Answer Me This! - AMT394: Fabergé Eggs, Catnip for Lions, and the Funny Bone

Episode Date: February 4, 2021

In AMT394, listeners are struggling with questions about genies' feet, treadmills in shoe shops, and their own children's mediocrity. 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 your questions for future 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 piano to mystery-writing to formal logic to Italian. AMT listeners get a free fortnight 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

can you eat what you want on a tar fit or just weigh in curds apropos our conversation about ammonium carbonate smelling salts last episode we've had this email from steve uh who says many years ago on a ba transatlantic flight remember them uh i suffered with pain in my ears on descent to our destination familiar with it yeah that is a horrible thing isn't it yeah i once had it it lasted for hours after i got off the plane as well i couldn't hear anything luckily i was with a very talkative friend she didn't seem to care whether or not I could hear her. Yeah, I guess sometimes just being a good listener. But you couldn't even be that because you couldn't hear.

No, I'm just a good lump of human in the same vicinity. Thanks. Anyway, Steve says, a steward gave me some smelling salts in a little vial. Wow. And sniffing that cleared my eustachian tubes, and provided me instant relief. Wow. Up until then, I didn't know that would work or that BA carried stock on their flights. Well, why would you know? I did not know either of those things either.

It's not a page of the in-flight magazine, is it? The smelling salts on board. I wonder if actually big airlines like British Airways just keep lots of little things like that on board that take up very little space and sort of... needs no looking after does it it can be there for years until it's needed I don't know I've never come across one I've taken a lot of flights but then I also don't like to complain about my bad ears you've never asked never asked yeah exactly I don't know what helps available but I also wonder whether a lot of flight attendants would just be dubious of offering a passenger anything like that just in case you know the passenger had a heart attack from the smelling salts or a brain hemorrhage or something

like that yeah some weird medical side effect although do you remember they used to give you little boiled sweets on descent i used to really enjoy that and now it stops hasn't it and i i wonder whether it was because the ear popping negation that the boiled sweet provides was counterbalanced by the increased risk of choking and the airline didn't want to be responsible for that or actually statistically said uh you know end of year five more people have choked to death on boiled sweets than have stopped their ears from popping i don't know because you could say that about all the food they give you is a choking hazard but i think they do have to be just very mindful about everything they load onto a plane and even if it's 500 boiled sweets, that's a few kilos of weight.

Right. It's like the free newspapers. Like if they got rid of those, the difference it would make to the fuel consumption is quite significant. And also the free newspapers are always the mail and no thank you. BA actually used to carry Answer Me This on their in-flight entertainment until they wrote to us and said they needed a quote refresh. Maybe our podcast was taking up more weight than we realised. Here's a question from Leo in Southern California who says,

Ollie, answer me this. Do big cats like lions and tigers enjoy catnip? If they do, could wildlife walks through the natural habitats of big cats be made safe by wearing clothes impregnated with large amounts of catnip? Wouldn't that mean it was much more likely you'd be like clawed by a horny lion yeah you'd essentially be turning yourself into a giant walking cat toy there i'm not sure that's the best strategy but to answer the first part of the question yes um big cats do like catnip oh wow or at least in the same sort of ratio as domestic cats about 60 of big cats in captivity have been found to enjoy catnip now, it hasn't been tested in the wild because dangerous and other things to do,

you know, to look for if you're a scientist. But in captivity, when big cats are well fed and keen for distraction, they have been as receptive to catnip as domestic cats are. And they roll around in it. They get high. They do some crazy shit. Do big cats also enjoy balls of yarn? Why not?

Squeaky toys. When you watch those like zoo documentaries, they use all kinds of things to distract wild animals, don't they? And make them feel like they've got stuff to entertain them because they're not in their natural habitat. I suppose the point is in their natural habitat, they don't need things like balls of yarn because they've, you know, they've got ostriches to play with or whatever.

Play. Yeah. We watched a great show the other day um called big cats in the home i think and it was about people that run a big cat sanctuary in kent and they had a jaguar cub that they were raising and at eight weeks old it was already quite big and quite strong and the size of a like a terrier maybe yeah and and just when it showed its teeth like if it felt threatened or anything it was terrifying it was also mauling their sofa it's interesting isn't it the the instincts in domesticated cats are exactly the same it's just that they're small enough not to hurt us i mean you could you could almost argue that like they evolved to be small

enough that they couldn't kill us and that's why you know they're the ones we keep i mean they're the same they're doing exactly the same things whatever kind of cat they are and if it was big enough to hurt you it would this jaguar was absolutely entranced though by a moving beam of light on a wall so yeah big cats just like small cats interesting nepetalactone fact uh nepetalactone is the chemical name for uh catnip if you were to impregnate your clothes with nepetalactone, it would be repellent to mosquitoes, flies, cockroaches and termites. Oh, that's useful. And in some studies, they found it to be 10 times more effective than DEET,

which is the ingredient that you find in most insect repellents. Oh, I hate DEET. But the problem is they haven't found a way to put nepectalone onto the skin without removing its repellent qualities. So it works on fabrics, but not skin. Oh, wow. Well, here's a question from Anthony from Essex,

which I thought everybody already knew the answer to. In fact, I confidently taught the answer to this to my five-year-old just this week. So I'm intrigued to know if I'm wrong. Which is, Helen asked me this. Why is the end of the humorous also known as the funny bone? Is it because humorous is a homonym of humorous? I mean, yes, that's what we all think.

It is. Okay. Or, because it feels funny when you bash it. I mean, that would rely on funny peculiar being the same in a different language as funny ha ha, which it wouldn't be, would it? Right. I'm guessing, he says, humorous is a Latin word. Yeah. Yeah, that's what I thought too it's a spelling of the latin word humorous meaning shoulder in which case its name is probably similar in romance languages do those

other languages also have a similar nickname for it e.g le bon fun a no they oh my goodness right let's talk about the french term for what we call the funny bone, which is actually the ulnar nerve, the feeling you get that it's not a funny ha-ha feeling when you bash yourself just above the elbows because you bash the ulnar nerve, which rests against the humerus bone. And in France, I learned just the other day

that this is called le petit juif, the little Jew. Why? Allegedly because tailors were typically Jewish in France and cloth merchants, and they would measure fabric by wrapping it around the length of their forearm. Yes. And that carried the risk of bashing their elbow against the bench. Okay. And then you've got the double win, I suppose, that you've got a vaguely anti-Semitic tinge to it as well.

It's an unpleasant thing that happens, which you can call a Jew. Little extra treat for the anti-Semites. I mentioned this on the Illusionist Facebook and some of the listeners told me about the term in their languages. Apparently in Portuguese, it's oso esquisito, the weird bone. And then in Icelandic, it's the vitlausa beinid, the wrong bone and um one of them said that um in Dutch he doesn't know whether this is like all Dutch or just his family they call it telephone central or telephone bone because it buzzes when you hit it nice okay it is one of those things that's almost embarrassing to be in pain from when you do it yeah like like stubbing your toe or like bashing your head on the overhang staircase it's like you almost pretend it hasn't

just happened and you can see that it's funny you can almost from the outside see yourself writhing around in pain as amusing at the same time as feeling very intense pain as it happens to you i wonder whether people think it's a bit dismissive as well when people like oh you're funny bone whether they're like well that means that you're saying the pain is less serious than if it was the serious knee the sad arm here's a question from katherine from oxford who says homeschooling is a blast isn't it though ollie answer me this how best to deal with mediocrity in my children without totally destroying their self-esteem for example their magic tricks are just so shit and i know theoretically i should be praising efforts not results but honestly isn't that how those people end up on x factor crying because simon says

they're terrible but their mum says they're incredible my children are eight six and three okay well i mean the ages are important there because i do think obviously the way in which you should alert an eight-year-old to their inherent mediocrity is probably different to how a three-year-old would handle the same news yes she knows the answer because she says i know theoretically i should be praising efforts not results i mean that is it basically i think you have to commend them when they put the effort in which isn't the same and this is crucial i think isn't the same as saying it's good. It's saying that's really good that you've tried so hard

and you've done the best you can. That's the nuance of it. Well, what if they haven't? What if they haven't done the best they can? They've done okay and they think that's enough. And shut it out. Like, fuck it, just ignore them. Otherwise, they don't know the difference.

And I do think that is important. Acknowledge that they've done a thing. But like, you know, if they really aren't trying their hardest. I suppose the thing is right even if you're saying well done there's a tone that I remember myself from being a child you know means dismissively. Yes dear. Very good now leave me alone so I can read the newspaper. Yes dear. That's lovely dear. Oh isn't that lovely yeah and you're not listening you're just trying to get rid of me. I remember that feeling and children know so I mean you can say the words well done that's great and then when they actually do something good put some effort into it yourself yeah for example harvey's pictures

used to be laughably shit i mean he's only just turned five right yeah yeah and when he was about a year ago when he was four he was a terrible artist, he'd only just learned how to hold a pencil. He couldn't, like, draw from sight. He'd come in with a piece of paper, which was like a circle with two sticks coming out of it, and he'd say, I've drawn a tractor. Yeah, that is quite shit, to be fair. And it was difficult to suppress laughter,

but I did manage to say the words, oh, that's really good, well done. Now he's actually, he's just turned five, really good well done now he's actually he's just turned five as you say now he's actually quite good he can do like in fact he's into tractors so he's still drawing tractors um and he did a sight drawing of a tractor really looked like a tractor had four different colors in it you know black for the wheels red for the body yellow for the corn and like when he showed me that i genuinely i was excited i was like wow that really is and he must know the difference you must see the difference i also think there's this kind of anti-millennial uh narrative which is like if you praise your

children too much they'll grow up expecting a participation prize and it's like i think that that's parents really putting too much emphasis on their own role in their child's later development because as soon as they get to school and they do their shit magic trick their friends aren't going to be like oh yeah well done o only amazing magic trick they're going to rip the shit out of them like they have other keys in the world that will be like yeah that was okay or that was good or that was terrible i'm just trying to think of how it was in my family because similarly i i was one of three children and i don't know how it was for my brothers because of the age gap but by the time my parents got to me, I don't think they would have had super amounts of enthusiasm for whatever three-year-old shit I was doing.

So I would have got the yes, dear. Or maybe they could have been like, that's nice. Go and show granny. And then granny would be like, yes, well done in this kind of acidic voice that I need. You know, I just really grew up with this idea, like not to bother the grownups unless I had something genuinely impressive. That's healthy. just really grew up with this idea like not to bother the grown-ups unless i had something genuinely impressive that sounds healthy i think in some ways it's sort of good that the child feels confident enough to show you a shit magic trick over and over again and also you do learn by repetition but yeah maybe you could be like oh that's terrific maybe you could film this on this old phone and then they can just do it to the phone rather than you i don't know would it be

okay if katherine was like oh i see you uh doing great at this magic trick why don't you try this one and like give them one that you found instructions for on the internet that's really difficult that would keep them occupied for days david copperfield making the statue of liberty disappear right exactly distract them with more process and bigger hills to climb har Harvey's really devious actually at finding the line between commendation and criticism and deliberately twisting it. So it's quite, it's like nuance and difficult thing to talk about. But for example, if he finishes his dinner and says, Daddy, I finished, that's obviously a good thing because he's being polite before he steps down from the table, right? So in the past, I would have said, well done done harvey go and take your plate to the dishwasher right yeah so he'll say daddy i finished then he'll say

daddy i finished again right and i'll ignore it the second time because he's already said it once but obviously i'm not going to criticize him for just repeating a thing that is inherently good then he'll like dial up the notches so he'll start running into the sink and bouncing off the wall and pushing his brother in his high chair. And going, daddy, I'm finished! Like a mockery of the politeness that we're trying to get him to do. And inevitably, in the end, it ends with me exploding and being like, go to your room!

And then my wife comes down. I'll say, what did he do? What did he do? Thinking that he must have done something terrible. And I'm like, he said, daddy, I'm'm finished a lot which of course makes me look really petty he's created this whole scenario so that he's beyond reproach even though he was deliberately being annoying it's like quite hard to actually say what it is that he's done and where the line is where he started being a twat but he's definitely done it on purpose that's because you're delivering the wrong headline to

your wife if the story that you're trying to get across in the news is harvey was being annoying like well he he ran into the baby and pushed him over he kept running into the sink and shouting it's so incremental though because if he was like daddy i love you while punching you in the stomach and you said i sent you into his room because he kept saying daddy i love you then it would seem cruel but it's not the whole story. All right. I'll give you like an academic example then, right?

So something that he's doing at the moment, which I can tell is developing wordplay and something that should be encouraged, is he of his own accord, he hasn't picked this up anywhere, has noticed rhymes in metaphors. Like if the room's hot, he'll say, gosh, I'm hot as a pot. Right? Which is just, like, it's quite sweet. Yeah. And quite clever. Or he'll say, he'll clean one of his toys

and he'll say, that's as clean as a bean. Well, that works less well. I mean, pots do get quite hot, but beans are in the mud all the time. You're in the problematic ballpark, Martin. Exactly. Yeah, but clean as a whistle is an expression loads of people use, and whistles are full of spit.

Well, you clean them because they're full of spit. That's why they're so clean. But then what do you do, Helen? What do you do when he then says, I'll be as quick as a rick, or I'm as cold as a fold? And you're like, oh, that doesn't work. Tell him to write them down, and in a few years he'll be the Dr Seuss of Hertfordshire.

But you see what I mean? Like, there's a grey area suddenly where it's like, okay, that's actually quite annoying. But I know what you're doing. You're like playing with words and you're trying out different consonants to see if they rhyme. I can't say that to him

because he's five years old. So I just have to say, yeah, that's good. But like, again, with less enthusiasm when he actually says a good one, like hot as a pot. I can't even explain to him why some things have praise

and some things don't. Can you yes and with the ones that are bad and, you know, work towards something that is cold? Quick as a dick, more like. If you've got a question Then email your question. He wants to be this podcast at googlemail.com He wants to be this podcast at googlemail.com So retrospectives, 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. It's a question from Adam who says, Fabergé eggs. I'm not entirely sure what they are. As far as I can make out from pop culture references, they are bejeweled egg ornaments that are very expensive.

Well, you got that right, Adam. You do know what they are. I'm guessing, he says, maybe in the £100,000 region from how people talk about them when they're mentioned on telly. And also what comes up when you Google them and it gives you the shopping results. But Helen, answer me these. What is the deal with these eggs? Why are they supposedly so

special and so well known in our minds as being the object that someone rich has? Because you can only have one if you're really rich and they're quite rare. Is there anything inside them? Are you able to use it as a fancy keepsake box? No. Is it just an egg? No. Is it egg-sized?

Yes. Kind of. I imagine they're the size of an ostrich egg, he says. More like a goose egg, like three to five inches high. Say goose again, that's really good. Goose egg. Plus, what does Fabergé mean? It's a name.

And lastly, where can you buy one? Not like I'll be buying one anytime soon, but it would make a cool gift for the fam. I guess they'll be selling them in Tiffany's or somewhere equally pricey. Let's take the name question first. Fabergé is a name. Fabergé was a family jewellery firm

founded in 1842 by Gustave Fabergé. And then 30 years later, it was taken on by his son, Peter Carl Fabergé, who was the one whom became egg famous. His brother, Agathon, came to work with him as well. And then other members of his family and his children. Sorry, what did they make before they made eggs? They made jewellery.

There's a lot of different Fabergé objects. And the Royal Family has one of the biggest collections, just not... The British Royal Family? Yeah. Okay. So the peak time of Fabergé egging was 1885 to 1917 and um these are the imperial eggs the uh most famous and precious fabergé eggs every year the tsar of russia would give his wife a bejeweled easter egg this is tsar alexander the third this

is why you know when you move on to the gourmet, it's like the advent calendar, isn't it? When you move on to the gourmet Easter eggs, you can't look back. Can't follow up with a packet of mini eggs, can you? No. It's got to be a bejeweled Easter egg every year then. Maybe this is why now you get like, you know, a one pound Cadbury's buttons egg and it's got a bag of buttons inside because he would give these eggs that were fantastical on the outside, but then also contained a surprise within. A bit like a Kinder Surprise, but with jewels. Yeah, like a Kinder Surprise that cost millions.

Easter was one of the most important days in the Russian Orthodox calendar. Yes. Still take it very seriously, don't they, the Russians? In this egg tradition, Tsar Alexander in 1885 commissioned Fabergé to make an egg. It wasn't one of the most ornate ones. It was a white enamel shell that opened in half to reveal a gold yoke. And then inside the gold yoke, there was a golden

hen sitting on gold straw. And then inside the hen, there was a ruby pendant and a miniature version of the imperial crown. But they loved this egg so much that within a few weeks, they made Peter Carl Fabergé the goldsmith by special appointment to the imperial crown. So then every year, the Fabergé family jewellery company would be making the eggs. Even after Tsar Alexander III died, his son Nicholas became Tsar and kept on commissioning the eggs for his mother and for his wife Alexandra. So altogether, there were about 50 imperial eggs and 43 to 46 they still know them to exist and then the fabergés also made a couple of dozen more for private collectors who wanted what the sars family had so the ross childs have a bunch right and that's where the real value

comes from doesn't rarity so when adam says exactly what you know why do they cost so much they're special because there's a limited number and this is similar to the game my dad was in you sell vintage bentley yeah they only made around 3 000 of those and you know i guess like fabergé bentley continues as a brand but it's not a new bentley isn't made by wo bentley it's just a brand that another company has bought yeah so if you want a bentley there are only 3 000 to buy that's what makes them hold their value isn't it yeah well this is what happened with the fabergé eggs the fabergés themselves made about 50 imperial eggs and the sars didn't know what was going to be in them they just wanted every egg to be unique and nearly all of them open up to show a surprise like jewelry or like a miniature palace made out of

gold then in 1917 the russian revolution broke out then in 1918, the Fabergé workshop was seized and nationalised. Yeah, it's not a good look, is it? During the Russian Revolution. It's not. We make bejeweled eggs for the royals. The family fled Russia. I think some of them were also imprisoned for a while. Peter Carl Fabergé made it to Germany, but he died in 1920.

Apparently, he never recovered from this trauma his sons ended up in france and finland and two of the sons set up a jewelry shop in paris in 1924 and they would stamp things with fabergé paris to be like these you know these ones we're making not the original russian fabergé yeah so because by then their name was a passport to success wasn't it I suppose in that field. It's a bit like the guy who is the nephew of Cadbury or the grandson of Cadbury, who's a chocolatier these days. That store carried on until 2001. But the Fabergé as the business that is still around,

we know is like, this is dodgy and kind of sad. In 1937, rubin an american business person started branding his perfumes fabergé he was of russian descent so maybe he's like fabergé that is a name that conjures a lot of glamour and richness i'm going to call my perfumes fabergé i'm going to form fabergé ink without the family's permission just took their name and started using it eventually they settled out of court it took years for the fabergé brothers in paris to discover this was happening and they settled out of court because they i think they just couldn't afford to take on this magnate and he paid just 25 000 us dollars to use their name for perfume and like fabergé like made brute aftershave right and um babe i think was the most popular women's perfume in like mid-century usa and like aquanet hairspray that

was a fabergé product so it wasn't being used for jewelry for a long time and then in 1989 unilever bought it it's been bought a lot of different times and it seems quite complicated because there was some kind of dodgy like russian oligarch shit happening as well there's a it's an oligarch named um victor vexelberg who owns nine fabergé eggs uh he paid over a hundred million dollars to get nine of them because they're that rare adam i'm afraid like it would be cool thing to buy for your family but even if you had a hundred thousand dollars you're not getting an original fabergé egg and he also tried to buy the brand and it seemed to be like a lot of dodgy shit but did did unilever do their own version of the egg like a personal uh dishamatic well yeah they

bought it in 1989 and at the time it was it was just a cosmetics company it it owned elizabeth arden and then they realized that samuel rubin back in 1946 had also registered the fabergé name as a trademark for merch and granted licenses for third parties to create products other than toiletries under the fabergé brand and they were like oh they should do jewelry but i'm not sure they did really i think they had like some keepsakes but um there were decades with no fabergé jewelry and i think fabergé.com has only really got back in the game in the last few years uh it's currently owned by gem fields which is a gemstone mining company which makes sense i guess okay so you can now buy a modern fabergé egg can you yes you can buy a lot of fabergé egg shaped

products like they do pendants some of which open they start at like two thousand pounds right to five thousand pounds but then they go up and up and then they do have fabergé eggs listed on their website but it seems very much like a price on application thing. Yes. So they did like a Fabergé egg for Rolls-Royce, say. So where do you buy one of the antique Fabergé eggs from then? Is it like Sotheby's or whatever? Most of them are in museums or in private collections. So the likelihood of one of them coming up and a Russian oligarch not snapping it up if it does

is pretty much nilch. I mean, there's something depressing, I suppose, about people buying something just because they know that historically it's got value because of its rarity. And so the value is going to go up. But on the other hand, if you put yourself in the position of an oligarch. What else are you going to do?

Because like pointless money really after a certain amount. But also this you're not getting any interest in the banks. Right. You might think to yourself, I don't particularly want to invest all my money in some dodgy offshore thing. I want egg. I want egg. Well, you might as well think i'll get something beautiful yeah even if it's not to my taste even if i don't really understand what i'm looking at i'll get something beautiful that will go up in value or at worst retain its value right and at least other people will be able to look at it and think that i have sophistication i mean that's what you're

it's the same as buying any kind of egyptian anything like that, isn't it? It's just like, well, I might as well. Yeah. Well, the thing with Fabergé eggs is that compared to other things made out of precious metals and gemstones, they don't necessarily age as well. I mean, they do look amazing and they do have these like incredible detail, incredible moving parts, but because a lot of them are made of enamel, they're like covered in like very, very thin layers of glass, which is a Fabergéé specialty the colors don't necessarily stay true for that long there's a danger of cracking so even if you can get one of the original eggs which um unlikely

the condition of it is not necessarily going to hold for you know hundreds of years but what are you supposed to do with it and once you've said happy easter love here you go look at this what then yeah you you open it and go oh how delightful and then maybe you wear the pendant uh maybe you show up on the hen it's basically like if you're that rich but what do you do with the egg what's the egg for it's an ornament like what what is the point of knickknacks that you've got ollie it's an ornament it's a thing for like rich people who have everything to be delighted by for a hot second we've got a car that we bought at disneyland that makes a farting slurps and we squeeze it and yeah you know the bush and aristocracy have the fabrics each to their own the silicon roundabouts my favorite place to become a web

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purchase for website domain if you use our code answer hi hello it's rosalind from leeds but originally from telford so hi there martin I'm currently looking at the history of Woodhouse Mall, which I've lived quite near to, and it had so many cool things in the early 1900s, like a bandstand, they had a water fountain, they had Crimean War kind of exhibitions, and a tank at one point. And right now, completely none of that's there anymore and

it's all gone so answer me this what the hell happened to woodhouse mall was it was it the war i'm assuming it's the war yeah it was the war the bandstand of which you speak was removed to be melted down to supply armaments ah that makes sense yeah and probably the fountain too that was an iron clock tower with a drinking fountain at the bottom. It's pretty cool. I've seen some photos of it. But there's no record of what happened to that, but almost certainly because that's what happened to the bandstand. It's what happened to the iron archways.

It's what happened to the gas lights, which were put in in 1902 to commemorate the coronation of Edward VII and facilitate evening promenading. Love an evening promenade. I mean, a similar thing in Crystal Palace Park, where I think they got rid of a load of fencing. They took down these water towers that powered the fountains because they thought that would be a landmark for enemy aircraft to navigate by. I don't know. I know sort of intellectually that for the war effort, you know, it was all hands on deck. Like the idea that every, like a public park, which was so hard fought for, we've talked before about, you know, how the Victorians in particular believed the lungs of

the city and the place for the working classes to go and get respite and all the rest of it were really, really important and partly to justify the huge expansions they put into their metropolises. It's kind of like astonishing, isn't it? To think that every iron railing in the park had to be taken down to be turned into weaponry. I was reading about the cannons that used to be there in woodhouse moore um they were cannons that made it over from sevastopol in russia as a souvenir at the end of the crimean war and in the park that the walk where the cannons used to be is still called cannon walk for that reason because they were really celebrated when they were put there then they were kind of forgotten and neglected then they were kind of resurrected and celebrated again because people older people got upset that people like kids were

sitting on them and eating their lunches on them and stuff and so they got placed into the center of the park on like a concrete base to give them renewed purpose and then they got melted down for the wars like the history of that object is absolutely fascinating and and now you wouldn't even know it used to be there apart from the fact it's called cannon walk there's also things like fencing as well that are made out of old stretcher poles uh stuff like that and and cannons have been repurposed in um you know urban features in in there's like lots of war stuff and weaponry that afterwards was reused as something else which which I found interesting. To typify the story of what happened, I found a letter from the Yorkshire Evening Post in the 1970s, where the guy who had been responsible for putting the cannons into the furnace to melt them

down had written into the paper because someone had asked what happened to the cannons. And his anecdote was, yeah, I worked for the company that was asked to melt them down. I was really sad about it because I remember playing on them when I was a kid. So I kept as a souvenir myself an oval plate that told the story of the cannons that had been part of the display. And as I took it away from the cannon that I was melting down at the time, a bomb fell on the foundry and I never found the plaque again. Oh! Fucking hell, you know.

It just seems like an unimaginable sequence of events, but just like an ordinary thing to happen in 1940. Yeah, I guess you just had to accept that you may lose every physical object that ever meant something to you. Yeah. I wonder generally just how much, like what the average lifespan is of an interesting feature in a park like whether you know if if the bandstand hadn't been melted down in the war like whether it would have rusted away or been replaced by some kind of 1970s bandstand that like it was like all made out of like sludge green tiling or something well i kind of think this when i see the benches you know the memorial benches yeah it's really lovely for the relatives

i've always thought it's to be honest i think it's a nicer thing than a gravestone because you know going to a place that person loved, looking at the view, feeling nature around you, and then thinking about that person. Having someone's bum on you. Yeah, it has more meaning. But ultimately, those benches rot, don't they? And then someone puts a new bench up. And when they wreck the new bench, they don't keep the old plaques.

It's like, even that is so temporary, really. You've got like 25, 30 years. Well, it's like a little bit of extra life, isn't it? They've been having illegal raves in Woodhouse Moor over the last year. Oh, really? So, you know, might be some interesting benches in the future. Alan Smith raved here in 2020. Another question about garden features now on the phone line.

Hello, Helen and Ollie. This is Beck. I'm from Albany in Western Australia. I'm building a house next year and I want to make the landscaping in my backyard in the shape of Gallifreyan language from Doctor Who. So like the grass and the veggie garden and the fire pit and a fountain. They'll all look pretty but they'll happen to say something in Gallifreyan, flat placed around a circle. i want it to either be corroboree or welcome or something like that would it be too wanky to have my gallifreyan phrase be de chalonian mobile which is hackneyed

latin for the turtle moves which is a motto with great secret meaning for lovers of terry pratchett if i was to take one nerd culture reference that's in pig latin and translate it into another nerd culture reference does that make me a wanker i don't really see what the problem is it's beck's place yes it's not like you're planting a big swastika in it go for your life have it that's right it's your garden it's your life go for it if it makes you happy fine i do understand her uh reflection though that to kind of it's mixing metaphors isn't it to mix nerd references to take things from two different worlds even though there's a venn diagram of people who are in the fandom of both things i guess it's a question of taste isn't it i mean i found a blog called our nerd home.com which is run by a

couple who create their own home furnishings in the style of various different nerds wow cool they had actually gallifreyan stepping stones in their garden which they'd honed from concrete themselves i couldn't find an example where they'd mixed uh you know different worlds in the same thing but certainly in the same room like for example they had a christmas tree with a batman garland and a super mario tree topper why not what i do wonder is just how to render this because i imagine planting things to spell out a word being harder than it seems like when i've seen it on large grass verges by a motorway it's usually like welcome in very big letters so that it actually comes out so i wonder whether that is that is more of a factor just how you do this

and you might have to make it kind of minimal just so that it works but then maybe you could like carve it into a bench or something and well across hugely variable media which says here the grass the veggie garden the fire pit and the fountain sounds like a lovely garden martin you have the nerdiest interests of the three of us do you have any geeky objet d'art oh boy yeah i've got a ton i mean i've got um t-shirt which uh had the logo for wayland utani which is the fictional antagonist company in the aliens films it's quite whenever you take a um a reference from the world of fantasy or science fiction that's relatively low-key and you render it in a different uh graphic style i feel like that's quite a fun thing to do.

The whole turtle moves thing, I think if you've got any passing awareness of Pratchett, you know that the disc world of Terry Pratchett is carried on the back of turtles. It's a recognisable reference, but then the two steps of rendering that in Latin and then translating that to Gallifreyan, I think 99.9% of the population that you're likely to come across probably

will only even get one step through this wonderful process that you've created. I remember your Alien t-shirt that you're describing, and I didn't know what that was. I had to ask you what it was, then I had to Google it. I've still never seen Alien, but I thought that is cooler

than just having the official logo. It's like I've got a Slice of Life t-shirt. Slice of Life is the boat in Dexter that he takes out his dead bodies on to dump them in the ocean. But it's much cooler, isn't it? Because you are signaling only to people who know that they know.

Anyone else looking at that t-shirt just thinks I've been on a yacht in Miami called Slice of Life. I was wearing that William Duttoni t-shirt, the alien t-shirt, throwing through customs once. And the customs guy was like, oh, well, you've got to check

when you're not smuggling any eggs and i was like what i forgot i was wearing it he was like because your company's got a history of it and i was like fuck don't make that joke to me now i thought you're gonna strip search me for eggs i suppose a problem is with any kind of fandom if suddenly it becomes toxic like i know a lot of harry potter fans are kind of wrestling with you know their relationship to the work given some of the bigoted things jk rowling has said and therefore like some of them i think have found ways to reconcile their relationship to the material she wrote whereas others are like i just can't participate in it anymore so i suppose you're pretty safe in that terry pratchett is no longer alive and so probably not going to tweet out something terrible yeah my autographed

woody allen uh poster is uh remaining on my parents wall at the moment i haven't uh i haven't brought it over to my house for these reasons which film is it manhattan which itself is a problematic film oh god no it's an iconic photo it's you know the silhouette of him on the bench oh it's a lovely photo yeah i still have love in my heart for for a lot of his work but i wouldn't i wouldn't display it for these reasons yeah although maybe in gallifreyan i could put a tribute to woody allen no one would know maybe yeah maybe that uh would make it smarter for beck to plant a flower bed spelling something out so that if something does happen you know next year you can just plant them spelling out something else rather than you've got some stone steps with it carved into

you helen how many minutes should i bake a cake for before it gets all burned and dry Ollie! How many onions can I slice Before my eyes start to cry And Martin! How many sausages would you like For your evening meal if you answer me these i'll be very pleased that describes how i feel

thanks very much to the great courses plus for sponsoring this episode of Answer Me This. And we've been stuck indoors in Britain for such a long time now in lockdown. And Ollie, have you been watching any Great Courses Plus to expand the mind while our physical environment is fairly limited? I have. I have been learning the piano. Wow. Because from my mum's house, when you were still allowed to go to your mum's house, I rescued a yamaha porter sound 200 from 1984 oh my god which has been sitting gathering dust on my parents uh

window ledge for well since about 1984 and it is uh presented by you'll enjoy this alliteration helen professor pamela pike professor of piano pedagogy that's what they do to introduce her she starts with improvisation so you improvise on the black keys first nice and then she accompanies you whilst you're doing your improvisation so basically you feel like a legend immediately within 15 minutes i was playing stuff that sounded good even though i don't know how to play properly wow that's really cool by the end of lesson one after the first 30 30 minutes, I was in a manner playing Ode to Joy by Beethoven. What?

And actually genuinely was excited. I came up to bed and I said to my wife, like, I can play Beethoven. I'm going to come. Yes, dear. Yes, dear. A magic trick. Yes, dear.

Yeah, exactly. That's great. So yeah. And I'm actually really enjoying it. That is awesome. As well as piano playing, there's language learning, there's a lot of history courses, dog training. You can learn for fun.

You can learn with purpose. And you can learn for free for 14 days. If you visit our special URL, thegreatcoursesplus.com slash answer, you'll get a two-week trial with unlimited access for free. That's thegreatcoursesplus.com slash answer. Here's a question from duffy from northwood who says ollie answer me this why are all genies depicted without legs is this something disney

invented or was it mentioned or depicted in previous stories not all genies are depicted without legs and almost certainly the disney one was not the first to be depicted without legs yes but um it was always the case that um in islamic writing about genies they appear in clouds of blue smoke so if there's smoke then it kind of makes sense if you're doing any visual representation of that that you would start to you know as the as the genie morphs into something approaching human form that there'd be a stage where you know they haven't fully formed yet bits of them are smoke easiest to make that the legs because that's what goes in the lamp so you can sort of see how over history people have often drawn them like that but they do have

legs um so in fact the first hollywood depiction um was the thief of baghdad directed by michael powell in 1940 uh and um the jinn in that that's another word for genie is not only clearly depicted having feet but actually it's like an iconic uh shot of the film because when the genie comes out of the lamp and he's like 20 stories high compared to abu who's the aladdin figure in that film abu holds on to the jinn's feet for dear life and there's like a special effect where the actor's holding on to a big you know polystyrene foot um because the genie wants to crush him to death with his feet wow so very much has has feet and basically says in a moment i'm gonna crush you with my feet ha ha ha so uh yeah they have feet it also appears

that disney sell genie merch that has two legs and feet and little shoes and of course at the theme park the genie has legs because he walks around. They could have made that a role for someone without legs or used a Segway. Get like a motorized lamp for them to ride around in with their legs tucked into the spout. I mean, the astonishing thing about the genie for me isn't that he doesn't have legs, the Disney genie.

It's how Jewish he is. Because it's the first character as far, I think, in, I mean, maybe there's one in the Jungle Book, but I Because it's the first character as far I think in I mean, maybe there's one in the Jungle Book. But I think it's the first character from Arabian culture to be in a Disney animated film. And the genie is literally I mean, he's in the Quran, right? And their decision is, let him crack Yiddish jokes. I mean, it's quite, it's quite subversive, really. I think now probably that would cause a bit of controversy. Therefore, yeah, possibly.

Although, I mean, Will Smith obviously played him very recently in the live action version and he's not Arabian either. But I suppose then you're, you know, the template's been laid that you're playing the Disney genie who isn't Arabian. Here's another question about the lower half of the body from Ryan in Melbourne, who says, whenever I'm buying shoes, I feel like an idiot strutting around the store trying to see if the shoes fit right ollie answer me this why don't shoe stores have treadmills or hamster wheels or something they do do they they do at uh runner's need which is a british chain ryan i don't think

they have one in melbourne uh but if you go to a runner's need store they all have treadmills oh wow that makes total sense well they offer gait analysis using the treadmill so it's not i think they deliberately put that in it's a quasi-scientific thing at the beginning so you don't just like try the shoe on be like get me on the treadmill and have a laugh there's this thing of like assessing your gait to find out whether you've got a over pronating foot yes or an under pronating foot it's when your foot turns in and out pronating i'd feel a bit like once they'd provided that service i'd have to follow through and get the shoe and also i'd feel some performance anxiety of being on a treadmill in a store i think but people love it if you read the google reviews

i have friends who've who've had gait analysis and it has been really transformative for like them no longer getting particular kinds of joint pain or shin splints when they're running yeah i haven't seen treadmills admittedly i have not been buying athletic shoes but also a lot of the shoe stores i've been to have just like quite small and rammed so they don't have room for equipment but i think i have seen in an outdoors wear shop in sydney they had like on the ground sort of fake terrains so that you could test walking boots on like something gravelly. Yeah, there's a US chain that has a running track I've seen as well, where you can actually like jog around the store on a kind of 200 metre circle. I wonder whether a lot of them don't because they don't want the shoes to look like they

have been used at all if you don't buy them. Here's a thing that they used to have, Helen, from 1920 until the 1970s, which absolutely blew my mind. Floroscopes, which are x-ray machines what and this is in britain and north america like really quite common thing predominantly for children and the idea is you'd look through a viewing porthole to see an x-ray view of your feet inside your new shoes to see if they fit or not what about the radiation indeed that's why we don't have them anymore that's bananas for a long time there was like a sort of tobacco industry resistance to

medics and scientists saying what about the radiation essentially um the argument was there's no harm in a little bit of radiation and it's worth it because it's saving millions of people from poorly fitting shoes um people are like yeah but what about the sales people who are getting constant radiation from this fucking thing and also it's not serviced by medical professionals yeah it's just a box that leaks whenever i've had an x-ray the radiographers run out the room before it happens and also those tend to be still images now yeah whereas this was a moving image so this is something you still use fluoroscopes in medicine if for example you want to watch someone trying to swallow something so like if there's a real medical need to film using an x-ray but

it's higher radiation so you only use it when you absolutely have to and this is what they use routinely on people's feet in this country they were called pedoscopes uh after the company that manufactured them who are based in st albans bloody hell what did they go on to do x-rays for the home see what someone looks like under their clothes and their skin i just like a really lo-fi low friction shoe buying experience i like tk max i like here are the 10 pairs of shoes in your size that we have in stock try them on and then buy one if you like it that's all i want you know that i like to be benevolently ignored in my retail experiences.

Right. Post-Gout, it was quite useful for me to ask the opinion of the store merchant as to which shoe offered the best support. Puma, it turns out. Oh, good to know. If you're interested, if you've got Gout, yeah, switch to Puma. It's funny they don't sell it on that. Puma, got Gout, this is the shoe for you. Yeah.

Well, that brings us to the end of this episode of answer me this but please supply us with your questions for future episodes you can write them down you can record them on a voice memo and you can email us you can send them by carrier pigeon we probably will not receive them but our long cumbersome email address is on our website answer me this podcast.com and if you want more answer me this in between episodes then you can go to answer me this store.com and you can buy our first 200 episodes and also our special albums and it being february it is valentine's and uh the answer me this love album is well i mean love is eternal right but like might as well jump on the uh selling shit for valentine's day bandwagon

yeah we did a whole hour long special about romance and sex so get that now from answer me this store.com and do check out our other work online as well yes there's a new illusionist episode out which is dissecting apologies like public apologies mainly and why you think well that looked good but is it are they actually apologizing probably not there are all sorts of ways in which people are doing faux apologies and it was really interesting to find out about that faux apology that's a faux apology it's a good portmanteau is that yours no i wish good though you can find that on the pod apps and at the illusionist.org and we're also blazing through season three of Veronica Mars at vmipod.com. Oliver.

Yes, I make five podcasts. You can discover them all at ollyman.com, including The Modern Man, M-A-N-N, my monthly magazine show about trends and sex advice and amazing life stories. And in this month's show, Alex Fox and I dispense some advice for a listener who sneezes every time she has an orgasm. Oh, how inconvenient. Yes. You're just trying to shuffle out a sneaky one.

You will find that episode, which is called Trouble in Paradise, at modernmanwith2ends.co.uk. Martin. Well, my Tom Waits podcast is going strong. We've got a very fun run with food writer Helen Rosner, because it turns out Tom Waits writes about food quite a lot you can hear that at song by song podcast.com or search for song by song on your podcatcher of choice and i've also got quite a lot of music out uh if you'd like to support your local struggling musician do so by searching for pale bird music wherever you

get music and then listen to the music don't just do the search that you're not supporting by searching if you buy the music and don't listen to it that's that's better than neither right put it on a loop on spotify overnight while you're in bed exactly on meat and that still helps you struggling musician uh you can find us on spotify too and on all the podcast apps that you might like just hit subscribe yeah and answer me this and then in the middle of the month you will receive into your feed a retro episode of the show from our extensive archive with a new intro recording in 2021 with us apologising for our past selves.

Is that a real apology, Helen, or a fake apology? That was real. That was a really real... The one that we released in January that's still on your feed until halfway through February. I didn't feel that much pain about

which was a nice change. But yeah, you've got to subscribe to get those retro episodes where our past selves and our present selves meet and struggle. So plenty for you to get going with. And we will be back on the first Thursday of March with a brand new episode.

Bye!