Answer Me This! - AMT395: Bobble Hats, the Hollywood Sign and the Macarena

Episode Date: March 4, 2021

Put your arm out, palms up, now touch your biceps, cradle the back of your head, hand on hip, other hand on other hip, pat each buttock and JUMP because in AMT395 we're learning about the Macarena dance! As well as Rita Ora's hats, wearing sports merch for a team you don't support, and winning a car at the airport. 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

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How many murderers are there on this luxury train. Hey, remember how kids used to get their feet X-rayed in shops? No, but I remember you telling me that they did in episode 394. Quentin in Fulham, he's written in to say, I was surprised at your shock over the use of fluoroscopes and pedoscopes in British shoe shops. In the popular Michael Caine film, Billion Dollar Brain, I mean, Quentin says popular, I'm seeing 50% on Rotten Tomatoes, the hero, spy Harry Palmer, rushes into a shoe shop to use a pedoscope to check the contents of a mysterious thermos flask to find it contains plague-carrying eggs. Of course it does. And of course the shoe shop fluoroscope would be able to tell that. And also, I've been enjoying taking a thermos flask to the park over recent weeks

in my one allotted period of exercise per day. The last thing I would want to think is that it contained plague-carrying eggs. Plague-carrying coffee? Or eggs. Eggs of any kind I do not want in my flask. Anyway, Quentin continues, this would have provided a superb link back to your billion-dollar Fabergé eggs article. Sadly, the moment has passed.

Damn it! So disappointed in myself. You made the comic connection in your own head, Quentin. Is that not enough? You've shared it with everyone now. And I appreciate you doing that, Quentin. I'm guessing you haven't seen Billion Dollar Brain or any of the spy movies from the 1960s that began with the Ipcrest file.

Oh, is it part of that series? It is, yeah. The third in the series, directed by Ken Russell. I'm not a huge fan of Michael Caine, so a spy film starring Michael Caine would not be a combination of elements that I would be particularly excited to absorb. I kind of weirdly am a fan of Michael Caine. Whenever I've seen Michael Caine in a film, I've thought, yeah, he's actually a better actor than you think he is. Because there's the cliche, isn't there, that he always always plays himself he never changes his accent but actually like if you see him in um Dirty Rotten Scoundrels where he's really funny or Hannah and Her Sisters where

he's really convincing you know I think I do think you're a good actor and yet I've never been motivated to go back to golden period Michael Caine which is kind of when Michael Caine became Michael Caine like in films like this I don't know what it is that's putting me off something about the pedestrian nature of a British spy, actually. You know, that would go into a shoe shop to find a plague-carrying egg. I wish James Bond did more of that. Like going to Argos and using the tiny pencils to brain-spike an enemy. Yeah, I'm not about that.

I'm about kind of giant leaps across skyscrapers and that sort of thing in my spy thrillers. If I want to see films about the British retail sector from the 1970s and 80s, I've got the Are You Being Served movie. There's there's a movie well i've not actually seen the series it was forbidden in my household when i was growing up i don't think it's your thing helen oh nothing's my thing today is it i think you'd acknowledge the comic skills of the performers involved but i mean the actual material that they have to work with is is not really also i mean for example joke number one in the are you being served movie i it's fresh in my mind because i watched it over christmas is um there's a bloke who's like vacuuming the store and of course as he vacuums the mannequins he goes up their dresses can you guess what happens oh do they turn out to

be real women uh yes wendy richards is there um looking hot and stocking up some shelves and as she bends over he puts the vacuum up her leg and sucks off her knickers that's literally joke number one 10 seconds into the movie wow here's a question from dom who says ollie answer me this why do so many airports have raffles to win luxury cars how do they work assuming means the raffle not the luxury cars do you get a car in your own country i see so he's like if you're abroad what's the point of winning a luxury car in a country you do not spend time yes well if you're about to fly abroad what's the point of entering a lottery in a country you're leaving you may well go back in a couple of weeks say and thus take possession of your luxury car from the airport yeah but you are taking it on trust aren't you that the company that you're buying the raffle

ticket from are going to bother doing the raffle? I mean, I know it's illegal for them to sell you a ticket and then not do the raffle. But, you know, if you're out the airport, out the country, I mean, who checks? Who does check, Ollie? Who is checking that raffles are legit? It's an interesting loophole

because the answer would be the gambling commission if it was a raffle. But it isn't a raffle for that reason so you're calling it a raffle and sometimes frankly the people selling you the tickets effectively market it as a raffle but it isn't and there is um as we've discussed before in the example of itv daytime quizzes there has to be a element of skill for it to be a competition and hence unregulated um so the element of skill can be very low like which of these is a shakespeare play uh hamlet or cats um but there needs to be an

element of skill so um if you actually look carefully at like for example the biggest company in the uk that does the airport car giveaways is called botb best of the best that sounds like a boy band from the late 90s botb doesn't it best of the best it doesn't they'd have a great video two singles set up for them terminal five lamborghini oh my god perfect you know this would have happened and they wouldn't have even got a permit to film near the lamborghini and then they would have got chased off after two takes anyway technically that competition you enter when you buy one of their raffle tickets is a spot the ball competition that's what you're actually

entering so there is an element of skill so you are kind of taking it on trust although it still would be illegal if they were selling tickets without giving cars away and i'm not making allegations about botb i've been on their website you can see previous winners who have won the cars i'm just saying as a customer traveling through a transient location on my way to another international destination i just wonder how many of those people then get home forget all about it never bother to check online who won the raffle that they entered at the airport you're doing it at the airport because there's nothing else to do and you'll just forget that you've entered and also you didn't go there for that no exactly it's incidental whereas like the village fate you might

think okay every year i enter the raffle so it's a bit more imprinted on your mind yes uh so weird isn't it that you'd take it more seriously you know winning the pickled pears at the village fate than you would a lamborghini i don't get the bath balls this year i'm gonna kill someone um but anyway to answer the question i mean why did they end up at airports i think it's that the business model of like car giveaways in shopping malls and equivalent locations had been running for a couple of decades, just because it's a talking point. People stop and have their picture taken with the thing. They look at the car.

It's marketing for the car. They're in a place where they're buying stuff anyway. And then someone cottoned on. It might have been the bloke who set up BOTB because they've been going for about 25 years. Someone cottoned on that actually, in a a way the airport executive lounge is the perfect place because you've got people who have just spent thousands of pounds on a on a plane seat when they didn't need to so they're more likely to have a tenner in their pocket to enter a raffle well they probably don't carry cash they're in this environment where they can't leave for two hours and have nothing else to do and they're in a holiday mode you know they're in this environment where they can't leave for two hours and have nothing else to do and they're in a holiday mode you know they're kind of in for fun times and it adds an element

of exclusivity to the ambience of the airport which is often what the building owners of the airport want to create isn't it that's why they have luxury brands in there so they like having a ferrari on the concourse whether or not it's actually advertising a slightly grubby competition is not important what's important is you walk into the airport lounge and you see five luxury cars in front of you and you think, oh, this is a flash place. So it kind of works for everybody. Right. I try to remember if I've ever seen it or whether it's the kind of thing that I tune out because I am, A, not interested and B, in airports just looking for the space between the people to avoid collisions. It's about the only bit of driving theory I remember from my brief learning to drive career. Look at the spaces between the people yes to avoid collisions it's about the only bit of driving theory i remember from my brief learning to drive career look at the spaces between the cars or the laptop charges

that's what i'm looking for these days oh yeah good a good armchair with an inbuilt plug yeah oh it's got usb thank you very much five minutes from wh smith and it's got usb perfect location thank, 21st century. But then when Dom says, do you get a car in your own country, where is the car? Where does the car end up? Well, I've been on the website of BOTB, as I said. They are Britain's largest purveyor of this kind of competition. They say, and I quote, we will deliver your car or other prize anywhere in the world free of charge.

All cars are delivered with UK VAT paid. There may, however, be further import slash registration or luxury goods duties in certain countries, which in general we do not pay for. And in some cases, it may be preferable to take a cash alternative and then buy the equivalent car in your country, which we can, of course, assist with. Interesting. So the car is just the tip of the prize iceberg. And when they say other prizes, it could just be that you'll win a tote with a picture of the car is just the tip of the prize iceberg. And when they say other prizes, it could just be that you'll win a tote with a picture of the car on it.

Yeah. And that's actually the case with the big sort of shiny competitions on daytime TV as well, isn't it? Like people, it's funny, isn't it? People are more likely to enter. They must be, otherwise they wouldn't do it. If they see a promo saying, win a brand new Land Rover, than if it said, win the equivalent value of the Land Rover like if you could win 60 grand they'd be less likely to enter than a car that's worth 60 grand I don't know why that is but that is how people operate clearly yeah maybe the psychology of it's a finite thing it's an object and it is going to be given away whereas again it's all about that trust isn't it do you trust person who says, I'm going to give you 60 grand if you win?

You know, you've seen the car, it was there and you could win it. Do you trust airport car competitions? And if you don't, what can you trust? Here's a question from Alan in Dublin who says, Helen, answer me this. Is it okay to wear team merchandise as a fashion statement, even if you don't support the team and are only a casual fan of the sport? I really want to get a basketball jersey just to wear at summer to the beach,

working from home and other times it's okay to wear a sleeveless top, but I'm not a huge fan of any team. Do I need to pick a team and then start supporting them? I love the idea that there'd be like a significant financial outlay just to a fashion choice. Or can I just buy whichever jersey I think looks the best and then that's where my association ends? I think if a lot of sports fans were being honest with themselves, at childhood anyway,

one of the reasons that they get drawn to a particular team might be as straightforward as the branding and the graphic design. Might it not? It's also one of the major reasons my mum chooses who to bet on in the grand national right the silks and the name like you know the team is being represented by their players and also by their image so if you are buying into their image in a sense you kind of do become a supporter of the team don't you let's just state which i think regular listeners will know none of us are sports fans so we are

answering this question without the emotional attachment to a team and therefore i don't know whether i would feel offended if i was a true supporter of the team that you were just co-opting it for the look yeah and for the breeziness of sleevelessness so you've got to be aware of those risks that someone else might take it as a sign of affiliation so like if that team is bad or if the players are notoriously evil, you are supporting them. And also it just means that people who care about the sport,

like not even necessarily that team, will engage you in sports chat based on their interpretation of your preference. So this was my massive fear as a child when my relatives bought me sport merchandise. I never bought my own, but relatives who didn't know me very well, you know, cousins who'd be visiting

from Canada or something, they'd often give me you know a t-shirt for uh I always leap to Cincinnati Foreskins which is something Martin made up on the show 10 years ago but that's as embedded in my knowledge of sport as any other convincing team so let's go with that they bring me a t-shirt for the Cincinnati Foreskins and I would think what am I going to do with this t-shirt because you know even if I thought it looked pretty or I thought this is a relatively obscure sport to be into in northwest London I was anxious it would cause a conversation about sport which I was not equipped to deal with yes that is the danger I think there are ways to skirt this and one of those is to go vintage so find a team that doesn't exist anymore or one from a country that people aren't even necessarily aware

plays basketball. You're minimising the likelihood of someone you're passing in Dublin in the summer getting into a heated argument with you because they hate your team or something. I mean, some of the teams that don't exist anymore don't exist because people think the names are racist, so be careful about that. Yeah, that's definitely something to consider. Do they not sell basketball jerseys that are just plain just the

shape of garment with no affiliation printed there on i'm sure they do or you could probably like approach a company that will make merchandise for your basketball team and invent a fictional one and get some printed out maybe that would be fun to invent a fictional one and get some printed out maybe that would be fun to invent a fictional one and get some printed out because you can do those like single serve print out garment things the alan attics the alan manax hi helen and ollie this is vincent from shropshire the other day i was discussing with a friend the origin of the bobble hat. My guess was that it's probably something very obscure and we don't really know with any certainty why these things came into being. However, my friend insisted that they arose as a sort of form of safety wear for mariners on ships to cushion the impact of bumping their head against the low ceilings. As much as I want to believe this, I feel it's maybe just too wholesome to be true.

So answer me this, who's right? I'd say that out of the two of you, Vincent, you're significantly more right. I would also like to say, why is it that people are always making up things and attributing them to like, oh, something weird that happens on ships among sailors, that is always happening with the origins of things yes anyway i would invite people to check their myth-making about maritime shit just think of something else yeah sure but you're right vincent in that it is difficult to say definitively who first put a bobble on a hat. It is a very old practice. They have evidence from the Vikings, so that's like 1200 years ago. They have statues of the Viking god Freyr

wearing a hat or a helmet with a pom-pom on it. I think surely more of a helmet than a hat. You can't really tell in a statuette whether it's meant to be a hard or a soft hat. The statuette also has's meant to be a hard or a soft hat the statuette also has bracelets and an erection i don't know if you know but erections originated on ships when vikings first found things sexually attractive they used to use them as oars but pom-poms in the military have been around for a really long time i was watching one of the michael palin travel programs recently where he's in greece and i guess it's the early 90s and he's watching the soldiers in have been around for a really long time. I was watching one of the Michael Palin travel programs recently where he's in Greece and I guess it's the early 90s

and he's watching the soldiers in their traditional guard uniform and they've got these huge pom-poms on their toes. The Hungarian cavalry used to wear pom-poms, I think, as an indication of rank. I guess it would be pretty easy to see, like a thing on your hat that is like different colors or shapes people would be like oh i get what that is without having to really get near someone it makes sense as a uniform actually because i was about to ask like it doesn't if it doesn't really add any protection in the way that vincent's friend

is suggesting because it doesn't does it because otherwise we'd wear them instead of cycle helmets wouldn't we because they look nicer if you've fallen over wearing a bobble hat you probably still hurt your head so therefore that sort of only leaves you with a couple of options as to why it would be there at all regardless of who invented it i suppose either for some reason something to do with the knitting process makes it practical to put it there yes you're right or uniform like to signify something those are the two reasons aren't they right in in rome as well clergymen wore these caps called berettas and the color of the pom-pom on the berettas signified their rank. In South America, there were pom-poms on garments, which was a sign

of marital status. It's also just for something that large, it's quite light to wear. It's not like wearing an iron bell on your hat or something. And you can make them with scraps. So it's quite a thrifty way of decoration. So in the 20th century, I think they became popular on hats during the Great Depression because that was an easy way to embellish your clothes and cheap. And then as you say, Ollie, part of the knitting process, when you are shaping a hat, you usually start knitting from the brim, the bit that goes around your forehead and you end up at the top. And you usually end up with a little hole.

And then you cover it with a pom-pom to conceal that little hole i'm all about the bobble hat these days and it's in some ways perhaps the biggest change in my life since we started this show 14 years ago is that i'm now a hat man he's the hat man hat man i remember saying on the show how much i was ambivalent about hats like i just didn't see the point of them basically and i remember being quite ranty about it and now it's like i'm mr sun hat in the summer i'm mr bobble in the winter i feel like it must be due to me losing my hair but i try not to focus on that do you think it was because when we were in our early and mid-twenties, hat wearing was associated with the posers wearing fedoras? And so it felt like quite an ostentatious thing to do.

And as you grow older, you're a bit freed from that. So you can wear a hat for function, such as warmth or sun, or something that you just think is jaunty, rather than it having to be a statement about who you are. So you've been released from these societal expectations of a hat. You're right that there were lots of examples. I mean, Pharrell is the one that jumps to mind from that kind of era justin timberlake fedora man yeah whereas actually now if i think of celebrities male celebrities in particular in hats now pharrell again but in that huge like vivian westwood ranger hat well yeah or

beanies i was thinking so like sort of you know pap shot of harry styles getting a starbucks he might be wearing a beanie. But a beanie is somehow different to a bobble. A beanie is like, I don't feel cool enough to wear a beanie. Like who are the male celebrities wearing bobbles? I can't think of one. I remember when they were launching Rita Ora

wearing kind of sexy clothes, but also a thick woolly hat was the attire they put her in. I can't remember whether they were bobbled or not. Well, I do think in pop starlets, it's a slightly different thing because there's a kind of sexy scandinavian vibe to it sometimes you know if you're doing a wintry photo shoot then bobble hat kind of reindeer type hoodie you know that sort of opens with a zip that is sexualized in a way that on men you just i've

can't like i say there might be one i just can't think of sexy male celebrity in a bobble hat maybe it should be me maybe i should just go for it i just google him as rita aura bobble hat and she's coming up in a lot of bobble free woolen hats so i guess the stage is clear for someone to come in and make the bobble hat their own i bet they're secretly beanies and you remember them as bobbles to be honest i hadn't paid all that much attention at the time especially you know, this show is all about paying attention to things that people don't necessarily pay attention to at the time, isn't it? Rita Ora's millinery is not something that I've heard a podcast about before. I think it was generous of me to remember

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Toyota. For what matters most. Here's a question from Chandler from Denver, who says, Last night, my partner and I were watching the 1995 music video for Los Del Rio's iconic love-it-or-hate-it jam, Macarena. I think what you mean, Helen, is aye. We were astonished to see that the ladies in the video were not dancing the Macarena dance as we had learned it as kids. It resembles the dance we learned, but with half as many positions, each held for twice as long. This morning, I was doubly astonished, Chandler is

really taking some hits for the team here, to learn that a band called Los Del Mar also released a version of the Macarena song in the same year. That music video shows the singer of Los Del Mar sort of piecing together the Macarena dance as we know it from pieces of other dances that he sees on TV and in the street. By the middle of this video, all the sexy people are dancing to the Macarena in the style I'm familiar with. So, Helen, answer me this. What the hell is going on?

I know Los Del Rio were the progenitors of the song, but they whiffed on the dance in their 1995 video, and that same year, a group with a nearly identical name also released a Macarena song and video with the correct dance, i.e. the one I was always taught. What is up with these two versions of the Macarena? Why on earth would Los Del Rio let a group with such a similar name release a version of their global hit song in the same year. And did the copycat band Lost Del Mar actually invent the Macarena dance as we know it today? Or did it exist before that music video? This is confusing. So the timeline is, there was the original version in 1992, which was just Lost Del Rio, these two middle aged men

singing in Spanish. They'd been performing together for 30 years. It's a good listen. If you like that kind of, you know, acoustic guitar clapping, Gypsy Kings type vibe, it's better than the remix. And the way that they come up with that song is that they were doing a gig in Venezuela and they were invited to a party during which a flamenco dancer named Diana Patricia Kubilan Herrera danced some flamenco for the guests. And one of Los Del Rio spontaneously just came up with the chorus as a tribute to her. But they referred to her in the chorus either as Diana or as Magdalena as a Virgin Mary reference. And then when actually writing up the song, they changed that to Macarena,

which was the middle name of one of their daughters. And possibly of the Virgin Mary. Lost to history. No, it is a Virgin Mary name. Like there's so many kind of Maria Mary variants and Macarena is one of them. So that version of the song was released in Spain in 1993. It did pretty well. But then the year after that, the American label BMG bought the Spanish label that had released Macarena and decided to make it a hit in the USA. And so started this English language version to make it big in clubs and on cruises.

So they released that as a single in 1995. However, it didn't become big until the following year. It was like kind of just humming along, humming along. Yeah, well, viral hits didn't have the internet to aid them at that point, did they? So you needed people to go on holiday, hear the song, like it, and then try and find it when they got back home. Yeah. So that version of the song, the 1995 more dancey version,

was a remix by the Bayside Boys. Yes. And they added the bit at the beginning of the song that we all hear, when you hear on the dance floor, like, oh my God, it's the Macarena. That's them. That wasn't in the original. Yeah the female vocals and they changed the lyrics quite a bit yeah which is interesting just on that point in the spanish version it's lost el

rio isn't it sort of mansplaining oh macarena put it about with this guy then he left town so she went off with his two mates macarena oh she's hot in the english version it's macarena herself doing that bit where she's like so i then ha ha ha so i then which is a bit more girl power isn't it yeah right so there are various different versions of the story and they're all a little bit sex shaming of macarena but at least it's first person in the bayside boys mix and she seems to be enjoying it yeah and she seems empowered by her sexual appeal so the video was directed by a French director called Vincent Calvé. And because it was made in 1996, I'm wondering whether they saw the impact

that the Saturday night dance had had a couple of years before of making that a viral hit. He worked with the choreographer Mia Fry, who's also in it. And what he wanted was a simple concept that was kind of like a dance lesson. And you've got Los Del Rio surrounded by beautiful dancers

from around the world. Of every ethnicity on God's earth. Yes. Joining in. Well, 10. And so he wanted it to have that white background for it to be very easy to see everybody. So these were some of the criteria that Mia Frye was working with. And the reason why it's slower than any other video is that she had to halve the number of movements because she was like, if people are going to be able to learn this dance, and particularly if it's like, you know, children, old people, like, we want everyone to know this dance, so it has to not be too fast. She just kept simplifying the choreography. It was focused on the upper body, which meant that like anyone could dance it if you were sitting down, if you were like wearing a tiny skirt and heels that meant you didn't really want to do vigorous leg movement. And the director, Vincent Calvert, also wanted the choreography not to take up too much space because he wanted to be able to film

like 10 dancers in the same shot. And basically, I mean, I know we'll move on to the last Del Mar bit in a minute, but basically it worked, didn't it? Which actually, you mentioned Saturday night. We've talked about that on the show before. Oh, yeah. We had this Mandela effect experience when we were checking our emails, deciding what questions to do we were like we must have done macarena i'm sure i remember us talking about it checked our website checked our archives checked

our google docs the macarena effect yeah yeah we had not we had covered it in the answer me this book yeah still available as an e-book yes or in charity shops but not actually on the show no but there is it well there is a macarena tag on our discussion of wigfield saturday night from episode 198 so we did mention it tangentially but i listened back to see what we'd said about saturday night and what we said then was oh you know you can't create this kind of viral dance um it has to happen organically but actually what we're saying with regard to lost el rio is it really was an effort from bmg to say we are going to create a viral dance and it did work yeah like they did create this dance right and also i think they did deliberately want there to be regional versions because that helps it

spread around the world and they would also hire local dancers to be in those videos because you know they wanted to convey this message of like everyone's linked everyone's together united in this around the world so maybe that explains lost elmar but also it's like what plays on mtv is different in different markets isn't it so again you have to remember before youtube there was no idea of there being one video for us i mean i know now there's like 10 videos because you get the lyric version or whatever but you know there's usually one official version of a video then there didn't need to be because they'd release it in different markets at different times and they could

fine tune the way it was going to look for the market that was going to buy it so something like these kind of women of the world dancing with a happy smiley face on might work really well for euro pop fans might not work so well in canada where they're listening to more grunge music or whatever lost elmar's cover was for the canadian market. That's where Lost Elmar are from. And so it was a big hit on MuchMusic. But what's weird is that the Lost Elmar version was released in 1995 and then reissued with different vocals in 1996. So you've got multiple versions of Macarena in a short space of time, or like revivals with different videos confusing and so when chandler says why would lost el rio allow someone else to release it it's more a case of like they're getting

the money from every direction right they wrote the song yeah their record label's like we can release this 10 different ways i mean why would they say no to that they know they've got a novelty song by that point apparently there's uh nearly 5 000 different versions of the macarena around well even lost el rio uh have done multiple versions of macarena do you have a translation by the way of the chorus something like give your body some joy right okay which sort of means i mean it means sex doesn't it in the context of what they're saying about her but it makes sense in dance terms as well doesn't it that's what you're doing giving your body joy yeah well i think like if they were improvising that at the time of seeing this woman do this beautiful flamenco dance yes she was

dancing true they're not necessarily talking about her sexual past even though that is the rest of the lyrics i think that came later i mean i guess the flamenco is a sexy dance whereas the macarena really isn't Bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum Then in your awesome knowledge I'll be basking once in summer. I'm so alone. No one to email and no one to phone. Where can I get new friends from? Answer me in this podcast.com. Thank you to our sponsors for this episode, The Great Courses courses plus who can help you learn something new today i've been watching the course pioneering skills for everyone modern homesteading

now i don't have a homestead modern or otherwise but i thought what is that life is it one i can handle the episodes i was watching were about goats. Okay. This was a very visual course. There's a lot of goat footage. There was a bit where they were demonstrating how to trim a goat's hooves. But really, to me, it seemed like a demonstration of how to hug a goat. It's a two-person job. One trims the hooves. The other, before that, takes gentle hold of the top of the goat's horns,

wrapping their arm around the goat's neck. Not too hard, so you don't strangle the goat and then they sort of tuck their head into the uh angle between the goat's neck and back and patted it and i was like that's so tender as the other person trimmed the hooves i think i would do a lot of goat hugging if i had a homestead i watch a lot of that lives in the wild with ben fogel and um often it's it's like striking how often it happens he goes to visit someone who has pigs roaming and he says do you eat them and the person will say no they're my pets like so many people the reality of actually killing livestock is so difficult or even milking it yeah well then the next lesson was about milking it and um about how to make various different cheeses a very useful

demonstration of that very soothing shots of a man with a gigantic beard squeezing and stretching goat mozzarella and i thought maybe this is why people are into slime videos but also there was some very graphic footage of goat giving birth what did you learn though helen what what what tip can you take with you i learned not to try and pull out the afterbirth because the goat will take care of it so basically like be there just in case the goat is breached or needs a gentle tug but don't interfere too much the goat will eat all the slime off the baby goat and then the next lesson in the course was processing and butchering goats for meat and i thought well i've just got attached to these goats having birthed

them in the previous video so i haven't watched that yet that's the great thing about the great courses plus you can do it at your own pace when you're ready to see the dead goat you press play you just take your time. Once you're ready for the realities of meat production then go in but before that you could be like okay goat cheese here's some recipes for three kinds of cheese and I will remember not to use cheesecloth despite the name because it's too loose weave thank you Great Courses Plus. You can sign up for The Great Courses Plus and see for yourself. Visit our special URL, thegreatcoursesplus.com slash answer, where you will get a 14-day trial with unlimited access for free. That's thegreatcoursesplus.com slash answer.

Here's a question from Bryony who says, I'm from the UK, but I've lived in Banff, Canada for the last three years. During that time, I've done plenty of camping and hiking trips, but I'm also a very light sleeper, so every small noise at night is deeply unnerving and I never sleep well. My imagination takes off in the dark and all I can think of is the shredding of the tent as a big grizzly busts through to eat us while we sleep. This is a bit like me on a plane. Whatever, a grizzly might blow open the doors and eat you. No, just the imminent death. Like, I don't know how anyone can sleep on a plane. I want to turn around and just shout at everyone. You're staring death in the face. Why

are you so relaxed? Why are you able to sleep? Because you can't do anything about it. You're on the plane now. Maybe it's better to sleep. Well, maybe that's the advice we should give Bryony. Yeah, but you're more likely to run into a bear than you are to die in a plane crash. You're not helping me relax. Well, it's not a rational thing, is it? Bryony says, next year, my boyfriend and I are going to do a mega long hike from waterton to jasper a total of about 990 kilometers didn't round that up to a thousand 990 yeah but do you do you want to end 10 kilometers west of jasper there might be nothing there well you might take 10 kilometers of detours ollie answer me this do you have any tips for sleeping that i could use to help make sure i

manage to get at least some sleep during the two months we'll be hiking i think the fact that it's two months might end up assisting you in itself right because you'll be so knackered well just and also i think familiarity breeds complacency in this regard like you know you're scared that a bear is going to come and and shout in your face or eat your legs uh when you are camping for perhaps i mean you didn't specify a weekend or a week but if you're away for two months i mean i'm actually not a bad person to ask about this because having been to boarding school i grew up trying to sleep in an environment where at any time a child could come and spray cream in my face or piss on me oh god and i would say that the fear of

that you know for the first few weeks it's a reality um is something that might make you anxious but then you just i mean your body needs to sleep so you do just you get used to it don't you like you get used to sleeping on a blow-up bed and it's suddenly more comfortable after day three or four than it was on day one or two i've never camped for long enough to sleep well right i really hate camping and i'm a pretty bad sleeper anyway but in a tent even though most of the camping i've done has been at british music festivals you still think every noise is a bear coming to eat you very disruptive it's actually just probably someone on drugs trying to find the silent disco yeah yeah it's someone tripping over

your tent strings because they're looking for the loo yes or choosing to use your tent as a loo best not to think about that i mean i think again that's the novelty of sleeping in a tent which is part of the reason why it's difficult so i do think on a thousand mile hike or 990 kilometer hike you will probably get a lot more used to this sensation well also i suppose after like several weeks of continuous time in this environment you will have learned innately which noises you can tune out and which ones are genuine warning noises. So maybe like as you sleep, that would make a difference as well. You're not thinking every noise is potentially a bear because you know most of them are not. Yeah. But also there is a link between anxiety and insomnia. So actually in a

way, you know, having put your thoughts on paper like this, having asked us for our opinion, possibly isn't going to help. If you overthink this, you're more likely to be up at night thinking about it. And I know this because I did three years of overnight radio, which time I had some pretty funky sleep times myself, but also interviewed a lot of sleep experts, because obviously we had a lot of insomniacs listening. And they always said, basically, if you overthink it, it makes it harder. Like people who sleep well don't think, what do I do to sleep well? They literally don't think about it.

So some kind of mindfulness exercise and, you know, being in the woods with a campfire is a good location for that. Don't look at your phone. That kind of thing might help you sleep better than thinking, how am I going to sleep tonight? I wonder whether things like earplugs or sleep masks would be helpful or make the anxiety worse, because you might be thinking, now I can't hear warning signs that I might need to hear. I think you've got to remember why you're using those tools. That's the thing. You block out your eyes because the light in the morning might wake you

up. So think about other ways that you might be able to do that without literally putting a blindfold on. And same with your ears. How your tent is set up. I realise I'm speaking to someone who's a much more experienced camping person than I am. But even so, like getting a good tent and making sure the ventilation's good. I mean, this is like, for example, as we record this, we've just pretty much got to the point in the year where it started getting lighter earlier than I naturally wait yes and this morning in fact the day of recording is the first day that me and all my children we put the blackouts down last night for the first time had a lie until 7 30 nice um which was like evidence that the daylight was waking us up but it happened so subtly yeah because the daylight's now kicking in before 7 a.m so i think it's just thinking about how you can control those influences

even inside your tent because that stuff wakes you up when even at a music festival that's the stuff that wakes you up is it's like suddenly hot or it's suddenly bright that's that's the stuff you can control with a better tent well sort of you can't really control your tent heating up to intense levels at 5 a.m because of the sun but the sunlight patterns are things that briny can plan for because you know what they are you don't know if a grizzly is going to be nearby and interested in eating you no there's nothing you do about an actual bear i mean if she's right then it's probably good that she knows there's a bear nearby and it's right that she's alert i mean she's going to be camping where there are bears

i can't really change that good for you briny for knowing that you are apprehensive about this, but you're still committed to doing this hike. Yes, agree. I know that my baby is the absolute best. I put Facebook photos up daily and my friends are impressed. Apart from ones who block me because they're jealous. Because their babies are so ugly. Well, why not build a gallery of your kid on Squarespace with special pages for its cute feet and cute hands and cute face so my Facebook feed won't have your kid all over the place.

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hello um kevin ollie and martin the sound man um this is kate calling from bristol uh about 10 11 years ago my husband and i were on honeymoon in california we went to on the to a Hollywood sort of stars tour in a little minibus and our guide told us two boys had accidentally set fire to the woodlands and the Hollywood sign because they were having a campfire or smoking a drink or something up there and their punishment

had been that they had to pay part of their wages for the rest of their lives like a stipend to cover the costs. Is that true? And has that I've never heard of that happening in any other case. So please, can you let me know if that's true and how such an arrangement would be set up? Thanks. Bye. Well, I checked with my friend and long term answer me this listener, Lo, who was a lawyer in california

because they have federal crimes and state crimes she said she didn't know about that specific case but in theory if you're convicted of a crime and are required to pay restitution or get any kind of monetary judgment against you one of the ways they can collect is to get a wage garnishment order which yes depending on how much you make and whether you have other garnishments that take precedence like child support could take a very long time garnishments under californian law the most that can be garnished from your wages is the lesser of either 25 of your disposable earnings for that week so i assume that means like not child support not taxes or 50 of the amount by which your weekly disposable earnings exceed 40 times the state hourly minimum wage.

Wow. Well, it's just a payment instalment plan, isn't it? It's exactly the same if you watch Can't Pay, We'll Take It Away. That's exactly what they do, isn't it? They try and get you signed up to something so that if you haven't got the money now, you sign up to give them the money over time. I mean, it probably wouldn't be the rest of their lives because if it was an accidental fire, like the fines seem to be for like malicious burning and for arson. But like if it was accidental, they wouldn't be charged with arson because it's about intent.

Like felony arson can be a few years in jail. And if it's malicious burning, you can also get a fine up to $10,000 that is increased up to $50,000 or twice the amount you would have obtained if the arson was done for financial gain, such as insurance fraud. So unless these kids were doing it for insurance fraud, I'm not sure that they would have got a humongous fine, which means it's plausible they could pay that off before the end of their working life. So a Hollywood stars tour, it turns out, might not be the best place to get exacting history. The Hollywood sign had had arson happening to it like in the 70s when the sign was quite dilapidated and some of the letters were kind of missing. An arsonist set fire to one of the L's. So it said Hollywood. Well I'm not sure how many of the letters were standing at

that point so I think maybe they had to replace a lot of it well the sign as it is now is not the sign that it was in the 1920s the whole thing's been replaced over time but that triggers broom well also it's been changed because famously it was hollywood land initially yeah which was to sell uh real estate wasn't it so the idea was you saw this big billboard hollywood land come and build your house here which is quite interesting because like now the hollywood sign is the symbol of that period but not for real estate it's the symbol of that period of golden hollywood film production which actually wasn't happening in the hills was it was happening down in you know burbank and and downtown hollywood so the fact that the hills was what

it was advertising it actually turned out the hills was just a giant billboard for what was happening underneath the sign has also been pranked around a lot. Some people were arrested at the start of February for changing it to Hollyboob. How do you actually do that, though? Do you just put a big poster over the letters? You, like, hang black fabric or tarpaulin over some of the letters strategically

and then, yeah, put white sheets up. The Hollyboob people claim that they changed it for breast cancer awareness, but people claim that they changed it for breast cancer awareness, but they also claim they changed it to protest Instagram censorship policy. Which is it? I mean, it could be both, but why would it be both? And also, how is that helping breast cancer awareness? I know that at one stage, it was changed to Hollyweed to campaign to legalise marijuana. Twice, in the 70s and in 2017. It was also 1991 oil war and then you're gonna love this ollie 1987 ollie wood during the oliver north and iran contra hearings just like the invitations for my

in 1994 exactly you're not supposed to be near it it's trespass which can earn you one year's probation 20 days of cal trans labor a thousand000 fine with penalties of up to five times that amount, restitution to the LAPD and the Parks and Recreation Department, and a stay away from the sign order. Like you say, everyone does know that it used to say Hollywood Land. Did you know that there used to be a white dot halfway between the sign and the ground? What? In 1921, the US Chamber of Commerce produced maps illustrating business conditions in areas of the country so where's a good place to do business where's a bad place to do business because you know you're likely to lose your money where's a really bad place because you're likely to get robbed that kind of thing and the bad areas were colored black the middle areas were colored gray

and the areas that were good for business were colored white which obviously has an unfortunate racial overtone now, but it's ambiguous about whether that was intended at the time. The point was, LA was a white spot on the map. And all around LA in California were black spots and grey spots. So the owner of the LA Times and his paper had started calling LA the white spot of America, came up with the idea of putting a white spot on the Hollywoodland sign to say to visitors, we are a city free of crime, corruption, communism. We are the white spot of America.

That's why it used to have it. Did all towns have a literal spot on a hillside? I quite like that idea. It's very, very pre-Google Maps. I've commented before about how my local town of Boreham Wood, in my view, recognises in a very poor way its recognition to the world of classic film and television. You know, there are token efforts around the town. But I have recently discovered, which I didn't know existed last time I mentioned that on the show,

a mural to The Muppet Show, which is in Manoway. Is there a Muppet connection? Yeah, The Muppet Show was made in Elstree, is what I'm saying. Yeah, The Muppet Show, Indiana Jones, Star Wars, like every fucking thing is filmed here. And it's like it never happened. yeah the muppet show was made in elstra like i don't yeah the muppet show indiana jones star wars like every fucking thing is filmed here and they're just like it's like it never happened it's really weird i know anyone listening who works for bournemouth council will be like no we've got a star outside the library i know but it's shit so anyway on man away there is a um and this is a very like uninteresting suburban road you wouldn't think there was any hollywood

connection there so it's really amazing to get this stumble on this surprise when you walk around the corner someone has spray painted a mural of like fozzie bear kermit uh the swedish chef statler and waldorf and i've actually found another example of street art in boreham wood as well recently it's because i've been walking around during lockdown there is one that the youth club did uh on on the tennis courts, which is like Boreham Wood spelt out like the Hollywood sign. And within each letter, there's a different character from the thing that's been filmed there.

So like in the R, there's the EastEnders logo. And in the W, there's the bowler hat silhouette from A Clockwork Orange. So they do exist if you go looking for them. Have you considered volunteering for the borehamwood tourist board i'm i'm waiting for the borehamwood tourist board to recognize that uh ollie man has been making legendary podcasts nearby and to commemorate that in some way yeah well they haven't recognized the legendary muppets yet so you could be waiting for a very long time if you don't even know what a question is then you're probably at the wrong place.

Because religion's on God casts, dogs are on dog casts, fish are on rod casts, but we don't do fish, because on this podcast, you answer me this. Here's a question from John who says, watching the Super Bowl, I was impressed by the planes doing the flyover at the stadium during the last note of the national anthem. Ollie, answer me this. Where would the planes have been at the first note of the national anthem and what speed are they travelling at? I believe the anthem is pre-recorded so they know how long it is. Do they practice the flypast or just calculate where they need to be? The phrase military precision exists because guess what? It's really important to be precise when you're flying for the military. Otherwise you kill the wrong people. So flyovers aren't the only example

of a plane needing to be in a place at the right time. This is very much what they do. TOT, time on target, is the abbreviation. And practicing your T on T is very much what you do when you're training to be a pilot. And interestingly, a lot of flyovers are actually executed by people who are training, which I didn't realize. You'd think, because especially in this country with the red arrows and everything, it's always presented as like the cream of the crop, you know, doing their skills in the air. But actually, in American flyovers at sports matches, it's often part of the training because, you know, that's an essential skill you need in the battlefield. And that is a way, therefore, that they can take the budget for training pilots and do it on something as seemingly frivolous as a sports occasion, because they cost $36,000 to train everyone to be able to do that from the

military budget. But the equation is obviously they think, you know, as John points out, he was impressed. I mean, that is the propaganda point of these flyovers, isn't it? Look at our skills. They think this is money well spent as advertising for recruitment for the military, basically. Are they just like circling far enough away that the sound is not drowning out the national anthem yes where are they so that it's not so loud like any kind of magic trick as soon as you actually explain how it's done it's like oh of course yeah all right they put the calculations into a computer right so they put in the gps coordinates they need to be at they put in their target speed that they want

to fly at and then the computer tells them where they need to start i mean it's not that complicated actually what is difficult as you suggest is that they need to start. I mean, it's not that complicated, actually. What is difficult, as you suggest, is that they need to create a holding pattern near the event site. But, you know, in terms of noise, there's lots of noises going on at the Super Bowl. Yeah, but military planes are so loud. It's such a penetrating noise. That's true. But if they're flying high up enough and they're in a holding pattern and they're far enough away, then I'm not sure that's... I mean, the point is people look up and they kind of imagine that they must have flown for hundreds of miles but you know they've just come from around the corner and exactly as you

suggest as far away as you can be so that people can't hear them so it's more of a surprise and that's it there's a spotter positioned on the ground who gives them a command to go and the planes are off and they soar over right on cue because that's their job also most people are watching on tv so if they bluff it and come in a verse early they're not going to point the cameras at them until they come in at the right time right yeah well i've seen an example of i can't remember where it was but there's a sports match i think philadelphia possibly where it was raining so they covered the stadium but they did the flyover anyway for the tully which is quite weird so like everyone in the stadium for whom it was supposedly intended couldn't see it but everyone watching on

tv could well there's more people watching on tv than present makes sense yeah that's true but then they could just show some archive footage really i suppose they could just have a little model plane on a thread but anyway there's rehearsal as well obviously so i mean you know you don't do it at the venue but you can rehearse the exact distances and coordinates somewhere else so um if you live near raf scrampton and lincolnshire you will see the red arrows rehearsing because it's not the sort of thing you can blag you know you do practice but you don't need to practice in venue i saw the red arrows rehearsing in lincolnshire i was in lincoln for my uh sister-in-law's mother's funeral and i remember

coming out the crematorium and then i looked over towards lincoln cathedral in the distance and like the red arrows just appeared behind it. And I was like, bloody hell, this is incredible. Like it did sort of feel like a thing, even though it was nothing to do with her. And it was just them doing a rehearsal on a weekday. I think regardless of what you think about the military or whether you care about aviation, there is something moving. I don't necessarily mean emotional, but I just mean stirring. Like it physically moves you to see something flying that fast a thousand feet above your head well i move now to draw this episode to

a close but for us to make another episode next month we need your questions and you can send them to us by email via a voice memo attached to an email using the address upon our website answer me this podcast.com uh we have hundreds more hours of this available for you to buy at answer me this store.com so if you've listened to every episode on our free feed do check out our first 200 episodes and our six exclusive hour-long albums there yes and uh also halfway through the month we will drop one of our archive episodes into your feed with a commentary of what our present day selves think of our past selves yes but you do need to subscribe to the show to hear that and also we

make our other work ollie what is happening in the man audio empire this month yeah i make five podcasts you can discover them all at ollie man.com uh the modern man m-a-double-n is my monthly magazine show in which i test out trends, answer sex questions, and hear some extraordinary life stories from our listeners. And this month, actually, it's an Answer Me This listener whose mother decided last summer to tell her that her dad wasn't her real dad. Wow. Yes, we have a fascinating conversation about what happened next. You can hear that at modernmanwith2ends.co.uk. Helen.

I make Veronica Mars Investigations and The Illusionist in Veronica Mars we are about to start recapping the Veronica Mars movie wow wasn't that where it went downhill no it went downhill before the movie and that's why it was cancelled and then revived years later with the Kickstarter movie we've already done the bit where they went downhill

so you can find that on the podding apps and The Illusionist is also there at theillusionist.org Martin. I make a podcast about the music of Tom Waits. It's called Song by Song. We go through his music song by song but we also talk about other music. Wow, that's everyone covered. If you know Tom Waits' music and you don't know Tom Waits' music, there's something for you. You can find it

at songbysongpodcast.com or just search for Song by Song in your podcatcher of choice. And we will be back with answers to your questions, your fresh questions, on the first Thursday of April. Until then... Bye!