Answer Me This! - AMT388: Lolly Stick Jokes, Pizza Cutters, and Wombat Scat

Episode Date: August 6, 2020

In AMT388, questioneers wonder about pizza cutters, lolly stick jokes, cubed poo, lawns, and the house in the middle of the M62 motorway. Find out more about this episode at . Send us questions for future episodes: email written words or voice recordings to [e-mail]. Tweet us Facebook Our new album Home Entertainment is available now for £paywhatyouwant for a limited period at , where you can also obtain our other special albums, AMT episodes 1-200, and our Best Of compilations. Hear our other work: Helen Zaltzman's podcasts The Allusionist at and Veronica Mars Investigations at ; Olly Mann's five podcasts including , The Week Unwrapped, and Four Thought at ; and Martin Austwick's music at his Tom Waits podcast Song By Song at , and his new music'n'science podcast Maddie's Sound Explorers, hosted by Maddie Moate, at . This episode is sponsored by: The Great Courses Plus, the streaming library of courses on topics from wine to mystery fiction to yoga to formal logic to dog training. AMT listeners get a free month at . Squarespace. Want to build a website? Go to , and get a 10% discount on your first purchase of a website or domain with the code 'ANSWER'. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Does Michelle Obama's podcast do songs about Squarespace? How close would you willingly get to a bear's face? Well, well, well. In the last episode when we were contemplating the origins of flapjacks, the oaty kind versus the pancake kind, and I mentioned this drawer of myth in Scotland that used to be full of cold porridge. Oh, why do you have to even mention it again? It's given me nightmares for a month. And yet a lack of evidence pointing to the definitive existence of those drawers. Lucky for us, Nick from Renfrewshire has piped up to say,

I am in Scotland and I can confirm the porridge drawer story is true he's checked every drawer in scotland for even a smear of oat nick says it doesn't happen anymore at least not with anyone i know but the older generation would tell you that they used to regularly get porridge slices from a drawer there would be big wooden metal tray line drawers in the kitchen this was the porridge drawer or just a general cooling drawer. So I suppose it's like if you use the salad drawer in the fridge, but filled it with porridge. Yes.

I mean, there's nothing repugnant about a salad drawer when you use that terminology. Ours is pretty repugnant. It's got a lot of green slime in it. Right. Future generations might be as equally put off as I am by the very concept of a porridge drawer. Yeah. But maybe it's just what you're acclimatized to i just don't know how you would then get that

metal tray clean ever exactly my son eats weetabix every day that shit hardens to like foundational levels of hard it is like cement well i wonder if maybe in the scottish highlands they did use the porridge drawer as a general kind of household ooze. Like a cement mixer come breakfast storage. Well, sticking with the food chat, we have the following correspondence from Francesca in Walton-on-Thames. Helen answered me this. Did fab ice lollies used to have a joke on the stick? I mean, I would argue that a fab ice lolly is in itself a joke on a stick.

Shit. Why are you baiting people this way, Ollie? They're having a hard enough time. If so, when did the jokes end? The laughter faded as the ice creams melted. Or was it another ice lolly that used to have jokes on the stick? Do you know what? Sometimes when I'm researching stuff for this show,

I happen upon a lacuna in the internet where i feel like there is under representation of knowledge on a topic that a lot of people care about well that happens to me all the time and this was one i think they could well have been on a fab i can't remember specifically but walls and lions made both had them and lions made uh produced the fab i was curious to find out that the fab was one of two ice creams brought out to ride on the wave of popularity of Thunderbirds. Ah, FAB. They launched the Zoom first. Do you remember that one?

That was like a rocket in three flavours. I don't. I did three years of overnight radio and yeah, I don't have a ready answer for do you remember the Zoom? One shaped like a foot? I don't, David N. Chorlton, tell me more. Well, the Zoom was a rocket and they're like, rocket, that's for boys. So a few years later, they launched the fab for girls. Originally had Lady Penelope on the wrapper, because girls. Oh, so actually was Thunderbird branded then it was an official tie and it wasn't just inspired by i think the name has been retconned to fruit and berry fabricated

and bullshit more like yeah that works for me but um fab has the last laugh because zoom is no longer manufactured and fab is right in the 70s and 80s there were the informally titled lolly wars i think it was essentially getting kids to spend their 25 pence on a walls lolly versus a lion's maid lolly so there was free shit like serial toy style yeah endeavors with the lollies but like cards badges masks magic tricks little facts on the rappers some of them would have comic book style characters so you wanted to collect them all with little stories but some of them amp this up lion's maid had a lolly called crime squad which on the stick had a secret code and then walls had the rival super spy which had the same and then some of them really went for it there was

another lion's maid lolly called goal once you ate it the stick revealed a little plastic footballer and then you could paint it and if you collected 10 then you had enough for a five-a-side team and you could send off for kevin keegan's mini football pitch so that was a racket as well to get people to buy enough lollies for a team fuck me painting lolly sticks to create a collection that's your summer but this i thought was actually quite cool walls did a count dracula's secret lolly on the stick there were little stencils and it meant you could draw faces and there were six different ones to collect to draw your different vampire faces i thought that seemed quite fun and what was count dracula's secret does he secretly love garlic yeah it's a garlic flavored lolly so I remember when I was at secondary school,

and it must have been specifically between about 1992 and 1995, there was a girl called Bex who was collecting all of the lolly joke sticks. Right. And eventually she, I think, just wrote to Walls to ask for a full list because she couldn't complete the collection. For the list? Yeah. Why not just ask for the full list because she couldn't complete the collection for the list why not just ask for the actual sticks i don't know if they were willing to distribute the sticks you see because then maybe she would like make her own bootleg lollies but then the joy of collecting the sticks

is surely not to know what the jokes are well you've just said the joy of collecting the sticks ollie it's a pretty low energy joy i've already said I don't understand how people's joys were so low generally. I mean, it's extraordinary now. But anyway, that happened definitely in the 90s. However, I read that they phased out lolly stick jokes in 1988. So therefore, you think that you have false memory? Or do you think that actually, because there were so many different ice cream distributors doing the lolly stick meme that it carried on or probably so many sticks left over or maybe just the uh the school tuck shop

had stuff that was like years out of date probably but it also could have just been the start of a phasing out and that supposedly is because at that point this ice lolly market aimed at kids where they were extremely low price was just not considered worth it anymore and i guess also like in the wake of haagen-dazs so like go for the sophisticated adult market it's worth more go for the ice cream van market and so off went all of the 25p lollies with the novelty sticks such a shame is it because even as a grown-up i think with a nice lolly it has to be on a stick so you've got the stick anyway you might as well make the stick interesting there have been a couple of revivals of these in 2008 indeed walls hired james corden to write new jokes who did he hire to write the gags well also they were supposed to be printed in english german and

greek and because a lot of these are just wordplay those don't translate you would effectively have to write different jokes and localize for each of those cultures for the puns to make sense yeah like my uh four-year-old son's favourite joke at the moment is, what's a pirate's favourite letter? Arr! Yeah. Right. Classic.

Can't translate that into Greek. Ro! Conclusively, then, you can't say that it was on a fab ice lolly. It just sounds like it likely was, if she remembers it, because it was on so many. I think it likely was as well because fabs were one of the few of these lollies that I did used to eat, and I definitely remember ice lolly jokes. So, anecdotally... I have absolutely no doubt,

if we can find someone who's seen a porridge drawer, someone listening to this right now, either knows for a fact that fab ice lollies had jokes on them, or probably still has one. Like, probably has a collection of jokes on sticks. Let us know. Here's another question of jokes from Davidid and jane who say ollie answer me this how did knock knock jokes come about why does everyone know how to respond to them are they actually funny that's very subjective isn't it well it is subjective although i think i can represent most of us listening as they no they're not funny what they generate is um the recognition that a joke has taken place don't they yes but it's like it's an

effort to go ha ha like you have to actually force the laugh when really what you think is yeah I see you've done a joke I think that a lot of the formula jokes are thus it helps that it's often a cute kid doing it so then you feel like you're boosting their self-confidence by laughing. Maybe you're just hindering their career and doing better jokes. But in terms of where they came about, I actually guessed the answer to this using my actual knowledge and then was proven right, which doesn't happen very much. It's Shakespeare.

I guessed correctly because I remember seeing a production of Macbeth in the 90s where this was very laboured and it stuck in my mind. That the porter in macbeth the comedy character comes on stage basically saying knock knock so yeah shakespeare wrote effectively the first knock knock joke in 1606 it doesn't follow the same structure of the knock knock jokes we know and hate now i'll read it to you i mean you have to bear in mind i'm not a comic actor and you haven't just seen someone stabbed to death, so I'm not providing any light relief here. So imagine it in context.

Actor wakes up from a drunken stupor at the sound of someone knocking on the door to tell him that the King of Scotland's dead and says to the audience, knock, knock, knock. Who's there in the name of Beelzebub? Here's a farmer that hanged himself on the expectation of plenty.

Come in time. Have napkins in our about you. Here you'll swear for it that's a little longer than the knock knock formula usually extends to these days it's shakespeare so there's certainly rhythm but it's not the rhythm that we've become accustomed to is it um it does actually carry on there's a second and third verse no you're fine uh knock knock who's there in the other devil's name uh faith here's an equivocator that could swear in both the scales against either scale who committed treason enough for god's sake yet could not equivocate to heaven

no come in equivocator and then the big punch line uh knock knock knock who's there faith here's an english taylor come hither for stealing out of a french hose come in taylor here you may roast your goose you have to remember that it is a really grim story macbeth so like if you imagine the equivalent is like in a really gritty jimmy mcgovern drama then there's a commercial break and i diversity come on and they're dancing it's like that it's such a different tone that that in itself is kind of funny that sounds like almost a character catchphrase yes but that's a far cry from it being a formula where you say bloody blah bloody blah whoblah, blah-de-blah who? And then the reveal.

Right. And it's slightly lost in the mist of time exactly who first put that formula together. Although we know that by the time Bob Dunn, who's a cartoonist in the 1930s in the States, published a really popular book which had a series of the jokes in it, obviously by then it was well-established. So by the 1930s it was well-established

and some people credit him as having invented the modern knock- joke but i think it's more complex than that because there was a music hall comedian called we georgie wood who was on the radio in the 1930s now his act was basically like jeanette cranky he had dwarfism and played a school boy that was his shtick and um he came on the radio and did a pun on his own name so he said i'm georgie wood knock knock because his name's wood right and that was a hugely popular radio show at the time you have to remember like you know mass transmission of media has only just happened people are being very cheered up by this stuff so everyone went around the next day in the

schoolyards basically saying i'm georgie wood knock. And I think there was a residual memory of the Shakespeare because obviously it carried on being staged for 400 years. So I think that those two things conflated into the meme that became the knock knock joke that was then solidified by Bob Dunn. And it was in America where it really, really took off. In the States they already had a slightly more aggressive

tradition where they would say, do you know? So it's more of a punked thing where you're pranking someone. You go up to someone in the street and say, do you know so that it's more of a punked thing where you're pranking someone you got someone in the street and say do you know arthur they'd say arthur who because that is how you'd actually naturally reply to that question and then they'd say a joke like arthur monitor and run away that's an anticlimax right it does mean that you're kind of a victim of the joke rather than laughing along with it. But if you think about it, there is an American tradition of that, which you see in The Simpsons when Bart calls up Mo and does the,

is Ima there, Ima who, Ima buttface. Do you think that's an exclusively American formula? So after Georgie Wood was on the radio in Britain, radio orchestras in the States started using knock-knock jokes to kind of punctuate their acts, like a bit like a kind of comedy ident. They even had like knock-knock clubs in 1930s America. No, what happened at those? See, knock-knock jokes, I don't know.

Just an absolute nightmare. Just waiting for the drop. Well, here's a question from Noam from Brooklyn, who says, recently a Dungeons & Dragons playing friend sent me a link to a company that carves game dice out of Arctic Swedish moose poo. Priced at $215 for the set. Wow, what? Ouch.

Well, I mean, how much would you say that a game's dice carved out of Arctic Swedish moose poo should be retailed at to Dungeons & Dragons fans? Well, you get several in a pack, don't you, for Dungeons & Dragons? I wouldn't know. And they are multi-sided, so there's probably some skill

to make sure all the sides are equal so they don't roll weirdly and all that. But I feel poo is not a good substance for it because it's not hard enough. I'm looking for a number. What do you think is a fair price? Well, I bought my nephew some in plastic for like $20. So I'd put novelty poo at maybe $50.

$50, all right. I actually, to be fair, would expect up to $150. But $250, I agree, is a little steep. Thoroughly delighted, said Noam, I forwarded the link to my family for a laugh, at which point my father informed me that this was a waste of time and energy because, clearly, he said,

wombat poo is by far the superior poo for dice as it is already cubed. That's right. At point of origin. Do they really do cubic poo? They do. They're the only known mammal to do cubic poos. It's only an advantage if you want a six-sided dice.

If you're a gamer, a serious gamer, you might want 20 sides or 10 sides or four sides. So, Helen, answer me this. What the shit is going on with wombat poo? Well, we've been to the Poseum in tasmania which is a museum of animal poo amazing we went in and chatted with the proprietor it was only being open for three weeks and um thus got out of paying for it but also meant we couldn't look at the exhibits but it was mainly words on the walls rather than actual poos oh that's disappointing yeah i mean i did learn that wom poo is cubed, but then I also saw it on the verge outside.

Having learnt that, I was like, oh, there is actually quite a lot of wombat poo around everywhere because wombats produce between 80 and 100 poos in a single night. Impressive. Is that a lot? It seems like a lot because wombats are quite small. Look, 80 bowel motions is a lot, but I'm just thinking about my own poos and thinking if you divided them into cubes,

I probably could produce like 20 a day. I think they're doing about eight cubes per movement. Right, okay. So they thought maybe wombats have got square anuses and that's why this is. But no, they have discovered from some roadkill wombats in Tasmania that they have dissected

that wombats' intestines, which by the way are longer than those of a human they're nine meters long wow just remind us how large a wombat is it's like less than two feet long it's like a big pillow um they're herbivores they eat many grass and bark and roots digestion is very slow eight to fourteen days that travels through their very long intestines because they're trying to preserve all the hydration they can get. And then in the last 8% of intestine

that's where it turns from liquid into the cubes. So that last 8% of intestine doesn't stretch evenly so it's not like a circle of muscles some of the muscles are really stretchy and some of them are firm.

That's what makes it into these cuby shapes because it's extruded through this uneven tube, which allows it to become a cube. But I also read that sometimes in zoos where the animals have more access to hydration, they make less cubic poos. Well, the most would just round off the edges and all that. It wouldn't keep a crisp cube shape. But then some people theorize as to why this is a feature so they're like well it's

cubed that means it doesn't roll so maybe they're shitting it and leaving it in special places to communicate with other wombats maybe they're stacking it up whereas other scientists are like no they're just shitting where they are like if you're doing a hundred shits a day it's not that strategic right well i think that's uh answered his question hope you're happy with that noam do you want a bonus uh amazing wombat fact about the back end of a wombat who wouldn't they don't have a lot of defenses against predators except for they have a kind of armored plate in the top area of their arses right so if like a dingo is coming after them they can go into a burrow and if the dingo's head is coming

after them they just crush it with their armored bums and how do they make sure that they don't inadvertently crush other things with their armored bums like during sex or whatever well it's not heavy it's just they can exert a lot of bum force yeah they just sort of force their bums up against like the roof of their burrow right crushes the dog's head between the the bum and the burrow what a way to die bum to death if you've got a question email your question to answer me this podcast at googlemail.com answer me this podcast at googlemail.com here's a question from so retrospect, what historical events are we ticking off on this week's run of Today in History?

On Monday, we bring you the real story of the mutiny on the bounty. On Tuesday, the anniversary of the day somebody invented the meatball, but who? On Wednesday, the iconic British car that ripped off an iconic American car. On Thursday, how American airlines invented air miles. And on Friday, the UFO sighting that gripped colonial America. We discuss this and more on Today in History with The Retrospectors. 10 minutes each weekday, wherever you get your podcasts. Katie, who says, my mother and I visited London for the first time last summer, and there's something that's been on my mind ever since.

Why does a 21st century country have a monarchy? No, that's not her question. That's mine. Being that she's not a very adventurous eater, my mother, we ended up having pizza twice whilst we were in London. I actually think if you're not a very adventurous eater, then having pizza only twice is quite restrained. Although it was pleasant in taste and texture at both establishments we visited. Faint praise.

Don't put that on TripAdvisor. Restaurants have got a hard enough time at the moment. We were flummoxed that when it came to the table, it was as a whole pie. We don't say pie. Completely unsliced. We were not provided with a pizza cutter. So we did the best we could,

sawing away at it with a knife and fork. So Helen, answer me this. Is unsliced pizza a London thing? No. She says, I've never been to Italy, but growing up in central New York state, I was surrounded by pizzerias owned by first and second generation Italian immigrants. So I thought I knew a thing or two about pizza. Yes, you know a thing or two about American pizza. Yeah. Well, I suppose that's the nature of her question. She says, I did a bit of research and I found that the inventor of the pizza cutter was indeed American. So has this invention not made it across the pond in these last 100 plus years?

No, we have them here. I grew up with one actually in the house and we didn't use it that much because they're kind of shit. They're quite blunt, very hard to sharpen. They are fun. I think for children eating pizza they're more fun than using a knife and fork that's a reason it's great to have a rotating blade near children i mean i suppose the advantage is that when you're trying to cut pizza with a knife you drag it don't

you see you drag a lot of the ingredients and because you're not doing that with a pizza cutter if it's sharp it is a superior instrument well i think a lot of american pizzas have more shit on them and they're thicker you can't necessarily get through it with a knife as easily you it is true you do sort of drag some of the ingredients across the pizza i i've never thought of that as a negative before but if you're someone who did think of that as negative then there it is it's not clear actually who invented the pizza cutter uh who she's referring to with the uh inventor of the pizza cutter being american was a guy called david morgan who in 1892 patented a rotary cutter for wallpaper trimming in 1922 a carl a fram of canton ohio registered a similar device a rotary cutter

although a bit crinkled around the blades that was to cut dough that was raw but it's not clear who actually thought bingo gonna use these for pizzas that was probably a bit later and they do have them in italy as well but what they do have them in Italy as well. But what they also might use in Italy is a mezzaluna. What's that? That's one of those big curved blades with two handles that you rock back and forth. Oh, yeah, I love those. Yeah.

I mean, I've never used one, but I love the look of that. They're very useful for chopping, but also now just seems very obvious to use that for pizza. That was invented by an Italian, Silvio Pacitti, in 1708. It's also got a lovely name, like a song by Puccini. Yeah, Half Moon is what Mezzaluna means. Yeah, nice. The thing is, like, over in Britain, but even more so in Italy, you're more likely to have

an individual pizza. So it's not cut into slices for sharing because it's not three feet wide. So I think that's part of it. But in Italy, and I confirmed with our mutual Italian friend Raquel from Naples which is the pizza hotbed she confirmed my memories of people eating pizza in Italy with a knife and fork like you eat other foods you know you cut off little bits and eat them off the fork yeah because it is a casual food there too you know it's a street food but it's also a food you have in a posh restaurant in a way that it just isn't here okay so when I I spent time in Florence when I was 18 and I was there for a couple of months

and I made my first American friend and she was 29 and we went to a pizza place and she was like, what do I do? Because the pizzas were not sliced. And she'd never encountered pizza before that you didn't eat just with your hand. I mean, the option's fairly obvious, I would say, if it's in front of her. No, she had never used a knife and a fork together before. What? And I had not been to America yet at this time, but now I have. I know that a lot of their food is engineered for single implement eating or hand eating

because it's quite soft. Oh, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Yeah, but what about, I mean, I know what you're saying, you know, if you're talking about, I don't know, burritos or fries or whatever, but I mean, what about steaks? They love a steak in the States. You definitely need a knife for that. Well, they give you a dagger for that. Also, that's quite high-end food stuff.

If you're 20, you might not be going out for steaks all the time. She'd also been raised vegetarian. I'm not meaning to shame your 29-year-old friend that you met in Florence 20 years ago. I've never met her. I'm just saying it strikes me as someone like that who'd managed to get their way over to Florence but never used a knife and fork in conjunction might be unusual.

You think not? Well, I think it's much easier to get their way over to Florence but never used a knife and fork in conjunction might be unusual. You think not? Well, I think just it's much easier to get away with it in the States because there's a lot more food that is yielding. Yeah, I agree with that. Yielding. Well, we have another pizza cutter question from Jessica in Los Angeles.

Another piece of the pie, which we're not calling a pie because it's not a pie. It's not a fucking pie. Jessica says, my husband and I got fed up with our broken pizza wheel cutter so as we're in quarantine and not shopping in brick and mortar i absent-mindedly ordered a

new one online the thing is monster the wheel is as wide in diameter as a teacup saucer it is sharp af and most importantly it has no sheathath. Flashbacks to contraceptives in textbooks. Here's the problem, Ollie. Yeah. I don't know where or how to store it. We live in a tiny Los Angeles apartment. We have only two small shallow drawers in the kitchen and one utensil pot on the kitchen counter.

If I put it in one of the drawers, I couldn't put much else in the drawer because one, large wheel. Two, fear of cutting myself when reaching for a different utensil. I can't put it in the utensil pot on the counter because it might slice up the other utensils. And I would add as well, the other utensils might abrade the blade. Yes. If it's hitting up against metal spoons and things. Don't add to her anxiety, Helen.

She's got enough troubles as it is. I would also suggest that it's even more of a terrifying prospect for your hand thrusting into a forest of utensils, one of which is an unsheathed blade. Agree. Jessica says, it currently lives awkwardly half under the dish drainer on the counter. That's not optimal. We don't eat pizza very often, but often enough to buy this thing, I guess. Yeah, but if she's got the same view as Katie,

like if Americans just can't eat pizza without a pizza cutter, then this is going to be a problem isn't it the unused pizza cutters all over the nation yeah but she is in america so her pizza ought to come pre-cut ollie answer me this how can i keep our fingers safe and this thing out of the way put it somewhere else are there pizza cutter wheel sleeves i don't know if there are sheaths but couldn't you put it in a jiffy bag or a tupperware jiffy bag's not bad but i do know because i've done the research there are sheaths uh i found at pamperedchef.com for $3.50 replacement protective cover for pizza cutter now obviously that is for their brand of pizza cutter which might be smaller

than your monster one but it might be worth measuring your one and seeing if if it fits you put yours in a cd case if you can still one of them. The zip ones you got for the car. I would also suggest not keeping it in the drawer. I would just put it in on top of the fridge, say. If you're only using it sporadically, back of a cupboard in its sheath. Or put it in a different room. Like I know that having a pizza cutter

in your bedroom chest of drawers might be odd if someone were to stumble upon it and think you're a mass murderer. Where do you keep like your toolkit or the winter coats you have for the 10 cold days in los angeles or your rain boots yes where do you keep your screwdriver there put it there yeah right camping gear spare light bulbs yes put it there in a sheath yes or a jiffy bag or a tupperware or a flat box like get some seized candies once you've eaten them put the pizza cutter in there put it in your um earthquake kit.

It could be really useful if you need to, you know, fight bears and stuff. If you need to cut your own hand open during an earthquake. Sure. Helen, Oliver, though life is full of questions, there are answers you must know. One. No, it will not fall off, but moderation in all things. Two. Yes, there probably is, but we won't find out in our lifetimes.

Three. Most people prefer colliery, but my personal favorite is Dalton. Four. but my personal favorite is dalton for if you try and slip a one it would ruin your friendship time to thank our sponsors for this episode the great courses plus uh who have more than 11 000 lectures available for you to watch on demand i was watching a very interesting episode of understanding japan today oh yes yeah this one was about uh the artist hokusai and the art of woodblock prints um so you know a lot of the very famous japanese wave prints or people in boats that was all by this guy and an interesting fact i learned is that at one point because it was sort of like well he did this art but he also did a lot of this stuff just to, you know, sell, like Dickens writing

these sort of serialized potboilers in order to earn an income. And at one point he published sort of his how to draw like I can draw thing. And through this, the comic book evolved. What? From this Japanese artist who died in 1840. So it's going back away. away and like when you look at it

you're like oh my god you can really see the direct influence on 20th century comic books yeah that's really fascinating and also actually obviously a really good use of an on-demand video platform but actually a lot of their lectures you don't have to look at at all so i've been listening to one and i say listening because a feature on their app is you can just download the audio as a podcast so i've been listening to um shocking psychological studies and the lessons they teach I mean you would have to listen to that show wouldn't you once you see it what did you learn well it's very much an overview an introduction of various horrible psychological experiments from across the years so yeah the Stanford prison experiment is in there the Neubauer twin study

what he's essentially saying is look at these studies aren't they hideous aren't there terrible ethical issues with them but also is it really any more ethical these days to be using social media data without people's consent that you're doing that for psychology you know like what are the ethics around using any kind of experimental detail and what about when being ethical actually means that the experiment can't really work like you can only prove a thing by doing something. Is it worth doing? So yeah, it's a lot of that kind of itchy beard, like, hmm, that is interesting. There's a lot of that. But I really, really enjoyed it.

That sounds cool. Anyway, right now, the Great Courses Plus have a limited time offer just for you, our listener. Yes, you can get one entire month of access to all of the great courses plus library for free all of the courses every one of them for free go to the great courses plus.com slash answer that's the great courses plus.com slash answer hello helen ollie martin i have a question which is i'm in new zealand at the moment and i normally live in Germany. And everyone here has lawns, like lots of lawns. I think Britain's full of lawns as well.

The U.S. is full of lawns. Everyone has lawns. And I find it weird because where I am in Germany, people are a bit less lawny. There's still tons of lawns. But there's a park near our place called Comenius Garden, which has like meadows, like wildflowers, you know, allowed to walk on it. Same in the Botanic Gardens there in Berlin. And it's clearly better for the bees and the insects and the birds.

My question is, why does everyone have a lawn? And I think the answer is probably status and some idea of tidiness. But also, how can we persuade everyone to not have lawns anymore? Would that make a significant difference to the ecosystem? I mean, it seems like a very basic thing that if we could start a trend, people would be really making a big difference. And actually, all it means is you're saving money by not mowing your lawn or paying someone to mow your lawn. You're saving power. Maybe you'd need to get some seeds to start off with.

But then if it kind of caught on, then there'd be lots of flowers seeding each other. Seems like a really good idea. Okay, well, first, why our lawns? The initial reason for lawns was, well, like if you go back to, say say a castle hundreds of years ago they would have grasses around partly for grazing animals and partly so that you had a clear eyeline if your enemies were approaching you know if you've got a wood then yeah they can hide where there's just grass they can't yeah i was just trying to think what the alternative would be but yes big tall fuck off trees i see that would be an issue yes exactly I was trying to think back to castle times, but yeah, okay, yeah.

But also similarly, like when people were hunting in ancient times, like it was a lot easier to see predators in grassland potentially coming at them from a long way away. But then from castles, you can kind of trace how they were a symbol of wealth and status. Right. So like, I think they particularly took off in the 17th century. That was when the kind of English fancy garden in fancy houses really became a thing.

Yeah, because you're showing off, aren't you, all of the places from around the world you've got plants and flowers from as well, which is a thing that gets lost these days when you can buy African roses for three pounds in the petrol station. Yeah, but even if you weren't, even if you were just using plants that were growing in a hedgerow, it was like, we can afford land that has no purpose except to be decorative and to exist. Like we don't need to put animals on it.

We don't need to grow vegetables in it. We can just have a fucking lawn and a not garden. And we can also afford people to take care of it. As far as domestic spaces, lawns didn't take off for a while beyond that. They were very much like the preserve of the rich. I think in the 19th century, parks started to become a thing

because like outdoors was considered healthy and kind of moral in a way. So it was like, give the paws some place they can be and some grass they can be on. But a huge thing was the invention of the lawnmower, which was first developed in 1830 wasn't great like it took quite a lot of people over the 19th century to make it good it was a guy called edwin beard budding who first developed it and he'd seen like in fabric production this

sort of rotating thing that like the thing that takes baubles off sweaters beard budding isn't it extraordinary the person who invents the lawnmower has a reference to both flowers and hair in his name so he thought well i'll just make a big one for grass but the problem is his blades often didn't really contact the grass enough also lawns like weren't necessarily grass like the chamomile lawns and time lawns were a thing i think grass itself was another status symbol because it's not actually a very good plant it's quite a lot of outkeep does smell nice i'll give it that but by the 1890s the lawnmower was like good enough and popular enough that it made lawn having a lot more possible and so that was when people who weren't aristocrats could also have their own lawn i think also just like you look at house building trends like mass

house building trends and a lot of them didn't have a load of outside space i think till the 20th century because then you had like look here's your luxury dream of the suburbs and you can have like space around your house and a lawn you don't even have to have your own herd of sheep to keep the lawn tidy i think in the states like houses i think partly because towns were built somewhat later to the uk and also it's a more roomy country so i think it's more normal to see a large amount of grass around a house there than it was here. Also, lawns then became more popular in public events. So like most sports that are now played on grass, it wasn't always thus.

Like you see it a bit in tennis where they're playing on clay or something. But apparently like a lot of sports played on different surfaces. And then it was like grass, grass, grass. Big grass really asserted itself. Okay. and then it was like grass grass grass big grass really asserted itself okay i mean i feel like actually in lockdown the front lawn has really had a bit of a resurgence for those of us luckily enough to have one because especially if you can't reach someone's back garden without going through their home yeah it's become a social space again hasn't it it's a place you can stand safely away when um alice says why don't people sort of grow wild meadows in their front lawn you can do that

that's quite a trendy thing at the moment my parents do that in summer they just let the grass grow waist height they have a big lawn but they're both quite infirm so it's not easy to mow so they just mow like a couple of paths through the grass and let the rest grow for the summer I'm into it like I don't aesthetically think that a mowed lawn looks better than a wild one. I like wild grass. But round here, if you let flowers take over, you just get stinging metals. And that is not my favourite. You know, if you actually genuinely leave things to go wild, it might be good for nature. But it's got to be good for the people who own the property as well. And if every time I walk out my front door, I get stung, that's going to make me think I'm going to perhaps create my own

slightly artificial disneyfied wild meadow i would assume also in certain places keeping grass long would be something of a fire risk yeah and also again like having insects in it is good for the insects and i guess good for birds that eat the insects but not necessarily good for humans because they bite you but there certainly are anti-lawn trends uh i remember a few years ago there was an episode 99 invisible about how having a lush green real lawn in california where there'd been a drought for many years at that point was the opposite of a status symbol so there were trends for kind of like painting uh your front garden instead or replacing it with something else there's a game actually that we play uh me and my son harvey in our front

lawn the road is kind of framed by two hedges. So you can sit just next to the hedge and you can guess what colour the car is going to be that comes past. So I did it once and I've had to live with the consequences ever since. He likes a game where it's like, I say it's going to be red. He says it's going to be blue. And then there's the jeopardy of what's the car going to be? You hear it coming. What's it going to be? Is it going to be red or blue? And invariably it's silver. Neither of us wins there's the jeopardy of what's the car going to be you hear it coming like what's it going to be it's gonna be red or blue red or blue and you know invariably it's silver neither of us wins but anyway you get the idea it is quite fun you know as games go that i play with my four-year-old but he doesn't really understand that it's the context of our front lawn

that makes that game fun so now every time we're on a road he says let's play the game what color is the car i'm like well i can see the fucking car's red. So do I say it's going to be red? Like that changes my gamble then. I'm lying if I say I think it's going to be blue. You're more likely to win. I know, but... Just by using common sense. Well, I suppose there's a compromise you could come to.

Find the wide ranging form of the game. Which would be what? Like what are the next 10 cars going to be or something? Right, what's the 10th car going to be? It's like gambling. You're training him up to gamble yeah it is gambling i'm an influencer you want to be who i am you envy everything on my instagram but it's all stock photos my life's a total sham I can't even do yoga. But I'm a real health expert. I use Squarespace.

All my photos and advice are all in the one place. And I built a store so you can buy into my taste. $8 smoothies. Yes, thank you very much to Squarespace for their sponsorship and patronage. If you want to design yourself a website you would be an absolute fool a village idiot to look anywhere else don't need to be me lolly why don't you uh frame it as a positive you'd be so incredibly wise and very attractive to your fellow human beings if you choose squarespace well that we cannot

guarantee but what we can guarantee is that Squarespace has award-winningly designed templates it has drag and drop tools to make building your website very easy and you do not have to understand code or anything you can just look at it and you're like that looks like a website rather than a load of things that are in square brackets that's right so you'll still have a beautifully designed website at the end of the process even if you remain incredibly unpopular to other people that is out of our hands but it is a it's quite a nice feeling when you're starting a new project like starting a new podcast or whatever it is and you you start using squarespace and you make something and it doesn't look completely to us it actually looks really nice and it gives you this little like inkling of oh maybe the project i'm going to do is going to be

really good and be as good as my website. Maybe I'm not complete toss after all. Well, I wouldn't go as far as that. If you want to be more Martin and experience that feeling for yourself, then head on down to squarespace.com slash answer. Use the two-week free trial. Then when you sign up, you can get 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain if you use our code ANSWER. Here's a question from Phil in Manchester who says,

growing up in the north of England, we're often told fables and tales about the man who lives in a farmhouse in the middle of the m62 motorway between manchester and leeds uh what so in between like the north and the southbound motorways yeah so if you if you actually just google like house on the m62 motorway is a thing people have always been curious about it the house is actually called stott hall farm the name of the man who lives there now is paul thorpe he's lived there for 10 years and yeah i mean it's an amusing picture even on google maps because you've got the m62 which is a huge six lane highway then just splits down the middle with the left carriageway going around the farmhouse on one side the right carriageway going the other oh it's almost

like an island in the middle of a river but made of roads rather than yeah exactly i mean you can see why if you grew up in manchester or leeds this would be something people would uh talk about yeah phil says there were stories that the motorway builders couldn't get this man to move as he was a stubborn yorkshireman so they simply built the motorways around him there are other stories that his farmland wasn't suitable for roads so again they just built it around him ollie answer me this why does the man live in the middle of the m62 motorway how does he get to and from the shops as i can't see him running across three lanes of motorway traffic with his bread and milk will they ever be able to sell this house well you've said someone's only been living in it for 10 years so they have

managed it isn't owned privately by the people who live in it it's owned by yorkshire water nowadays and so the people living there are tenants so So that deals with that issue. Well, they chose to be tenants, presumably. Yes, the guy who lives there now is someone who's worked on the farm before he lived there. So indeed, chose to be tenants. He's managed to get to work, I guess, before living there. He knew what the perils were. And the guy who lived there before, you know, was he a stubborn Yorkshireman who said you can't build the motorway here? Kind of, and that's why these stories don't quite die. But then so were like, you know, tens of thousands of farmers who lived across the routes of the M62 and loads of other motorways when they built them in Britain for the first time. Of course, they said, you're not knocking my house down. Most of them took the

money and sold up. And in his case, it became a non-issue because they realised there was a geological fault beneath the house, which meant it just was more practical for the engineers to leave it rather than blast through and destroy it. Basically, it was too wet and too steep and they wouldn't be able to get all six lanes of the motorway up there. So they just didn't. The boring truth. Well, that makes sense. Yeah, you can see why people like the kind of local hero idea that someone fought the big government organised road. But I mean, actually, it was just really hard to build around it and i suppose to answer

the thing about well who would want to live there now as you say like it's mythologized it's fabulized it is in any case quite a nice old house it's 300 years old it's 15 acres i believe and it's quirky because it's in the middle of the motorway everyone knows where it is and you do get random passers-by coming in and talking to you which some people like not your thing I would go there to get away from all that but that's interesting isn't it that you would choose that life but you know people want all sorts of different lives even if Phil doesn't yeah you might want easy access to a service station I mean that's the thing like you know he says how do you go out to get your bread and milk well you get on the motorway don't you drive 15 minutes if you're a farmer that might be quite

a nice break from you know walking around with sheep all day you might want to get in your car travel at speed maybe he grows all his uh milk and bread and toilet paper knits it out of the sheep's wool but the sound of the traffic i mean some people like oh who would want to live on a motorway but i mean actually my wife lived on a motorway for five years when we were in our 20s. On the M40 in London, there's a bit of perivale, which is just on the motorway. That's what it faces. And, you know, you get triple glazing. And yes, you can hear the traffic all the time.

It's like a hum that's there all the time and you get used to it. Like a babbling burk? It's not as nice as the houses three roads down that cost more because you can't hear that. But it does cost less for that reason. And that's the truth, isn't it? Like it like you know different people are willing to make that sacrifice and you know if you want a big farmhouse in yorkshire i guess uh having one in the middle of a motorway probably would be cheaper and also some people really like cars as i said earlier i will sit with my son and watch traffic and that's an entertaining sport so you know he'd bloody love to live there. Hello.

I'm Wilson, the ball from Castaway. And here is my song about my favourite balls. Football, rugby ball, volleyball ball. Tennis ball, zoe ball, basketball. Netball, handballball debutante ball bowling ball baseball big sweaty ball answer me this sports day a marathon of fun and games out now at answer me this podcast.com slash albums uh here's a question from Joris, age 32 from the Netherlands, currently living in Somerville, Massachusetts. Helen, answer me this. What is proper Instagram etiquette for liking suggestive bikini photos? And he has put the word suggestive in brackets with a question mark. We'll return to that. Subjectively suggestive, let's say. Exactly. That my wife's 14-year-old niece posts on Instagram. In general, I just like whatever

she posts, even if it's not something I actually like, just to be supportive. She's currently on holiday with her parents and aunt on Ibiza, and the adults posted pictures posing in the harbour that I would judge as kind of tacky, but that I liked regardless. But the 14-year-old included, again, he's put the word suggestive in question mark in brackets, photos in her bikini. If I like her bikini photos, am I a creepy uncle? Or is it just a normal thing to do? What is the proper Insta etiquette? Yeah, I'm coming into a point in my life where this is starting to become relevant because some of my nibblings are in their early teens and they are on Instagram. So far, they post pictures of art they've done or plants that they're growing.

No thirst traps. No thirst traps, not even any pictures of themselves. But I did think, well, you know, I have a 14 year old niece, so should I be prepared? But I think what I would say if my niece did start posting shots like that is probably just hope you're having a good holiday something like that very general where it's like I acknowledge the picture I haven't said anything to suggest I have only focused on the fact of you in your bikini yes I think there's a few things at play here I mean one of them is is your approval going to be that important to her? Because I don't want my nibblings to feel like

I'm kind of spying on what they're doing. Obviously, they're doing it in a public forum, but I want them to express themselves without thinking, what will my elderly relative Helen think about it? I sort of worry about the opposite, to be honest. I'm like, whenever I see one of your nibblings liking one of my Instagram pictures, I'm like, what have I posted recently?

Have I said anything completely ridiculous or inappropriate? The problem is that the more you like it as well, the more Instagram is likely to serve it up to you, and also the more that other people will get to see it, because that's how the algorithm works, isn't it? And I don't know with comments,

I think it's a good suggestion that you made, I hope you're having a good holiday, but I suppose that's still interaction with the photo which does bump it up doesn't it and but he said that there's other people in the photo yeah and he's also and i think it's important that he did put suggestive in brackets with a question mark on it because i think he's acknowledging there implicitly that it may not be sexually suggestive at all you know this is a 14 year old having fun on holiday she may not be thinking at all that that photo could be seen in a in a sexual way or interpreted in a sexual way or she might be because some 14 year olds are there at that point in their lives but they're not necessarily thinking about all of the implications

of that in a platform accessible to adults that's the question isn't it and that's you don't know the answer to that question and so that is a slightly difficult area i think it would be weirder to draw attention to it especially if she's comfortable with being in photos in her bikini then she's a lot more body confident than i have ever been and it would be a shame to make her self-conscious if she's not currently but you wouldn't notice you withdrawing your likes and become self-conscious i don't think as you suggest but she would notice probably if you had a word with her exactly you're right don't do that i guess we'll post some like sunshine emojis don't post an eggplant and water droplets emojis maybe it's

someone who's grappling with a wider problem is how as a man are you supportive of a woman's photos which include them in it without being a creep and obviously this is the one of the more extreme parts of that equation when it's a 14 year old girl and a relative that's a place where you definitely don't want to seem like a creep and you definitely do want to be positive about you know the things that they're posting the problem is also just the like function is so emotionally unsubtle yeah you can't really parse what someone there's no valence or intensity no she's probably thinking that there's no valence in my uncle's likes well that brings us to the end of this episode of answer me this but to make future episodes we need your questions or we'll

have nothing to discuss don't put us in that position please don't you dare not after all this time 389 can only exist with your cooperation so if you have a question send us an email or call us or send us uh better a voice memo attached to your email yes all our contact details are upon our website answer me this podcast.com and halfway through the month you will have a retro answer me this in your feed but if you want to hear episodes 1 to 200 of answer me this or any of our six special albums or our best of compilations from the olden times then those are all available for purchase at answermethisstore.com uh we also have other work that you can discover online uh helen what's happening in the illusionist at the moment uh i recently had the host of the podcast call

your girlfriend on that's a very popular show so if you like them you should listen to that one and i had some fascinating translators on talking about translating black lives matter slogans into yiddish that i'm laughing because it's like a parody of the kind of subject that you cover, but actually I'm sure that would be absolutely fascinating. It was, yeah. That's available at theillusionist.org and also my other podcast. Veronica Mars Investigations is at vmipod.com. We're getting towards the end of season two of Veronica Mars now. Olly, which of your Man productions is up next? Yeah, I've got five podcasts, which you can discover at oliman.com. I host a Radio 4 podcast called 4Thought, F-O-U-R,

Thought, Two Words. And it's a lecture series, basically. And in the broadcast version, I'm only in it for 30 seconds. But if you download the podcast, then you get an interview between me and the speaker after each talk. Martin? We've just launched a new podcast, which is a science podcast, a musical science podcast for young people aged seven to nine. So if you're seven to nine years old or you know someone who is, there's a podcast for you called Maddie's Sound Explorers, hosted by YouTuber and BBC person Maddie Mote. Every episode we explore a question about science through a sound

and there's a piece of music which we make from the sounds that we discover. By we, you mean you. You composed. Yes, well, yes, I'm using the royal we. And we will be back with a fresh new episode of Answer Me This on the first Thursday of next month. So do circle that in your diaries. Bye!