Answer Me This! - AMT393: Glow Sticks, Walking the Plank, and the Pringles Sweats

Episode Date: January 7, 2021

New year, new questions, about naming ravens at the Tower of London, how glow sticks work, did pirates really walk the plank, and how come prawn cocktail-flavour Pringles bring out one listener in the sweats. Find out more about this episode at . For more AMT stuff, head over to , where you can get our six special albums, AMT episodes 1-200, and our Best Of compilations. Send us questions for 2021 episodes: email written words or voice recordings to [e-mail]. Tweet us Facebook 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 the 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 chess 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

where are you baby we used to have so much fun how many times did spock set the faces to stun happy new year listeners happy 14th birthday answer me this i hate you i know that so yeah that wasn't anything to do with our 14th birthday i just couldn't i couldn't suppress it anymore i feel like answer me this year is more like dog years so now we're an old and creaky docile dog and the teenagers are quite some way behind us yeah well i suppose the way podcasting as a medium has gone feels a bit like dog years doesn't it so like you know every year for the last five years of Answer Me This has felt like 20 years of podcasting.

The first 10 years just coasted along, just more of the same, wasn't it? Well, I suppose if dogs became ultra-capitalist and started buying each other for hundreds of millions of dollars. Yeah, that's what dogs get like when they're 14. Yeah, just throwing the cash around before they suddenly die. Actually, this metaphor works a little better than one would have imagined.

Hello, Helen, Ollie and Martin. Paul here from Hertfordshire. I'm a confirmed meat eater, but I think like a lot of people, I'm reducing my meat intake. So venturing more into vegetarian options. One thing you keep coming across is ricotta and spinach in pasta of some sort. Why do people put spinach and ricotta in pasta? Spinach and ricotta basically taste of nothing and pasta really tastes of nothing and you don't really get much from it why is this continued to be a source of food enjoyment i put this question to our mutual italian friend rakella our pizza correspondent who was displeased by the premise but she was

saying spinach does have a flavor yes i would also argue that ricotta has a delicate flavor and pasta itself but the shit that we get in packets in britain may not be the most flavorsome in the chiller cabinet yes i'm also not a huge fan of spinach and ricotta pasta but i think that's because of the british kind that i've had that does indeed taste of nothing yes i think the word delicate is a a wise one. That's it, isn't it? It's borderline bland. And at the same time, because it's delicate, it's comfort food, essentially, isn't it? And if you think about a lot of comfort food, whether you're talking about in Britain, like chips from a chippy. Or chip butty is not a flavour sensation, really.

Bland and bland and bland with salt is delicious, isn't it? So it's like that. I guess it's sort of the Italian equivalent of that, no? Yeah, like what would be the equivalent in chinese food like congee which is wonderful it's about texture isn't it it's about the kind of simplicity and the reassurance of a nice hot thing in your mouth that doesn't challenge you in any way i think there's also i noticed in japan i was propelled to try and re-examine the way that i usually approach food which is for like more obvious flavor and texture and sometimes they just really want you to mull on the flavor of something that is just itself i mean we're all now wanting an example we went for hot pot

and usually we go for sichuan hot pot which is a spicy broth that you put things in and in japan it's a bubbling vat of water with one sheet of seaweed in it yeah and then you just have strips of meat so you're basically savoring the taste and texture of boiled meat do you have a preferred use for ricotta i mean you're saying you're not a big ricotta fan but i mean is there any instance of ricotta that you're like yeah i value the ricotta here uh no i don't really value mozzarella either and people before you get angry at me just think it means there's more mozzarella for you be happy about it for really i mean okay but there's different there's more mozzarella for you be happy about it for really i mean okay but there's different there's mozzarella and mozzarella isn't there i mean again it's back

to the supermarket chiller cabinet yeah but i've been in italy like i've spent quite a lot of time in italy fine just don't care for it is there a gradient is there a difference like the the freshest buffalo mozzarella on a hot day bit of mint bit of tomato don't care for it would rather just have the tomato right okay and actually i I made pesto this summer without parmesan because this was post my gout diagnosis. And so I had to cut back on cheese. So I was like, I'll give this a go. I'll make a fresh pesto, but I'll do like a vegan one.

Right. And so I did up the garlic and the salt and I put some coriander in as well as basil just to try and give it a bit more going on. What about some nutritional yeast for the savoury element? Can't have yeast. Oh, sorry. It doesn't help.

Yeah, taunting me. But anyway, you don't miss the parmesan. That's my hot tip for anyone who's doing veganuary. Don't miss it. I mean, you could still have like a tiny bit and sprinkle it on your pasta if you really miss it, but you don't need the loads that you put in pesto. Like you'd think something that's so flavoursome

would change the flavour, but it actually doesn't really. Garlic for me is the important component. If I become allergic to garlic which can happen I'll be very distraught. Yeah. Hello Ellen and Oli it's Richard here from Bradford. I really like prawn cocktail Pringles like by the tube but the way I like to specifically eat them is to lick all of the flavour off and they're all it's always concentrated on one end so to lick all of the flavour off and they're always concentrated on one end so I lick all the flavour off and then I eat the then plain Pringle but as I'm eating them as I get about a third of the way down the tube I start sweating and I don't know what it is that causes me to just sweat profusely specifically on my forehead helen and i'll answer this why do i sweat when i eat prawn

cocktail pringles because it doesn't happen when i eat texas barbecue or any of the other ones it's just the prawn cocktail ones and i know it's a good tube if i'm sweating by the end because i love i love that flavor powder to the end of the earth but why am i sweating uh i uh learned in the course of uh delving into this mystery that smoky bacon flavour Pringles are vegan, but salt and vinegar flavour Pringles are not vegan. Oh, he likes to fuck with you, doesn't he? That circle-headed monster.

Julius Pringle loves to just sprinkle a bit of milk protein onto the Pringles. Now, being very devoted to richard's well-being yes i looked up the ingredients on prawn cocktail pringles versus texas barbecue to see if there was something i'm gonna guess ketchup mayonnaise and prawns do not feature if they do they've given them a more scientific sounding name yes but and they they both contain um milk proteins they both contain paprika extracts they both contain annatto all of these things that someone might have a reaction to so i don't know whether there's like a small thing in the flavorings ingredient that they don't break down that richard is having a reaction to i also found

that a lot of people on the internet have a sweating reaction to salt and vinegar specifically so he's an outlier with the prawn cocktail ones. Can I just say that the sort of too long don't read version of this is it's some chemical, but we can't identify which. Well, no. You need to work out which one it is, and then you've got it's us. No, and bear in mind, I'm not a doctor. Not a Dr. Richard.

This is not a diagnosis. I don't think you need to remind us of that. There is a condition called fray's syndrome aka gustatory hyper hydrosis aka gustatory sweating aka prawn cocktail pringolitis certain foods make you sweat or even just thinking about them no richard are you sweating now hearing us talk about your experience are you familiar when when eating certain foods or even thinking about those foods makes you salivate more? Like if I think about sour Haribo.

I was just, oh my God, you took the words out of my mouth. That's weird. Must have been when you were eating Tangfastics. Yeah. When I think about Tangfastics, my tongue. Tonguefazzles. Yeah. It has the reaction it would as if I just put one on my tongue, which is really weird.

Yeah. I have noted that. Yeah. So if you had phrase syndrome, it wouldn't cause you to salivate. It would cause you to sweat because your nerves would be joined up differently or there would have been some trauma to your salivary glands. And when it was healing, your nerves would have joined up differently. So when you eat something or think about something that gives you that strong salivary reaction, you sweat instead of salivating

fascinating so just saying not a doctor but that's a thing here's a question from connor who says i've just been watching a video of a japanese mixologist preparing cocktails he looks all very smart and even has what seems to be a holster on his torso as if he could use it to carry a firearm in the video he does all manner of tricks, from carving ice into diamonds, catching limes on the end of a knife, to juggling various ingredients and equipment. It's a spectator spectacular, isn't it? Connor says,

I've also seen this type of performance from many mixologists and bartenders when ordering cocktails, and I wonder about its origins. So Ollie, answer me this, what is the history to this mixology performance? Who started it? Was the theatricality of the performance a way of justifying a cocktail's more expensive price tag? And how do they learn these skills? Do certain places pay for or

encourage their staff to train in these skills? There are numerous kind of quasi-academic institutions where you can learn to be a mixologist. Wow. It is essentially another way for mixologists to make money isn't it by training other ones like of course you know that that structure exists you can earn more tips you can get a better job you can work in better establishments if you've done their course and also the holster that connor references like it's quirky that is just practicality yeah like a utility belt yeah if the items that you need most readily available are best deployed when they're strapped to your waist.

It was as simple as that. Especially if you're doing a performance for someone, you quickly need the stirry thing. It's in your belt. Actually, I had always assumed, Connor, like you, that the theatricality of the performance was a way of justifying a cocktail's more expensive price tag. Yes. But actually, there is a long and illustrious history to this. First of all, let's just clarify the terms. The mixologist creates the drink.

The bartender basically just mixes and serves them. Some mixologists are bartenders, but not all bartenders are mixologists. And the term mixologist, I thought of as something quite recent. And indeed, it was kind of only brought to mainstream prominence in about 2002, with the publication of a book called The Craft of the Cocktail by Dale DeGroff, who's one of these old timers who's been working in New York hotels forever. Wow, really alliterative book title and author name. Yes, true. I don't know if all of his cocktails are alliterative as well. That would be an amazing gimmick. But the term had been in use within the industry for at least a century before that. Oh, wow. And it all goes back to a chap called Jerry Thomas,

who's the kind of king of cocktails, in 1862. Wow. Who published the very first cocktail mixing book, which is called How to Mix Drinks or the Bon Vivant's Companion. It's a list of recipes. There's a brandy daisy. That one is gum syrup, lemon brandy and jamaica rum that sounds good flip which is an eggnog without cream but also there is uh his signature uh cocktail the

blue blazer which is a hot toddy it's basically scotch lemon and hot water but there is a line drawing in the book of him mixing the cocktail in 1862, which is theatrical looking. So what you do is you ignite some whiskey and you pour it between two cups. He holds one at his head height and one at waist height. Cool. And clearly this is entertainment skills that he'd honed in his bars. And it's difficult to find any information as to why Jerry Thomas took it upon himself to turn this alcohol mixing into a performance.

But I have a theory. Yeah. Which is that if you look at the location of where his first saloon bar was, which he opened in 1851, it was in the cellar of Barnum's American Museum. Okay, so there was a spectacle expectation, perhaps. Right.

In the same way that that odd Harry Potter shop has opened around the corner from the Palace Theatre in London, which is showing Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. Oh, has it? I just think if you're there as a tourist 15 000 visitors a day went to barnum's american museum at its peak and they were there to see waxworks and dioramas so if you're there for that kind of thing then the adult portion of that tourist

quota who want to drink afterwards they're the kind of people who would pay extra to see one set on fire aren't they but i would also people who would pay extra to see one set on fire, aren't they? But I would also think that it certainly does allow the markup on the drinks. And also it allows for the narrative that says that it's an American art form, which was obviously really important to Americans to think of the cocktail as a quintessentially American thing.

But like a lot of quintessentially American things, it has its roots in other cultures. Like we had punch bowls in the 18th century in Britain, which, you know, are spirits mixed with fruit juices and spices and other flavors consumed in punch houses not that different really to a cocktail bar the difference was the americans turned it into a theatrical performance because i'm not a drinker maybe i'm not frequenting appropriate establishments but i i haven't seen that much performance cocktailing apart from like some very fast work from the bartenders but um I feel like I would find it quite irritating I'd be like yes yes just give me the drink yes I feel like that that what's it called when you go to um those restaurants where

they cook the meat in front of you what's that oh like a teppanyaki yes teppanyaki yeah to me that's fun for the appetizers then I'm like just give me the fucking dinner you know like I've seen it now because you and I can't deal with audience participation so it's just that again isn't it yeah it is but it's also the fact it's like the the onus is on you like you're paying but you have to go oh very good excellent oh that's theater ollie you're describing every live dramatic performance you've ever experienced no well sort of but as an individual your reaction is not being monitored when you go to the theater usually and really naturally you go to the theatre, usually. And really, naturally, you want to applaud at the end of a two-hour play.

That's a bit different. But like applauding someone cutting up a stage. Are you doing a lot more work relative to the amount of work they do if you're applauding every two to three minutes as opposed to every two to three hours? Right. I accept that. That's it, yeah.

It's imbalanced. But at the theatre, do they flip bits of meat into your mouth? If you've got a question, then email your question to answermethispodcastatgooglemail.com answermethispodcastatgooglemail.com answermethispodcastat at googlemail.com Answer me this podcast at googlemail.com So retrospectives, what historical events are we ticking off on this week's round 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. Ten minutes each weekday, wherever you get your podcasts. Mary Ellen has a question of pirates now.

She says, Helen, who are this me answer? Why didn't the captain or crew just push someone overboard instead of making them walk the plank? Was this additional punishment or was it a way to collectivize murder or were ships just built in a way that people couldn't be thrown overboard well there is a humiliation element in public executions isn't there a making example of someone uh i would guess there's also a slight practical element to making someone walk the plank so they don't hit a lower deck or bleed all over the ship as they hit every little window frame on the way down but also yeah as a warning to everyone else it's it's

clearly much less easy to miss isn't it yes an event that's happening on the ship but generally if they were killing someone on board which apparently was actually pretty rare they would just throw them overboard or abandon them on an island to die slowly or stab them there are a few recorded instances of this actually happening but it is mostly something that was popularized by fiction such as um treasure island right and then it just really caught on in in people's excitement for piratical trends so apparently pirates didn't really say either or speak in west country accents well so i presume the ones from cornwall did but yeah i guess that wasn't

the center of international piracy it wasn't that that probably came from the pirates of penzance didn't it that whole meme of cornish pirates pirates saying apparently is from the 1950s when robert newton played long john silver on tv and his accent had a rolling and that apparently popularized for pirates although on the plank thing when you say like sometimes they stab them or you know whatever would that be because they didn't have a plank i wonder because is the plank just the board that you use to get on board the ship for every day use yeah so mostly it wasn't really a plank. It was just the ship's ladder and they would put that out horizontally. Okay, so it's not a special feature that you have built bespoke for executions.

What, like a diving board to give them extra height before they go down? I'm just curious, like if you were ordering a super yacht now, could you get a plank? I'm sure you could. You'd probably pretend it was a diving board though. Some people theorise likeize like oh if you get someone to walk the plank then it meant the pirates would avoid a murder charge which is total bollocks because a piracy usually carried a death sentence and also you would still probably be charged with murder realistically for making someone die even if they walked their own death

a piracy on the high seas carried the death sentence until 1998. Huh. But the point is, they didn't really kill people on the ships because it was actually working against their piratical needs. Because if pirates had a reputation for killing everyone on board of every ship, then they would be embroiled in a lot more fights because crews of other ships would just fight them to the death. And if they just wanted to take valuables and fuck off off it's much more difficult if people are expecting you to kill

everyone or trying to kill you but also it's an organized crime ring effectively isn't it if you want to encourage other people to join you and be a pirate you kind of want it to be known that occasionally you kill people who get down on the wrong side of you and you're a bad motherfucker yeah but not that you do that routinely because if you do that routinely to kill people who get down on the wrong side of you and you're a bad motherfucker yeah but not that you do that routinely because if you do that routinely to the people who participate then you would run out of people to help you in your cause of robbing and thieving running a pirate ship is a job like you do need a skipper and you need someone to cook and you know right i suppose that's true yeah you don't want to have the reputation of a toxic workplace exactly i guess if you knew that you'd be abandoned on a remote island with a slow death in front of you

then that would be threat enough apparently they may have like chucked people off the ship and been like ha ha swim to safety so they didn't have to get back on the ship or swim to land and maybe die in the process yes that's why I think it captures the public imagination is as well because you think of yourself as the victim don't you think what if I was given the opportunity to choose like either slit my throat here or walk the plank like obviously by walking the plank you're probably going to die alone in the sea and drown and that's awful but there's a chance that you might get rescued or swim to safety so most people would choose that even though the death is actually more prolonged and worse than just having your throat slit

that's the thing is it puts you in that position where you think, what would I do? The first known writer talking about walking the plank in English was someone going by the name Captain Charles Johnson. But he was otherwise unknown. And they think that may have been a pseudonym for Daniel Defoe. And if it was Daniel Defoe, this book that was published in 1724 called A General History of the Pirates, in which a lot of pirate. It's not myth if it's real, but, you know, the whole pirate thing. Lingua franca. Yeah, this was like the golden age of piracy at the time, although it was very, very brief.

It was like a decade. In this book, he's talking about putting the ship's ladder out over the waves and telling captives that they're free to go and then obviously they die. But, you know, Daniel Defoe was a novelist who wrote some pretty out there stuff. So yeah.

And so and also he might have been trying to legitimize his own later fictional work. Like, so you create the non-fictional account and be like, look, this this guy says it's true. And actually you've made it. If he wrote this book. If he wrote that book. I wouldn't necessarily think it was an accurate historical document of piracy. So, yeah, it's somewhat bullshit.

It's so odd. I mean, I know it's really odd that pirates in general have become a staple of childhood entertainment. Although, again, I'd probably put that back to Pirates of Penzance. I think Peter Pan. I think that's specifically Peter Pan. But this particular thing of walking the plank is even kind of done in a child-friendly way

on kids' TV routinely, still routinely still now well it's a bloodless way to show death there's a show called swashbuckle which it's on cbb's and harvey watches it every day and it's great actually like it's fun house basically but with all the kids dressed as pirates and the woman who presents it is a lady called jemma hunt who has the most extraordinary commitment to children's telly i have ever seen in any performer ever i don't know how she does it she never lets the mask slip she seems like she's so thrilled to be there she just loves playing with five-year-olds it's extraordinary essentially it's it's like a an obstacle course soft play thing but at the end if the kids team beat the grown-up team which happens nine times out of ten then one of the

grown-up pirates has to walk the plank. And all the audience, dressed as pirates, shout, walk the plank, walk the plank. Ass to ass. Die, die, die. Exactly. I mean, what you're actually doing there is paying homage to a gang of robbers and rapists and murderers

and the way that they used to commit public executions. But it's like on kids' tech. I mean, it's into a gunge tank. Obviously, they don't actually die. But isn't it interesting that that's used to commit public executions. But it's like on kids' tech. I mean, it's into a gunge tank. Obviously, they don't actually die. But isn't it interesting that that's acceptable to parents in a way that portraying other groups of murderers, like the Mafia, for example, would not be acceptable on children's television?

You know, take him out! You wouldn't do that, would you, five-year-olds? Concrete overcoat. Yeah! At my village page, my hotcakes sell like hotcakes I want to expand my business beyond the school gates So I make so much money My wallet would fill a lake

Or a reservoir would do With Squarespace.com you can build an e-commerce website Track your hotcake orders and take safe payments through Stripe Your hotcakes are so hot they'll set the internet aloft. Selling like hotcakes, do you see? Thanks ever so much to Squarespace for supporting Answer Me This. And making it possible for you to build really quite straightforward and yet beautiful websites. Love straightforward beauty.

Absolutely. If you're looking to use lockdown, in fact, to build yourself a brand new website, Squarespace is the perfect platform to quickly and easily do that. And you don't need to take our word for it. Captain Tom Moore, he uses Squarespace, or at least someone does from his team to create his website. So if you want to donate to Captain Tom Moore's campaign, it's via a Squarespace template. Do you think he set it up himself at 100? I think that's unlikely given his age. Let's be honest, he doesn't have much time left. He's probably not going to spend time learning any kind of website building. But if he were to spend the time, it would take, what, a matter of hours and he'd be up and running. Lovely. Nobly and slowly with the courage of the nation behind him. Well, if you want to set up

your own website, then you can go to squarespace.com slash answer and play around during the free trial and find out what Squarespace does and how it can do that for you. Then you can get 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain if you use our code. Answer. Here is a question from Brent in Los Angeles, California.

When I visited the Tower of London in 1993, this is something that's been bothering me ever since, the beefeater leading the group tour pointed to one of the six resident black ravens and described him as being, quote, very special because he was the first raven in history to be hatched on castle grounds. Really?

Were they hatching them before? Well, I was about to be sceptical about that, but then I thought, actually, of London, like someone probably has documented every raven that's been there. They probably do have quite reliable records. But is there a raven hatchery and then they're like the glossiest, most handsome, most threatening looking ones get to be one of the six? I wouldn't be surprised if the raven hatching business at the Tower of London was only kind of fully professionalised in the 1980s, that seems likely, doesn't it?

Like, it was a big tourist attraction anyway. Like, you go there because of the tower. The ravens were just a plus. Well, no, I think it was... Well, speculation is that it was Charles II who insisted there should always be six ravens at the Tower of London. So it's been specific for a long time.

Yeah, but he didn't say it has to be a raven that's born here. No, but where else are they being born? I actually just found a BBC News article from 2019 in which it says, Raven chicks have been born at the Tower of London for the first time in 30 years this week. Obviously, it takes a while to breed some ravens. Maybe the ravens there don't like to bang.

It's too public. Brent continues. Our Guardian guide went on to explain that to commemorate the male raven's home birth, a naming contest had been held amongst school-aged children throughout the United Kingdom. The winning name, he revealed with wry but regal pronunciation, was Ronald Raven. Fantastic. A tribute to the US President Ronald Reagan, who at the time was in his final year in office.

That year then was 1989 which means the three of you as in you helen you martin and i were school-aged children at the time and therefore eligible to enter this competition so helen answer me this did you participate in this national raven naming contest and if so do you remember the name you submitted i did not participate i don't think i knew about it. No. I imagine a lot of kids at the time would have gone for John Raven after John Craven hosted Newsround. Well, they didn't ask for a pun.

I mean, they went for a pun in the end. People are going to. I suppose now if they held any competition like that, it would just be deluged with Raven McRavenface. Raven McRavenface, that's right, yeah. Forever, it's just ruined these kinds of competitions. What would you have gone for had you entered, do you think, at that age? So you were, what, like nine?

Yeah, I was nine. I don't know because I think I actually didn't have that much imagination as a child. Hard to credit. But I remember entering other competitions, usually Blue Peter ones. And I don't know whether it's because we were friends with a boy called Dermot who won the shit out of every Blue blue peter photography contest there was wow and i don't know whether my my family saw him racking up the blue peter badges and was like we need to like get on that train yeah we haven't hothoused our children in private education for them to fail

at blue peter so maybe with my glorious runner-up in the 1985 Christmas card competition, I was pressured to enter the 1986 design a new boss for York Minster after the fire competition. Oh, I remember that. Yeah, right. York Minster, huge fuck-off church. Yeah. Boss? What's a boss? Well, something almost like a monumental shield, isn't it?

Yeah, it was like a hemisphere. They were dotted around the roof. There were 60-odd bosses on the roof, and they were carved with different scenes and patterns and things and um york minster had a massive fire um i think in 1984 1985 so as part of the reconstruction they were like okay we're going to farm out six of the boss designs to blue peter competition winners i think they did six by age group so there was a six-year-old who won, could have been me, but wasn't. It was an amazingly slow gratification prize. I read this really interesting diary from Joanna Biggs, who at 16 was one of the winners. And she said to her

mother at the time, it's the last Blue Peter competition I'll enter because I'm too old. But she was like, the prize was so brilliant, brilliant i had to do it and she designed one featuring the raising of the mary rose because they're all supposed to design them with like significant moments of the 20th century when she went back to school having been on blue peter with this thing she was taunted uh but she was like i didn't care about losing street cred but then because the restoration of york minster took a really long time they all went back a couple of years later to see the bosses put into place and she was like i was at art college by then so it's just like really kind of embarrassing anyway i entered the boss competition didn't even get runner up what

was yours i remember it involved a whale i don't know why what was it doing it was just being a whale right answer but like i said i didn't have much imagination as a child it wasn't breaching i don't know what the important moment in the 20th century was maybe saving the whales when they specified important moments of the 20th century presumably they didn't actually in the end green light any that were like live aid or whatever like kennedy getting murdered yeah it was shima nagasaki yeah i mean if i'd have done it uh named a raven i think at that stage of my life being eight i'd just been acting in shakespeare in in fringe theater so i my entry would have been like it should have been burned on delivery really it would

have been some hideously pretentious allusion to Shakespeare, I probably would have wanted the raven to be called Fleance or something. That's quite an elegant name, actually, for a raven. I think those Shakespearean names would suit the raven style, especially as everyone who's on public display at the Tower of London is pretty much wearing a period dress. Ronald Raven's more fun. I can see why they went for it.

Down and lonely Life is so confusing I need some answers, preferably amusing Now I find a podcast that will suit

I listen to Helen and Ollie on my half-hour commute. Homeschooling isn't just for kids. You might as well learn something this year, which is why Answer Me This is supported by The Great Courses Plus.

A massive library of online lectures in so many different topics. I have been watching How to Create Comics. What, like graphic novels, comics? Yeah, and you know it's going to be a good one because there's a content note at the start of each episode that's not suitable for minors. Although I have not yet encountered any content that would be unsuitable for minors.

And the lecturer is Peter Bagg, who is a pretty major American cartoonist used to do stuff with Robert Crumb so he's got practical advice about like what kinds of tools you need or how you would build it into a career but I was more interested in the abstract stuff like how you do biography or autobiography in comic form yes quite a lot of what he said was applicable to other art forms well it's often the case with the courses isn isn't it? So you have experts in their fields reflecting on their own particular thing. Yeah, as I work in creative media, I think it's interesting to learn about

how people in ones that I do not know how to do, do it. And he was saying, don't think you know the whole story before starting Be A Blank Slate. So he was doing this strip about some news event and he was like, it turned out to be something completely different, which is what I felt validated by that because that's often how my work turns out although probably because i'm

more disorganized this was supposed to be a serious show initially just went completely off the rails uh he also said i'm reading between the lines here he said people who are into your subject matter often have very strong opinions about it and i was like oh yeah he must just get loads of shit from people yeah and one thing about the great courses plus is they are these videos but they're also downloadable pdf materials and in this particular course it's uh it's very good because it's got lots of illustrations of what he's talking about in comics so very useful very useful indeed um anyway you can uh visit our special url thegreatcoursesplus.com answer and get 14 days of unlimited access for free to the thousands of video and audio courses that are available.

That's thegreatcoursesplus.com slash answer. Hi, Helen, Ollie and Martin the sound man. This is Kate in Bristol. My son is two tomorrow and he's playing with some glow sticks in the bath. They're kind of plastic long glow sticks that you get at fireworks parties and discos and stuff like that. And I just wondered, can you answer me this? The chemistry inside them that makes them glow when you crack them, is that useful in any other context? Is there any other use for the glow stick or is it

just a party thing and how were they invented? Thanks. There is in fact a military use for glow sticks, mainly in the Navy navy for emergency lights and target markers and landing zone markers and parachute markers so in fact when they were first patented for commercial use the assumption would be it would be the navy that would use them because they and preppers like them too for this reason they are the only uh non-flammable non-sparking light source that's safe to use immediately after a catastrophic event so it's it's cute i don't know if they've ever seen that in a zombie apocalypse type film but it makes sense doesn't it like if there's been a gas leak or something safer to crack open a

glow stick then if you're ever in that situation then it is to you know light an oven lighter i feel like a realistic like post-apocalyptic film or series would have a lot more people like like falling into a sinkhole and breaking their leg and then starving to death or blowing themselves up on a gas main when they're trying to search the abandoned hospital or whatever. Whenabouts were they invented for the naval use? Well, they were sort of like a lot of these things kind of stumbled upon by accident. Chemiluminescence is the scientific name for the reaction which is going on in the sticks. And that is something that is produced in nature by fireflies. Yes.

A scientist in the 60s in the States, Edwin A. Chandross, an organic chemist, was investigating kind of how you can simulate that in a lab. And realised that using luciferin, which is a chemical compound you can produce light without heat. So he was the first person, documented anyway, to experiment with luminol by combining hydrogen peroxide with oxalyl chloride and dye. So that is essentially what a glow stick is. But it was only put into a glow stick, as we know them now, in the 1980s. Aha, which is when I associate with them being at raves.

Exactly. I wasn't at the raves. And that was... I was a child and a square. That was thanks to a chemiluminescent specialist company called Omniglow who had bought the technology off American cyanamid, who were the people who got the first patent for the navy with the trademark Cyalume. But it was Omniglow who turned it into a party stick right it's always been the same thing it's just that they managed to perfect it so it was brighter like chandros is one would have been by modern standards very dim like like literally like one percent of what you get now wow okay

it's an internal glass tube inside and out a plastic tube and when you snap them the chemicals mix if you break them in multiple places it's brighter because the faster the chemicals mix the more luminescent the reaction or if you shake it up as if you were dancing and if you shake it up that's right yeah then you get a better glow but all of that was worked out after a grateful dead gig in connecticut in 1971 people have a lot of good ideas when they're high that's because someone who worked for the company who was making glow sticks took a bag of them to the Grateful Dead concert and gave them out and thus created a glow stick sensation. Incredible.

So by the 1980s, it was something that was a standard issue at raves. That glass inside. Yeah, I know. And so you're letting your two-year-old play with them in the bath, Kate. Think about that. Do you let your children play with them? Yeah, at fireworks night because it's safer than fireworks true but otherwise no although in the bath harvey actually

got from santa this year um a hot wheels that changes color when you put it in the bath is it like a toy vehicle hot wheels uh micro machines for the current decade i see it's so good it happens instantly it uses um thermochromic dyes i think they're called which is kind of like a global hypercolor yeah i used to have color change toys so you dip it in hot water and it instantly changes color and you're looking at it i haven't looked into this but you're looking at this is obviously some military technology that's been applied to a toy because it's astonishing camouflage you know those mugs you get where when you put a hot drink in then the the picture changes? Yeah, yeah, that's the same stuff, yeah.

Like someone once gave me one where a naked man appeared when you poured a drink in it. I remember my mum and her friends just cackling their heads off when I was giving that for Christmas. I look at that and I think, yeah, military technology, yeah. Here's a question from Karina in Brooklyn, New York, who says, I was reading a novel set in the late 19th century, and there was a lot of business in there about gentlewomen fainting all over the place. At the sight of blood, at the mention of a rude word, and then she's put in brackets, bum!

Not an American 19th century novel then. Most of the time these delicate creatures were revived with smelling salts. So Helen asked me this, what are smelling salts? Can I still buy them? Do they work like coffee? Are they cheaper than coffee? Is it drugs? I bet it's drugs.

Well, it's not drugs. It's ammonium carbonate. And is it more effective than, for example, throwing cold water in someone's face or is it just more genteel? The thing is, you can kind of take it with you just in case you get a fainter. Whereas the cold water, you would have to be near some cold water.

And I can imagine as well in the 19th century, you didn't necessarily have water on tap. Particularly not water you'd want to throw in anyone's face. Right. That would probably solve one problem and introduce another worse problem. But also you'd like get all their clothes wet, wouldn't you? Exactly. It'd be very, very messy. Whereas this, you would just wave like a hand span away from someone's nose and and what the ammonium carbonate does

is it irritates the mucous membranes of your nose and your lungs which triggers your inhalation reflex often the faint will be caused by a vagal reaction which uh so you're not basically getting enough oxygen to the brain and this will kind of force you to breathe more and that's what wakes you up. But also people use it as a stimulant. For instance, in sport, a lot of NFL and NHL players use it. Okay, hold on. You've brought us out of the world of Victorian literature here.

Yeah, right. So it is still a thing that you can buy, but is it still called smelling salts? I'm guessing not. No, I think it is. It's not called like sports whiff or something. something no but ammonia carbonate sounds like a cooler thing to start looking for on uh you know athletes websites so it's quite controversial the use of it in sport it's not illegal because it's just a smell that they think perks them up but firstly

there are a lot of sports scientists who are like there's no proven benefit at all secondly if you use it improperly you can really burn out those mucous membranes thirdly if you've got a serious injury like concussion and people mistake it for a faint then it's bad to use it especially if someone wakes up with a start and you know they've got a head injury and they need not to move but hold on that's not going to happen in nfl is it someone's been hit they're on the floor the doctor is going to say quick, get the smelling salts. They fainted. I mean, surely not.

Surely at that point, they are on the side of concussion. I don't know. 70 plus percent of NFL and NHL players use them, which was astonishing to me. And also Tim Henman was given them at Wimbledon in 2002. He was down several sets

and then made it back up the smelling salts well enough to progress to the next round. Wow. But there isn't a commercial brand name for this product. I mean, it hasn't been Lucas-aided, has it? It hasn't been co-opted by Johnson & Johnson into a product that you can buy at a leisure centre. Maybe in some of the vending machines. machines i wonder if you can still get um in the 19th century they would dissolve the smelling salts with perfume in alcohol or vinegar and then soak it onto a sponge and keep it in a decorative

container like a little pretty filigree container called a vinaigrette i wonder if you can still get those okay i'm just on boots.com and i'm looking up smelling salts uh yeah mackenzie's smelling salts eucalyptus pneumonia 17 milliliters for seven pounds 99 wow buy one get second half price i mean you get cbd at holland these days so i'm not surprised Thank you. to googlemail.com So ask your question to Helen and Ali The money, the sound, the attention All the territory says Answer me this podcast to googlemail.com

Here's a question from an anonymous lady who says During my 11 years in college and graduate school I became incredibly close to two friends we were in the same program so we inevitably had most of our classes together and did almost nightly study groups we went on vacations with each other's families and lived together at various points over the years why are you sighing helen as if there's dread coming around the corner there's dread coming around the corner ollie for 11 11 years, we were basically sisters. I'm picturing little women now. They are sisters. That's true, yes. They're biologically sisters. During this time, two of us met significant others and got married. Once my husband finished

school, we were forced to move to a different state for his job. At this point, their friendship with me seemed to completely end. I was always the one reaching out on birthdays and holidays. And whilst they would reply, they never initiated contact more than liking or commenting on a Facebook post here and there. Oh, that's rough. And we should say at this point, and obviously she's in America because she's talking about school instead of university and moving state for work. But I mean, the US is massive.

I'm not saying this justifies cutting off contact, but she could be talking here about the equivalent of moving from London to Moscow or Nigeria. I mean, it's a bloody long way potentially, right? Yeah, but the internet still exists. Yeah, well, we'll get onto that. I'm just saying, even though the internet exists, I have found myself that when my friends move a long way away,

I'm less likely to contact them online, like counterintuitively in a way, because I'm less likely to bump into them. But it's like, it's easier to forget about them a bit that's all I'm saying I guess yes a few years after moving we got divorced it was not amicable and he said some rather nasty things about me publicly which I know at least one of them my old friends saw on Facebook neither one ever reached out to ask me how I was or what had happened. Neither one reached out or even liked my post when I got engaged and remarried. But one did like my ex's post when he got engaged.

I have not spoken to these girls in almost six years, have unfriended them on all social media platforms, not even Pinterest, have moved on with my life, assuming that I was never as close to them as I thought and I'm deeply hurt over it. However, recently, the one who liked my ex's engagement post

sent me a message asking how I was and wanting to catch up. So, Helen, answer me this. How should I respond? Can I be rude and tell her to fuck off? Should I ignore her and miss my only opportunity to express how hurt I was with their actions? Or do I have to put my big girl pants on and respond politely as if nothing has happened? Why are those the only options? Why not don't ignore her but also express how hurt you were with their actions? Maybe there's a lot of stuff you don't

know about because you haven't been in touch yes or maybe it will make you feel better to at least say that let that out or that she will have some information for you that will make you feel better because obviously you're still hurting so it's not like this is reanimating feelings that you had successfully vanquished because the feelings are already there yes you've got nothing to lose you're her anyway you've written them out of your life anyway so you might as well have it out but you don't have to do that rudely like she's like do i tell her to fuck off or do i be polite just tell the truth like you've got a rare opportunity here to not care too much about her feelings yeah because you don't you genuinely don't care but also you don't need to be rude you can be great to hear from you

it's a shame we didn't hear from me for for eight years and i don't know how to feel about it for these reasons yeah well i think you can say i'm surprised to hear from you i think say it on the call though rather than in messages because of tone i would not message too much before i would just say okay let's chat and say i was really surprised to hear from you i've been through a lot where i didn't hear from you and I thought maybe you were ignoring me. Do you know, that's such a simple tip, but I think actually is really worthwhile. Because actually she didn't mention here

that she wants to have a call. She just said she wants to catch up. So it could have all been digital and it could have all been written, but you're so right. Like you can obsess so much about how you write something, but then have a call because she'll be able to hear the nuance in your voice

and you'll be able to hear hers. And it's so isn't it yeah the trouble is i think you're more likely to forgive someone when you're in person or on a call than in writing yes but is that trouble that might be good you might want to forgive her if there's a reason to you i don't think that's necessarily true i think also like if you're angry that might come across quite strongly on a call it's maybe a lot more awkward on a call that if you're still really upset with her yeah but maybe anonymous will feel like her feelings have not been validated because on the call she was like oh i can't say the thing i think maybe write out some bullet points beforehand of things that would be important for you to express so they're there in front of you but also i guess be prepared for her having a defense yes and this

is complete speculation on my part because i don't know your ex-husband. But if she liked the post about him leaving you, maybe she did have her reasons and she might be wrong, but she may have a counter-argument for you that might be hard for you to hear. So I think you've got to go into it knowing what you want to say, but you've also got to be open enough to hear the other side, haven't you? I wouldn't necessarily go into it with the granular detail of why did you like my husband's post oh no no definitely not I think you can say I haven't heard from you for a long time I went through a lot of stuff where were you I mean don't say don't say where were you but I think

there are ways that you can express where were you without it seeming unreasonable I mean counterpoint I think any point along the spectrum is acceptable if your decision is like you're pissed off with this person then actually you don't need to reconnect with that sort of person at all and you just want to either just ignore her or say, you know what, you weren't there when I needed you, goodbye. That's fine. On the opposite end of the spectrum, people use social media in very, very different ways.

Yes. Like the frequency, what they think, the things that they say and do on social media conveys. Like you're obsessing over it, they liked a a particular post again i understand why that is but they might have you know just been like oh okay well i should express some solidarity with that person that they're going through a breakup you know and that's for them that's a like so the opposite end of the spectrum says like maybe they didn't think they were doing anything wrong maybe they hadn't realized how crap they'd been in terms of being a you know keeping contact and being a friend and also

because it's all sort of presented to you on one never-ending scrollable feed it's perverse but i often find myself not engaging with the really significant stuff because i save it for later in my head and then forget about it so if someone writes someone who's not close to me i mean obviously my best friend writes my father's just died then i would pick up the phone and call them but if someone who i'm not particularly close to post about their father dying yeah in my head i think oh god that's serious i'm not going to write like i'm not going to put a glib comment care emoji i will file that away and next time i speak to them i'll mention it or i'll drop them a message in a few days times and then what happens is i forget so i do wonder if like someone you lose

touch with says we're getting divorced maybe they intended to get in touch and then just forgot I mean that does happen maybe you just don't know what their motivation was and you can ascribe a lot of uh ideas to that that may not be accurate it may just be the algorithm didn't show them your posts well like Holly said like maybe you've left it too late and you feel self-conscious about saying oh I hope you're doing a you know or whatever the thing is you the response you were trying to craft you've left it too late and you can't post it at all i'm actually quite impressed that your friend has got in touch with you after such a long time because i think the longer you leave things the harder it is to then do the thing that you should have done earlier

so i think that is not for nothing i will also say that like i've had a couple of friend breakups in adulthood and they're really devastating. They're almost harder to deal with than a romantic breakup because there's less protocol for dealing with it and it's hard to know what to do with those feelings. How would you feel if one of those people sent you this message saying, hey, how are you? Because six years ago, whatever it was, 10 years ago, you decided, right, hard no, never engaging with you again. But if they reached out to you would you just leave it there's somewhere it's a long time ago where i would just leave it because they're people i don't trust and there's a more recent one where it would feel preferable if they did do that i think do what feels right if you want to not talk to her do it

if you want to just forget about it and try and reconnect with this person and put aside all of those feelings of resentment over what are actually quite small social media interactions and go you know what i'm just going to try and see how we reconnect without all of that baggage that's also a thing that you could try like it's up to you none of those are wrong also there's a lot that happens after you leave university like your friendships do reconfigure and that can often be on geographical lines particularly 10 plus years ago where staying friends via internet was less developed than it is now maybe these friends you had were not as good at being friends who weren't in person i mean i have friends that i i'm not good at staying in

contact with but like when i do see them every few years it's like none of that time has passed maybe it'll be like that for you yeah i mean my wife's best friends from university uh both live in norway so she she doesn't speak to them and she doesn't consider but they send each other christmas cards you'd almost say it's gone cold but when they do meet up it's like like they've never been it's like they've never been apart um so yeah they're i mean there's different strokes of different folks in there i guess or just you know you leave university you're wondering what the hell you're doing in your life, perhaps. Maybe like there's mental health stuff you go through as you're figuring out who you are as an adult.

There's lots of reasons that that could have happened, but see what the relationship is now, I would say. Like try and get some kind of closure for the feelings that you've been carrying around all this time, but then look ahead as to who you are to each other at this point in your lives maybe nothing maybe the ideal thing is like you'll speak with her and then you'll be like oh i don't particularly care about her anymore and she has no place in my life and then you can sort of that might feel good close that door yeah yeah or at least it

will just feel like nothing rather than painful if you if you are going to obsess about being on facebook though do go to facebook.com answer me Me This and like our page. I mean, you might as well whilst you're there. Thanks. That brings us to the end of this episode of Answer Me This. But to make more episodes in 2021, we need your questions in the form of emails or in the form of voice memos that you've recorded and attached to an email. And our email address, which is long, is emblazoned upon our website answer me this podcast.com and you should head on down to answer me this store.com if you would like to support the show buy our first 200

episodes our best of collections and our six exclusive albums including in preparation for valentine's day just around the corner everyone answer me this love and it's a good entertaining hour about romance and sex and messy fiddly coupley stuff do check out our other stuff online as well i make the podcast the illusionist and veronica mars investigations and veronica mars investigations is powering through season three the season that i had dreaded to recap and yet here we are here we are recapping it i mean i'm not familiar with my veronica mars history so when did the series end before it was brought back was that season three yeah season three it was cancelled okay so you're watching the series that for good reason it was taken off air it is not strong

okay and then we get to move on to the film which is a solid three stars you can find that at vmi pod.com and at the pod places and the illusionist the illusionist.org ollie what are you up to in the man empire well i present five podcasts you can discover them all at ollie man.com and the week unwrapped my current affairs discussion show is just celebrating its fourth anniversary so a veritable spring chicken compared to this one yeah yeah if you haven't checked that out before please do it is me and uh three people who are all cleverer than me who work for the week magazine i don't believe such people how could they find three chatting through the underreported stories of the week so the gimmick of the show is the stories that you would perhaps have heard more about were it not for coronavirus or brexit or american politics

or whatever other things things that you haven't heard from the news that's what we talk about so if you have a hunger for current affairs but you are also just trying to save yourself from absolute soul annihilation from the ones that are getting a lot of news reporting this is a good show to give to yourself we just you'd like to know what else is going on behind the scenes you know the world carries on turning there are things happening in the footnotes that are significant that don't get the attention they deserve so that's what it is you can find that by searching for the week unwrapped on your podcast app of choice uh and martin well i do a podcast called song by song which is about the music of tom waits uh as this episode goes out we have a special guest amrita acharya uh from a little show you might have heard

of called game of thrones go to song by song podcast.com to check that out also i put out some new music last month which you can listen to at palebird.bandcamp.com or just search for pale bird wherever you get music and we will be back with a brand new episode of this on the first thursday of february but if you subscribe to this show on your podcast app of choice you will get a retro episode from the archives dumped on your feed for a temporary period in a few weeks time with a shame faced commentary from us yes the past what a terrible time and good luck with January 2021

thanks for joining us keep safe bye