What’s the grossest thing you’ve ever found in your food? A worm? A lung? Arsenic-laced hundreds and thousands? Gird your stomach for Answer Me This! Episode 355, in which we discuss:
food hygiene ratings
pig nipple bacon
Stanley Mann style
dating your dadalike
shipping it
Larry Stylinson
stans
stoners
Agatha Christie’s cornflour
store detectives
and
that Subway smell.
Plus: Olly shows up a logical flaw in ‘Stan‘; Helen went on an evening out, once; and Martin the Sound Man’s fragile guts are the only restaurant hygiene rating you need.
Today’s Bonus Bit of Crap on the App is a question from Michelle about the phrase “How’s your father?” Get the app for iPadPhones, Android and Windows devices.
Want to hear more from us? There’s the retro AMT episode that lands your feed mid-month – right now you can hear AMT222, in which we learn about Battersea Power Station and the Brighton Pavilion, and coin a phrase that will chime in your mind forevermore every time you pass a branch of Giraffe. To get it, subscribe to AMT on your podcatcher of choice. All of our back catalogue is available from answermethisstore.com, along with our special albums.
Thanks to Squarespace for sponsoring this episode. Go forth and build yourseelf a website! Play around during the two-week free trial, then get 10% off Squarespace’s website-hosting and -designing services for a whole year with the discount code ‘answer‘.
We’ll be back with AMT356 on 2 November 2017, and with a Retro AMT episode on 19 October.
Helen & Olly
••• AMT355 Child-Friendly Rating: 55%. Questions about sexy fan fiction and Tinder dating, but nothing too lewd. Discussion of drugs, albeit an incredibly square one. A couple of swearsy. •••
Had any good celeb-spots lately? However good yours are, there’s no way they’re as good as the celeb-spot hat trick Olly scored last week. “Who who WHO?” you wail! Find out in Answer Me This! Episode 352, along with problems regarding:
two laptops
two red barstools
two subtitle generators
sofabeds < sofas < beds
breakfast bars
Dothraki grammar Better Late Than Never Naked Attraction (NOT to be confused with Naked and Afraid) – NB both links are NSFW
hotel turndowns
electoral returning officers Answering Wankers’ ProblemsCorrespondCuntsPoints of View
and Indian cress.
For today's Bonus Bit of Crap on the App – available for iPadPhones, Android and Windows devices – Olly takes a crap at a place of artistic significance. Perhaps his crap could be interpreted as HIGH ART. One day. Not this day, though; it’s just a crap.
Want to hear more from us? There’s the retro AMT episode we throw into your feed mid-month; to get it, subscribe to AMT on your podcatcher of choice. All of our back catalogue is available from answermethisstore.com, along with our special albums including the AMT Sports Day.
Thanks to our sponsor Squarespace.com you can build yourself a very spruce website. Play around during the two-week free trial, then get 10% off Squarespace’s website-hosting and -designing services for a whole year with the discount code ‘answer‘.
Ten years. Ten years! TEN. YEARS. Ten years we’ve been doing this show. TEN.
In that time, technologies have waxed and waned; world leaders have come and gone; yet here we still are, answering the questions that you supply, just as we did in episode 1 all the way back in January 2007, and in every episode in between.
To celebrate the show’s birthday, in Answer Me This! Episode 346 we provide a thrilling glimpse into the AMT Process, receive a gift from a musical hero, and tackle a question on Olly’s favourite third favourite subject. We also discuss:
Mickey Mouse
sentimental dehydrators
rubber fetishes
grown-up purchases
Helen’s lost engagement ring vs Helen’s lost copy of Heathers
Warhol’s Campbell’s soup cans vs Campbell’s actual soup cans
graphic design vs fine art vs graphic design
file-in-cake-based prison breaks
British bears
British beavers
and
why you should never lend things to friends if you ever want to get those things back.
In today’s Bonus Bit of Crap on the App – available for iPadPhones, Android and Windows devices – we consider another problem for a Mickey Mouse reboot: the voice. Disney, if you’re listening, we have a suggestion for who should play Mickey. Go on, give it a go…
You should give our album AMT Love a go, if you want to hear an hour of us talking about sex and relationships. It’s available from the AMT store – you can also get it from iTunes and Amazon, if you prefer – along with our other albums and our classic episodes. We can’t pretend that listening back to the first episode today didn’t make us wince, but for just 79.9p it’s a good price for a wince.
Thanks to our friends at Squarespace.com for sponsoring this episode, and for giving you 10% off their website-hosting and -designing services for a whole year if you use the discount code ‘answer‘.
Bigger thanks to YOU for listening and sending in questions and supplying kind messages and buying our stuff and generally supporting us during the past decade.
The album features a whole hour of love, sex, dating and genitals, and it’s all completely new AMT material that has never appeared on the podcast. Such as:
♥ Is it appropriate to buy sexy clothes for your mum? ♥ How do you make putting on a condom fun? ♥ Just what is in that liquid squirting out of your girlfriend? ♥ When you’ve lost your engagement ring, how best to style it out? ♥ Is your partner’s schoolgirl fetish something you should worry about? It’s not like he’s a teacher – oh, he is? Oh. ♥ How do you set up a blind date when you’re a blind dater? ♥ How can anyone feel horny at the prospect of a vagina bristling with sharp, spiky horns? ♥ What’s the best point of a wedding ceremony to call it off? ♥ How do they come up with all those lines on Take Me Out? ♥ What is your exhibitionist housemate really trying to show you? ♥ How many holes should there be in a penis?
Here’s a little preview:
Any further questions?
♥ Is this album suitable for me if I’m not at all in the mood for love, sex, or interacting with humanity at all? YES. If all these people were having such a great time, they wouldn’t be writing to us, would they?
♥ Is this album child-friendly? HELL NO.
♥ Will this album teach me what it’s like to have the Olly Mann Valentine’s Experience? YES.
♥ Will Helen say the word ‘urethra’ so many times, I will feel a bit sick? MAYBE.
You can get it from iTunes and Amazon, but if you want all of your money to go to us and none to Megacorp, buy it directly from the AMT Store.
Mouche, Van Dyke, jazz dab, goat tuft: in AMT315 we learned many synonyms for the reviled facial hair style commonly known as the soul patch. And there are even more! Martyn writes:
Is it only ‘oop North’ where the little bit of face fur that sits below the lower lip is referred to as a ‘taste keeper’, due to the probability of food getting caught up in there?
If you seek similarities, Martyn, look to the far south, towards Gemma in Tempe, Sydney, Australia:
In Australia the Soul Patch or Jazz Dab is often called a ‘flavour saver’. I assume because if you dribble your curry in it you can save it for Ron (later on).
Adele adds:
I’m surprised you didn’t cover the term ‘lady pleaser’. This is also used to describe a soul patch. That bit of friction just under the bottom lip.
That explains why so many people persist with them, because it can’t be for the look.
Do you have any vernacular terms for the jazz soul flavour pleaser? Let us know in the comments. If we get enough, we’ll compile a study of geographical differences and submit it as a masters.
Remember the AMT303 question about an online dater seeking handjobs with cheese, and the feedback in AMT304 about the notorious aficionado of such, the Swiss Cheese Pervert?
Well, even if you don’t, the above paragraph probably filled in the blanks.
Kate from Pennsylvania has further news of such:
I was amazed that the local story of the legendary Cheese Pervert reached across the pond when Liz in Brooklyn asked how a cheese hand job would be performed. It seems this man cast a wide net on dating sites, as one of my best friends told me the same story about five years ago.
It turns out that the man in question grew quite desperate and was arrested in Philadelphia for, well, “presenting” himself to women with cheese in hand. The story made the local news, and it turns out that I actually have several friends who received similar messages, and there is a definitive answer to the question from the man himself.
Liz was correct, and his preference is slices of Swiss cheese.
Thanks for the confirmation, Kate, that the correct medium for the cheesy hand job is sliced Swiss cheese. It would be terribly embarrassing for our listeners if they greeted their online assignation with a Mini Babybel or luscious Vacherin. What a boner-killer.
If there are any hairdressers, trichologists or mythbusters reading this, please go to the comments ASAP to answer this question from Hollie in Reading:
My boyfriend is adamant that hairdressers never wear flip flops because if they get cut hair on their feet it can attach itself and grow!
Is this true?
We have been arguing about it for 5 years and he is wearing me down. It sounds so ridiculous but he is certain and even got a hairdresser friend to tell me ‘the truth’ and she agreed with him! Is he right? Can hair attach itself to other people’s skin?
I would imagine that hair trimmings, particularly short ones, could stick like a splinter into a hairdresser’s foot, hence them choosing more protective footwear. But, just as a splinter in your foot won’t grow into a sapling, NO OF COURSE SOMEONE ELSE’S HAIR TRIMMINGS CANNOT TAKE ROOT AND GROW OUT OF A HAIRDRESSER’S FOOT.
I’m not a scientist, so maybe I’m wrong. But cut hair is dead, so surely I’m not.
Next question: if someone has particularly sweaty feet, could you grow cress inside their damp trainers?
Does anyone know of an earlier instance of a baked bean bath than this one supplied by Drew from Knoxville, Tennessee? He writes:
With twoepisodes now discussing baked bean baths, I’m shocked no one had referenced what arguably may be the first verifiable instance of the practice: Roger Daltrey reportedly risked pneumonia shooting the cover for The Who Sell Out in 1966. Apparently the beans were cold. Daltrey does look dazed and uncomfortable in the photo. Of course it was for parody, not charity.
The Who did in fact include on the album a jingle for Heinz Baked Beans. Eight years later, Ken Russell forced Ann-Margret to swim in baked beans (and soap suds and chocolate sauce) for several days of filming a scene for The Who’s Tommy.
Warning: this scene is harrowing viewing. Like a dirty protest in a bikini.
Ben in Edinburgh is not speaking our language (our language being the sound of rolls of squidgy lazy flesh slapping against one another):
I am into obstacle course running: tough mudder, rat race etc.
I am due to compete in an event this year called ‘The Unknown‘, a 48-hour event which is basing itself on telling the competitors nothing about what will be expected, and whose aims are ‘to get you to quit before the end’ thus the psychological element of the event is huge.
I am fit and train regularly for 20-mile obstacle course events!
So, answer me this…
How can I train for an event whose obstacles, events, skills required etc are completely unknown and how can I prep myself mentally for such an event?
GUESS WHAT? We are totally unqualified to advise on how to prepare yourself for the Krypton Factor minus the fun! But we’d imagine a lot of readers have put themselves through such events, and/or are currently planning to with the early January fitness fervour. Run (up a cliff, through a snakepit and over embers covered in broken glass) to the comments to advise Ben.
Seems Zora in Los Angeles failed to notice an invitation to become the third in a couple’s relationship. She writes:
I work in a grocery store and I was cashiering one day. A couple came through my line and spent the entire 300 dollar transaction kissing loudly, grinding and looking lovingly into each other’s eyes. At one point he opened a bag of coconut chips and fed one to her and said, “Wrap those luscious lips around that.”
I stood, bagging their groceries and attempting to ignore all of it, but obviously, that didn’t work super well. They kept looking over at me, and trying to engage me in conversation, but then they’d continue kissing a lot.
So, what should I have done in this situation, that would have made things more comfortable but allowed me to be cool cashier lady and keep my job?
You should have acquiesced to their attempt to converse with you – it’s much more difficult for people to tongue each other, or feel sexy at all, during discourse about whether they need their parking ticket verified or if they want to take up today’s two for one offer on dishwasher tablets.
Zora in LA writes in defence of the indefensible (ie green peppers, the scourge of AMT297):
Green peppers aren’t totally worthless. In many cuisines, they’re used in cooking. Creole cooking is the main example. The bitter pepper adds a note of pleasant sharpness when contrasted with sweeter cooked vegetables. It’s also excellent on pizza, as it provides the same contrast.
And, working in a supermarket as I do, I can confirm that they are indeed cheaper.
But eating them raw? Only sickos do that.
Well, now I’m torn, Zora – I hate green peppers, but I love Creole food. Let me wrestle with my feelings while we contemplate this email from Simon in Germany:
Your recent conversation on Pizza Hut reminded me of something I once saw in a Pizza Hut in China. There they seem to have a “only one visit to the salad bar” policy. So this led to some ingenious solutions as to how to beat the system.
As you can see from the photo attached, the basic idea is to use the more solid and brick-like pieces of salad to build a wall around the lip of the bowl – luckily in China there is a large supply of cubed water melon – and then to fill in the middle using the less structurally sound greenery.
One I saw was about twice the height of that pictured, took 45 minutes to make, and a further another 45 minutes to carry back to the table as any jolt or shake would have brought down their towering shaft of salad.
P.S Surely if you owned a Pizza Hut in China you would have melon balls rather than cubes!
I’m impressed people manage to build such structures on the rim of a small salad bowl. Readers, do share your buffet-cheating tactics and triumphs in the comments.
Got any great tips for gaming a hotel breakfast buffet? Do share in the comments; but first, listen to Answer Me This! Episode 297 to learn from the master (ie Olly Mann):
In today’s buffet of audio delights, we’re serving:
Sea Monkey refills
second hand wedding dresses
green peppers vs red peppers
Bob Dylan vs grapefruit juice Steve Wright in the Afternoon vs heroin Harold Von Braunhut
the Pizza Hut salad bar
Oxford divorces
cryptobiosis
spying on your children
and
gobbing in the pot.
Plus: if you see Olly roving towards you armed with a Tupperware tub, he’s either going to take advantage of your buffet or imprison you with fatal consequence; Helen will be survived by a sackful of raw gingerbread; and Martin the Sound Man is a masochist for grapefruit juice.
In today’s Bit of Crap on the App, we tackle another Great British Bake Off question from Katherine from Sheffield. To find out how we go from that to the Sword of Gondor in just four short minutes, fire up the app on your iDevices, Android or Windows playthings. As a happy by-product of buying the app, you’re funding the show – likewise if you splash out on any of our albums or vintage episodes at answermethisstore.com. So you know that along with your purchase you’ll receive a free dose of our eternal gratitude.
And because we’re simply brimful of gratitude today, let’s throw a bucketful over Squarespace.com, for sponsoring this episode, for allowing people to build and host websites easily and beautifully, and for offering you 10% off their services for a whole year if you use the code Answer.
By the way, if you’re keen to start your own podcast, book a ticket for this Guardian Masterclass and on 20th September, Helen and a host of other podcasting mavens will teach you all you need to know, and then some.
We will return with AMT298 on 18th September, and we hope you do too. Cheerio!
Helen & Olly
••• AMT297 Child-Friendly Rating: 88%. Light on profane language. Unfortunate TMI about Olly and Martin’s bodily fluids. Question from a parent running surveillance ops on their teenager, which may instill trust issues in your own offspring. •••
Answer Me This! Podcast 