; and Martin the Sound Man would like to remind you that you only have a couple of weeks left to enter his Science Songwriter of the Future competition, so make the old man happy because he’s got a bad ear this week.
In this week’s Bit of Crap on the App Helen gives you a great tip for making new friends on late-night public transport, based on her recent encounter with a stranger’s pelvis on the Victoria Line. That stranger’s pelvis could be all yours, if you avail yourself of the app on iDevices or Android! Don’t worry if you’re married; the pelvis won’t be worrying about that either.
We don’t want your pelvises, but we do want your QUESTIONS, so thrust them our way by emailing answermethispodcast@googlemail.com or leaving voicemails to the Question Line (dial 0208 123 5877 or Skype answermethis). As a reward, you may watch the video below of Eleanor from Norwich’s pole dancing team going about their totally sexless business.
Brush your teeth extra-assiduously before bed tonight, because Answer Me This! Episode 198 is super-chocolatey. We learn about literal death by chocolate (not carob, as if!), wonder at the untold stories of Oh Henry! bars, and invoke the name of chocolate behemoth Helge Rubinstein, again. Hear here:
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 subjects tumbling out of our mouths this week are:
Plus: Olly wants to take down Annie Lennox, gently; Helen declines ‘pie’ (in the linguistic sense, rather than in the sense of turning down pie); and Martin the Sound Man teaches us an important lesson about diversity in evolution. We also recommend you check out the illustration which accompanies the final question in the episode, which can be found HERE.
This week’s Bonus Bit of Crap on the App recounts where Olly had the Time of His Liiiiife – at his bar mitzvah in 1994. Have the time of your lives by firing up your iDevices or Android to get it.
We implore you to send your QUESTIONS to us, by leaving voicemails on the Question Line (dial 0208 123 5877, Skype answermethis) and emailing answermethispodcast@googlemail.com; but we also yearn for your hard-copy, old-fashioned postal correspondence to celebrate our forthcoming 5th BIRTHDAY! So please do send us something celebratory, to the following address:
Answer Me This!
PO Box 53587
London
SE19 9BQ
We really will be beside ourselves with joy to receive something from you, with which to festoon AMT Towers for our birthday extravaganza.
Thanks to everyone who has already bought our book and/or reviewed it on Amazon. And thanks to all of you in advance for listening to Answer Me This! Episode 156:
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 many other things, we consider:
the Augean stables
Green Shield Stamps
Miami Fried Chicken Gavin Bryars
home economics vs. cookery class
cowardice vs. gullibility
Sperm Wars
Littlewoods Index
Cerberus
The Shadows
peppermint creams
Gauls
Take your Child To Work Day
Jerry Yang and David Filo
scaredy chickens Hercules played by Mel Gibson
Richard Tompkins
Jules Leotard
Sarah Harding
and
heaven on Earth in Canada.
If that’s not enough, this week’s nugget of bonus content on the app, we marvel at the young Olly Mann’s love of theatrical PR. A wickle Cameron Mackintosh, how cuuuute! His parents must have been so proudconfused.
You know what would make us happy? YOUR QUESTIONS! Deliver them to us via the Question Line (0208 123 5877), Skype (our handle is answermethis), or email (answermethispodcast@googlemail.com). You know what else would make us happy? If you can pop along to one of our forthcoming book events, the first of which is 6pm Thursday 18th November at Waterstone’s Gower Street. You know what else would make us happy? A nice cup of tea. We’ll sort that out, while you work on the other two happiness-makers.
We may have had some jolly good news yesterday, but by gum, even though we should be taking a celebratory bath in fizzy booze or something, we are not slacking off on our podcasting duties. Heavens no. It’s business as usual, so here is Answer Me This! Episode 130:
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’s award-nominated trash talk includes:
bodysnatchers
the lamb of God
Galen
Norsical languages
Arawak Little Shop of Horrors The Game The Game
giant Bearded Fig Trees
sex homeopathy
retort cooking
Justin Bieber
zombies
antifreeze
and
the 1832 Anatomy Act.
Plus: Olly can only dream of being as innovative/stupid as the inventor of the Revolution Grill’N’Chill; Helen’s late granny ensures she’ll never be able to enjoy a nice blue china pig; and as well as featuring a questioneer’s tip to make you a proper hit with the Ladies, we come up with an ingenious scheme to entertain the pedestrians of central London AND rid the streets of the litter of freesheets. Get on it, Westminster Council!
Also, if you haven’t already, go to Martin the Sound Man’s website to download his latest Sound of the Ladies podcast to hear his smashing new song ‘What We Did With Our Lives’, as well as hear what he had to say in interviews with a few other podcasts. Yes, he cheated on AMT! Eh, who can blame him.
As always, please do ask us QUESTIONS for future episodes, by emailing answermethispodcast@googlemail.com or leaving a voicemail on Skype IDanswermethis or our question line 0208 123 5877. That would be luvverly.
It’s this time of year where we find it difficult to do much beyond faffing, time-wasting and procrastinating. But fortunately we managed to rise from our couches of sloth long enough to bring out Episode 104:
This classic episode is available to BUY NOW for just 79p, through iTunes or a secure PayPal server, without DRM restriction. CLICK HERE to find out more and support our podcast. (This helps keep our most recent episodes free)
Wherein we speak of:
armchair geography
the mockery of medical students
brie
Olly’s missing kidney
the Observer Food Monthly celebrity shopping-basket critiques
big bully Russia
bunk beds
Dr Gunter von Hagens
Terry Wogan
and
what Big and the army have in common.
Furthermore, Helen busts out an unexpected St Etienne cover, Olly reveals his wish to dress like a 4-year-old girl in a nativity play, and Martin the Sound Man says he hates to dent Olly’s ego although he clearly does NOT hate that AT ALL.
Our complaints department also rumbles into action, so we’d just like to reiterate that if you send us a question and it doesn’t get answered, it’s nothing personal, ok? We love you all equally! Read our FAQ to see our various excuses for not keeping up with every question you donate; keep the faith, and keep sending us your QUESTIONS in the form of an email to answermethispodcast@googlemail.com or a voice message via Skype IDanswermethis or the question line 0208 123 5877. We can’t promise to answer, but we’ll do our best! (Although we will do our better best if you slip us a brown envelope full of tenners…)
. And thanks to all of you in advance for listening to Answer Me This! Episode 156:
; Helen’s late granny ensures she’ll never be able to enjoy a nice blue china pig; and as well as featuring a questioneer’s tip to make you a proper hit with the Ladies, we come up with an ingenious scheme to entertain the pedestrians of central London AND rid the streets of the litter of freesheets. Get on it, Westminster Council!
and the army have in common.
Answer Me This! Podcast 