Answer Me This! - AMT404: Sand Heists, the Northern Lights, and Werewolf Menstruation

Episode Date: March 27, 2025

In AMT404, listeners want to know where to go to see the northern lights, why Jesus's official birthday and deathday aren't on the same calendar, and who is being weird: them, or their family? We also learn about sand heists, leaving your body to science/Disneyland, and werewolf menstruation. For more information about this episode, visit answermethispodcast.com/episode404. Got question for us to answer? Send them in writing or as a voice note to [e-mail]. Next episode will be in your podfeed 1 May 2025. Our patrons will be getting bonus material before that, as well as an ad-free version of the episode, so to become one, go to patreon.com/answermethis. This episode is sponsored by Squarespace, the all in one platform for creating and running your online empire. Go to squarespace.com/answer, have a play around during the two-week free trial, and when you're ready to launch, 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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Is Natasha Beddingfield's window still dirty? Do we still do Diet Coke break at 11.30? Ollie, I must thank you for the valuable service you're doing with this show. Oh, thank you, Helen. It's only taken 18 years. I really appreciate you saying that. You're illuminating people who are outside the UK as to what Toby Carvery is. My friend Ashera now understands the Toby Carvery reference in her Richard Osman book. It's important to know what Toby Carvery is. It's very on trend if you live in Hartsmere like I do.

It's like Soho Farmhouse around here. I never knew until last episode just how many of my friends are Toby Carvery aficionados. But you brought them all out the woodwork, Ollie. Out the woodwork and right to the mac and cheese. Did they give you any tips for your future Toby Carvery journey, which we are going to do? Yes, they said mac and cheese for sure. Separate plate. It's like a whole other meal.

Yeah. I mean, there are other tips, like when we do do our spin-off Toby Carvery podcast, which I would say, just to give you some headlines, as a general rule, if it's a standalone Toby Carvery in a converted form of pub, you're going to be on better ground than if it's attached to a travel lodge. It's always better to be detached from a travel lodge. Remember to put your registration number in the parking console or they will fuck you. And the other thing I would say as well, the refill machine has Apple Tango on it. Try it out. Like, it's free would say as well the refill machine has apple tango on it

try it out like it's free it's on the refill machine chuck it out the window if you don't like it refill with pepsi max it's risk-free apple tango it's a rarity apple tango exactly you don't just get that anywhere even in an apple aficionado's house or a tango aficionado's house or at the apple store that's all they drink at infinite loop my uh mayo on roast potatoes meme has not been universally kicked out of bed by our listeners either jonathan on patreon has even suggested roasting potatoes in mayo instead of in fat or oil i don't know if he's pulling my leg. I've never heard of anyone cooking anything in mayonnaise. I recently did read an article extolling the virtues of cooking everything in mayonnaise. But I'm not late to the mayonnaise party on anything. I don't know how I

haven't done this. You've really let yourself down. How will you face Mayo Club? I mean, I love a potato salad, obviously. Of course. It's never occurred to me to cook the potatoes in mayonnaise before adding them to more cold mayonnaise. And now I wonder if that's like the salad equivalent of a triple cooked chip. Like poach it in mayonnaise, then fry it in mayonnaise, and then mayonnaise it. It's bold, Ollie. I don't want you to die that way, but... He died as he lived, they'll say. Covered in mayo.

Here's a question from Chuck from Oak Brook, Illinois. Chuck says, Olliellie answer me this why when you have an error message on your computer does it say 404 an appropriate question because this is episode 404 of answer me this kapow will it live to be an error we'll find out it's not quite an error though is it it's what you see when for some reason that page doesn't exist anymore so typically when a company has taken a page down, for example, but the link to it still remains. But actually 404s, the code, were not initially designed to be seen by people at all. The codes were there for a computer network to interpret what's going on. And in fact, there's a whole list of codes. 404 is kind of like the

famous one. It's the one who broke through. After 403 reject siblings. Yeah, exactly. For example, 100 means continue. 302 was found. 402 was payment required. 503 was service unavailable, which now I think about it, I think I have seen. But all of this comes back to a 1992 document prepared by the World Wide Web Consortium, which established the 41 defined responses a web server can generate. Wow. And the fun fact, because don't worry, there is a fun fact coming in all this nerdery,

is that the 404 code was chosen because back in the 1980s at CERN in Switzerland, when they had the World Wide Web Central Database, it was on the fourth floor of the building. It was in room 404. And inside room 404 were a load of workers who would actually manually locate pages to servers. So if you were in a queue for that process to happen, you'd get a 404, but it would say, room 404, colon, file not found.

But it did originally mean the people in room 404 will get around to sorting this out eventually, which is fun fun i love it when there's like a real world connection to a well known phrase yeah like when we talked about left wing and right wing in the houses of parliament does room 404 have any relation to room 101 yeah do they deliberately put the difficult to get requests in that room no but at the same, I wonder if you go back even further than the 1980s and you come up with the nerds who built the building at CERN. I wonder if they were paying tribute to Room 101 by putting it in Room 404 in the physical world in the first place. And also the other thing that's happened regarding 404s generally,

and the reason we all know about them, is that consumer brands at some point in the 1990s started realizing that an oops page was actually an opportunity to redirect customers to things that might interest them anyway you know perhaps their latest product launch always be selling uh or just a joke like a bit of branding you know hey we're a cloud computing company but we're really fun guys and so then the 404 pages became more sophisticated and had jokes on and stuff. And that's why we all know what they are and notice when despotic presidents shut down taxpayer-funded institutions

that used to be there. What does it do? Redirect to Trump golf courses? Here's a question from NR from the West Midlands, who says, thanks for bringing back the podcast. In your absence, I've been put in a situation

that requires advice. One day at home, I was sitting in the lounge, minding my own business, when I heard a fairly loud banging noise coming from the kitchen being repeated over and over.

My brother-in-law, aged about 40, was teaching my son, aged 10, that the way to open a coconut was to hurl it at the floor as hard as you can until it cracks it's a way naturally i shut this down as quickly as possible and opened the coconut with a hammer but when i returned to the lounge to tell my wife what had just unfolded she looked at me like one of us was stupid and said they'd always open coconuts like

that in her house when she was growing up and implied that i was being weird for having a problem with it so helen answer me this am i being weird no i think you seem to be someone who perhaps is concerned for the integrity of your kitchen floor yes if it's ceramic tiles a coconut could easily crack one of those we did drop coconuts onto a stone path just outside our front door when we were growing up but we would drain the liquid first by boring a hole into the coconut and then we're allowed to go and smash it onto the path but that was stone flags and the idea of smashing it on the pavement was that deliberately encouraged by your parents because it was a fun novelty way to open the coconut or was it done in all innocence as appears to be the case here of just like yeah it's the floor bang it yeah well i think that the advantage of that over the hammer method is that it's smashing on the ground.

And although that might get path muck on your coconut, you're not likely to get a bit of flying coconut shard in your eye. Whereas the hammer method, I think you could get a lot of coconut ricocheting around. But I do identify with the satisfaction of hurling things at the floor. I actually do this for my chickens. We keep chickens. And the most fun way to feed a chicken is to just chuck fruit hard at the floor until it explodes. It's really fun.

And it's, I mean, obviously it's easier with soft fruit in the first place, like bananas and avocados. But if you just go boom with an out of date fruit, chickens absolutely love it. You love it. It's incredibly therapeutic. Another strong argument for getting chickens.

What I like that is subtly embedded in this is that nr's wife looks at nr like one of us was stupid and said they'd always open coconuts like that in her house when she was growing up it's like those little family psycho dramas you hear about where someone's like i went to my partner's family home for christmas for the first time and they were like what's the problem we always tongue kiss in this family but coconut openings so much more innocent or like mickey pluff the doll's eye polisher in my family yeah you're throwing that in as if everyone will understand what the fuck you're talking about oh uh it was my great-grandma used to say when you know when someone asks you oh where you off to and you don't really want to tell someone especially if they're a child so you say i'm going to see a man about a dog. Oh, yeah, yeah. Her equivalent was, I'm going to see Nicky Pluff.

People would say, who's Nicky Pluff? And she'd say, Nicky Pluff, the doll's eye polisher. It's amazing, isn't it, when older people speak in code and expect younger people to have understood just through insinuation, even though the references are well out of date. My father-in-law does this when he's giving directions to anywhere from where he is. So they live in a village called Ashwell, is near bulldog and that's literally what the address

says ashwell comma nr dot bulldog yes my grandparents used to live next door and if i was writing to them it was ashwell near bulldog on the envelope there we go and so if you want directions to anywhere you get directions from bulldog like it's just assumed that you know how to get to bulldog so immediately like you're out of your depth if you don't know the way to Bulldog. Yeah, getting to Bulldog's your problem, mate. But then the landmark that he uses in Bulldog is Fishy Taylor's, a fish and chip shop that has not existed for over 20 years.

So he always says, get to Fishy Taylor's and take a ride. You're like, what's Fishy Taylor's? I want to know if NR, being from the West Midlands, has also had Nicky Plough experience, or if that is Martin's family special. I think that was my great-grandmother's. But if someone else has heard that, I'd be really curious because, you know, there's things that you wonder

if they were specific to your family and maybe they are regional. Well, Madeline from Ely in Cambridge says, Ollie, answer me this. When coffee giants like Costa and Starbucks are designing new coffee drinks for their menu, what is the process for this? What are the parameters they must stick to? For example, the drinks must be able to be made by a barista within a certain time limit, or they must contain certain ingredients or caffeine limits, etc. I'm assuming price point would be a compelling example that Madeleine has not specified.

Absolutely. I mean, her own imagination has brought us roughly to the list of criteria, though, as you say, sometimes other commercial factors come in and new drinks are introduced without having been properly road tested. So I know from a mole on the inside that Cafe Nero introduced a mystery Batman flavour when the film The Batman came out. Was it bat flavour?

Wouldn't it be amazing? It was like a hot chocolate with a Riddler question mark on it in the froth, and you were supposed to guess what the flavour was. But that was the problem. The mystery flavour was like oranges and oat milk. This is a chain that prides itself on traditional Italian coffee, so their customers did not like that. But they'd been bugged a load of money from Warners to promote the film um and so you get this thing of like this isn't the right product for us

but there are commercial reasons why we should be offering this but in general obviously everything is sort of market researched to within an inch of its life and then rolled out slowly so the classic case study is pumpkin spice latte um a phenomenon i think we can agree yes out of control that started with a need from the hq so the need was we need a special drink for autumn and so they had a brainstorm and then they came up with like 200 different options for what would sell to their customers but then there's a lot of rigorous testing partly based on obviously um taste combinations you know balancing the floral notes etc the initial test for the pumpkin spice latte was they dunked pumpkin pie in espresso that was the first thing

they tried just to see whether the taste combination was right and it is often that basic i once interviewed the guy who invented baileys uh on the modern man wow touch you you're real the test kitchen for that was literally popping down to the off-license, buying some Nesquik and putting it in some rum. I mean, that is how they developed. To see whether the combination works before you then create any further. And, you know, we take for granted that those things would work together, but you really can't be sure.

Like the other day, I got a spicy iced mocha because I like an iced mocha and I like spicy things together. Monstrous. Appalling. Right. Yes, yes, yeah. But you see, some people do like the combinations and you can't tell even until you roll it out. So, I mean, that's the next stage. So the pumpkin spice latte, the classic example, as I say,

the textbook was rolled out to two locations first. Vancouver, BC, in fact. So you could have been amongst the first where you are. The other place they tested it was Washington, DC. And then when it caught on, they started rolling out and that's broadly speaking what starbucks still do it's interesting because the basics innovate like that so for example in the uk the standard starbucks latte in the 90s was one shot of espresso and a full fat milk puddled in the middle puddled whereas now it's two shots of espresso and foam full fat milk puddled in the middle. Puddled. Whereas now it's two shots of espresso and foam art on top because that's what the market has come to expect and the UK

was ordering extra shots of espresso for their lattes anyhow whereas in the US they still use one shot. So that kind of stuff is informed by customers. So market research that they're already getting paid for. Yeah exactly yeah yeah yeah but sometimes that still goes wrong uh just last year they withdrew almost immediately after introducing it a strawberry and vanilla oat milk coffee and a frappuccino that had a layer of jelly at the bottom i wonder whether they were trying to get on the boba market yeah i've got really into the texture drink so there was a time when i would have found that jelly constituent quite off-putting but now i'm i'm into them i'm into them all the grass jellies the coconut jellies tapioca's sometimes i guess you can be too ahead of a trend can't you if

you're a mainstream chain you've got to get it right when the the masses are ready to have it i guess you've got to know who your customers are haven't you well i was clever about it of course just to go back in fact to the question at hand here from madeline is that what they're doing by developing something that sort of obscure is creating something proprietary in a world where it's very hard to because you are just basically dealing with coffee milk and cream oh yeah and that is what is behind a lot of innovation so-called on the high street no so it's similarly it's like um costa now have a thing called that they call a spanish latte for the uk market it's got a hammer in it it's coffee con leche that's what it is oh yeah but it's just you can only get a spanish latte at costa market it's got ham in it it's coffee con leche that's what it is oh yeah but

it's just you can only get a spanish latte at costa so it's like you use the coffee if you can to create a meme like frappuccino that people associate with your main brand in in north america people still drink coffee but actually in the uk the top orders none of them are really but there is you basically can't get brewed coffee in most of those stores. They don't do filter coffee. And the top orders are latte, cappuccino, caramel macchiato, Americano and iced latte. I would say out of those, only really an Americano actually is a coffee. Well, maybe people are getting their coffee elsewhere and they're going to Starbucks for the things that they are not making at home or getting from a better place. Yes. I want a cup

of overpriced cream and water, please, with a shot of coffee in it. I can't make making at home or getting from a better place. Yes. I want a cup of overpriced cream and water, please, with a shot of coffee in it. I can't make that at home. If you've got a question, email your question to answermethispodcast at googlemail.com to answermethispodcast at googlemail.com To answer me this podcast at googlemail.com

To answer me this podcast at googlemail.com So retrospectives, what historical events are we ticking off on this week's run of Today in History? Nail.com 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. Here's a question from Sarah from Massachusetts, who says, I'm currently filling out an anatomical gift form for a local university so I can donate my body to science. No worries for my immediate fate necessary, just planning for the inevitable future. Well, that's some real long-term planning then.

Yeah. I do a bit of forward planning on a down day and it's usually like, where should we go camping in September rather than what's going to happen to my kneecaps when I die? But well done you. What's going to happen to my kneecaps when I die? Your most precious body part. I thought I would turn them into little snack dishes

that you can serve pistachio nuts out of, Olly. Would you like that? Toby jugs, please. They're too small. Stop knee shaming him. Sarah says, the form has spaces for me to write

what being an anatomical donor means to me and to write a message for the future healthcare professionals who will be learning from my body or bits of it, as the case may be. I find myself at a loss for what to write here. Have fun, kids! Seems a bit glib.

I doubt they'd take seriously my request that my skeleton be dressed up for Halloween every year. But I also don't want to go to the other extreme and write something trite or overly sentimental. So, Ollie, answer me this. What should I say to the future medical students who will be dissecting my corpse? Oh, I really don't know that there's any should on this like I can't tell you what to say

I think I would try not to be as it sounds like maybe you've been a bit intimidated by the formality of the form like I feel like this prompt you, what does being an anatomical donor mean to you, is actually really just, for some people, a good kind of thought exercise to imagine the question is being asked by a friend over a coffee or a beer. Why are you doing this? And some people know that they want to tell that person why they're doing it. And some people don't. And I think it's fine if you don't. If you think that your body being donated speaks for itself, you don't. And I think it's fine if you don't. If you think that your body being

donated speaks for itself, you don't need to say anything. But I think if you imagine that question coming to you in that informal setting, oh, Sarah, why are you doing that? Why are you donating your body to science? You don't need to overthink the answer because you probably do have an answer to that. Maybe it's, oh, because I don't have a religious faith, so I'm not bothered about having a ceremonial burial. Or maybe it's because I've always wanted to pay things forward and i think this is a way to support the future of science i think it's just a way of humanizing that question for people who aren't sure what to write and also then in turn humanizing you for those doctors and scientists who are going to be tampering around with you later do they want that do they want you to be humanized please answer us

this if you are or have been a medical student do you want the corpses Do they want you to be humanised? Please answer us this if you are or have been a medical student. Do you want the corpses in front of you to be humanised and to be thinking about who they were? Or do you want to just think of them as a meat jigsaw puzzle? Cadaver number seven. the fact of their personalities as much as possible when I was like slicing them into bits. What you could do, Sarah, if you have tattoos, maybe tell them the story of the tattoos, because I think I'd be curious about that. Yes, yeah. Whatever it was. If you don't have one, maybe you could get a tattoo that tells your whole story to them. Oh yeah, then you don't need to write anything on the form.

Then you don't need to write the form. Well, Sarah has an additional question, Ollie. The form includes options for the disposal of my remains after all the science-y stuff that can be done with them is finished. Most are fairly standard. Cremation and burial, cremation and return to my next of kin, etc. My favourite option, though, is total skeletonisation. Wow. I was pretty jazzed about the idea of being a skeleton in a medical school classroom,

mostly because I enjoy the thought of being both useful and kind of funny. However, it wasn't until further down in the form that I discovered the skeletonization process is done by a dermisted beetle colony. What? Now I'm torn, because I have a huge irrational fear of all things creepy crawly. On the one hand, I really want to be a skeleton, and I know that beetles are probably the best way. Logically, I know that I won't be around to see or feel any of the happily munching little critters, but right now, just the mental image is enough to give me nightmares. I don't want to be on my deathbed someday

and be made even more upset by the thought of being nibbled on. But also, skeleton? So cool! So, Ollie, answer me this. To skeleton or not to skeleton again don't put it on me man like i'm not giving my body what do you care it's after you've died doesn't matter if you're afraid of beetles or not this is the one time when you will not have to worry about them yeah but she said in the email helen the issue is not how she knows rationally she's not going to be thinking about that stuff she's worried that on her deathbed's not going to be thinking about that stuff. Yeah, it's not rational. She's worried that on her deathbed,

she's going to be upset by the thought it might happen in the future. And honestly, much as I like the idea of encouraging you to skeletonize yourself, if you think there's a chance that on your deathbed you will be worried about that, don't do it. If you know that beetles are going to devour your corpse, that makes the phobia you have of beetles

quite rational and justified at that point. Or seek therapy for the phobia you have of beetles quite rational and justified at that point or seek therapy for this phobia and then get the skeletonization done sure but the point is isn't it that insects will nibble at your corpse anyway like unless you're cremated aren't they gonna like um like do some fairly hefty chopping up before it gets to that point like it's not like you're going to be delivered pristine to the beetles to. I think also bear in mind that when you're on your deathbed, you might not be capable of having such thoughts anyway, or you might have other stuff to worry about. I mean, the concept of having my body hanging around in a medical lab,

the thing that would stop me personally doing that is that I don't feel strongly enough about donating my body to be a skeleton that I would want to deprive my surviving relatives of the opportunity to visit my grave or scatter my ashes if that's something they wanted to do rather than being like oh yeah you have to go to King's College London and see him strung up on the fifth floor. But what if you left your skeleton to theatre and if your family wanted to visit you they just had to go and see a production of Hamlet? Actually there's one place that I would be very happy for my skeleton to be on display. And that is, of course, Pirates of the Caribbean.

And a fun fact, I mean, that's not so fun. When they opened Pirates of the Caribbean at Disneyland in the 60s, they used real human skeletons. What? From UCLA. Oh, my God. And it's because in the 60s, they didn't have convincing real skeletons made en masse for theme park amusements and they just hadn't thought through the ethical questions of that were people just okay with it then someone was obviously okay with it i don't know i guess once

it became a sort of iconic ride and people realize that you're bringing children along to look at the cadavers of people who have not been given proper burials as part of an amusement then they felt uneasy about it and they replaced well supposedly they replaced them all rumor has it there is one skeleton in the pirates of the caribbean ride in california that is still real oh that sounds like an urban myth well you know what i wonder more is if it was just not that practical to maintain them like they probably looked a bit manky and it's a watery ride. So maybe the damp, the heat of Southern California, maybe it's just quite a gnarly skeleton situation. Both Martin's dad and my dad have died in the last couple of years.

And my family in particular don't have any sentimental attachment to dead bodies or graves. And neither of our dads had specified really what they wanted to happen. I think Martin's dad was just like, I don't care, I won't be around. I think he said, put me in a plastic bag and throw me into a dump or something like that. Which we didn't do. Which is not practical. You're not allowed to do that.

No. I think it's illegal. It would look suspicious for sure. I think my dad just thought he was never going to die. I think he really thought he still like hundreds of years ahead of him and so to me it felt a bit like a waste disposal task to figure out what to do with their bodies and also i was like wow humans are really fucked up in how we how we act about dead bodies and what we do with them there's like there's a kind of morbid luxuriation in it in a way it's funny isn't it the whole opt-in opt-out

thing i think the law probably has it right now that they've changed organ donation to opt out but you know that donating your body to medical science is opt-in but if we had a world where it was opt-out would i opt out like if that was the normal thing to do it wouldn't occur to me that i'd want a ceremony or that you know what i mean that i'd have a particular preference it only seems freakish because it's not a thing that most people do you know what i wouldn't want if me that I'd want a ceremony, or that, you know what I mean, that I'd have a particular preference. It only seems freakish because it's not a thing that most people do. You know what I wouldn't want if I left my body to science

is just thinking about how many scientists of the 20th century were eugenicists. Can you specify, I don't want it to be left for phrenologists to pick on. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, can you pick the particular science they can look into? Yeah.

The thing is, if you're a genuine scientist, even if you approach a controversial area of science that's been disproven in the past, if you're approaching it with a genuine belief, you might be able to find out something new in the future. And then you do. Then everyone who said that you were wrong was wrong, right? I mean, that's the thing.

Like, should you be able to say to someone, absolutely never think of this like this? Otherwise, they wouldn't have people to experiment on i mean some people are very pro phrenology so they would probably uh they'd be happy to donate oh yes bound to be coming back in use the racist corpses not uh 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. He looks like a scrotum. Thank you very much to Squarespace for sponsoring this episode of Answer Me This.

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We live in the middle of the middle of the United States, and we want to see the Northern Lights. I don't know if that means we have to go very, very far away to someplace like Finland, or if there is someplace a little closer that would be a little less expensive to get to. So Helen and Ali, please answer me this. Where should we go to see the Northern Lights? To see the Northern Lights, you want to go pretty far north, and you also want clear skies. Far north is expensive. Places like Iceland are often often cloudy so here is my vote for optimal possibility of seeing the northern knights and not even leaving the landmass that you're on yellow knife

and calendar where the northern knights are visible up to 240 days per year wow that is a lot of days i got some advice from our friend brie who lives in Yellowknife, who says, if you want to see them when it's warmest, then September is a good month. If you want to see them during winter, but not too cold winter, March is the best month. But in general, we have very clear skies from mid-December to late April. And then in the middle, it's too light. It's so far north that the nights aren't dark enough. Do not come in October, November and early December. It's cloudy.

Okay, good. All right. Another good thing about going to Yellowknife, they have an indigenous owned Aurora village that you can stay in if you want your tourism money to benefit the local community. And Yellowknife is accessible by flights from many flight hubs, including Calgary and Toronto, which are pretty doable from the middle of the middle of the USA.

Okay. So that's what I suggest. If Jackie wants to stay in the usa then you have options like alaska you can go to fairbanks or further north mid-august to mid-april and places like idaho and north dakota have dark sky parks and our friend dave who grew up in michigan said he used to see northern lights in the upper peninsula there a lot but i do think you should travel somewhere where you know you'd be happy doing the other stuff there is to do there in case you're disappointed by not seeing the Northern

Lights. Or indeed, you see the Northern Lights and then find them disappointing. You're not going to find the Northern Lights as disappointing. No. You're really not. You've got personal experience. Where have you seen the Northern Lights? Yeah, we've seen them in Iceland. We saw them here in Vancouver last year because at the moment we're in a period of

great solar storm activity. So it's a good time to see the Northern Lights between now and 2027. Right. I'm a bit jealous because there was that moment last year in the UK when supposedly the Northern Lights were visible even in Hertfordshire where I live. So obviously at that point, my wife, the kids, the freezing cold, 11. at night, we're out on the front drive with my kids' novelty telescopes, pointlessly looking up at the sky, can't see a fucking thing. Think we see it and realize it's just like the blur of the M25 in the background. And then what happened the following week is it happened again. If you remember, it was like there were two times where you could see it.

And I was alerted to that fact on social media. Like I hadn't noticed that people were saying oh we're going to be able to see the northern lights again and suddenly i started seeing all these photos on my social media of people taking pictures of the northern lights in real time and it was midnight and i was lying on my sofa in my dressing gown with a glass of wine in my hand and i had that thought process of can i be asked to stand up and go outside and stand on the front drive just in case i see the northern lights when I can see them fine here on my iPad? And I didn't get up and go out and look outside because I just thought I probably won't be able to see them.

But that might have been it. That might have been my one chance. And I thought, well, this guy's taking a picture. He's in Wellin. Looks all right. Yeah. What's the point of doing anything ever when you could just look at Google images? Exactly. I mean, that was genuinely my thought process. I realise realize you're being ironic here's another question of travel from elizabeth who says my girlfriend and i have just got back from a lovely holiday in madeira we visited a beach on the south of the island which had yellow sand different to the native volcanic black sand which we were told by a taxi driver had been transplanted from Morocco to encourage tourism. This is the second transplanted beach I've been to. There is at least one on Lake Michigan in the North Shore area of

Chicago as well. So Helen, answer me this. With beaches created like this, how do they guarantee they aren't transplanting creatures in the sand that are not native? Do they sift the sand in giant machines? Aren't we lucky to have this running feature where I ruin people's lovely holiday fun? Because I went into this thinking, oh, what a novelty, and came out being very harrowed indeed by this practice. There's so much controversy. There's so much crime because there's not enough sand in the world what there's this big sand shortage in fact because of construction mostly i know there's a shortage in construction

like even sometimes in play sand when you're filling up a sand pit it's hard but i would have thought like actually on beaches no they have to use sand from beaches and river and lake shores because it's jagged enough people, why don't you just use sand from a desert? They can't because that sand is too rounded. 50 billion tonnes a year of sand are extracted from beaches, rivers and lakes. And there's a lot of theft. There's a lot of heists. It's a very big business, legal and illegal. It's pretty scary. In India, for instance, hundreds of people have been murdered over sand. In 2008, a quarter mile of white sand beach in Jamaica was stolen.

And I think still no one has found the culprits or what happened to the sand. How the fuck do you steal 500 truckloads of sand? I was going to say, yeah, like a few bags, I can understand. And then a lot of beaches have more sand added to try and slow down erosion. So actually a lot more beaches are beach nourished

which is one of the euphemisms they use or just um put there from nothing whereas other beaches all the sand is taken away and they're basically like a rocky nub now which is actually just bad planning isn't it i mean like if people want to go to a place because they want a sandy beach holiday and that place doesn't naturally have a sandy beach then they put the resort in the wrong place didn't they i mean why didn't they build the resort in the other place? Look, I think a lot of resort businesses are like, we want our money and this is where it's going to be. But these beaches in Madeira are quite controversial because the sand was imported from the Western Sahara, which is occupied by Morocco, and the import may be violating

international law. What I couldn't find out for sure is whether or how they clean this sand because you're right like for instance um the sand on waikiki beach in hawaii was imported there from california between the 1920s and the 70s what i thought hawaii had like famously perfect beaches in the first place well not there because of erosion also there's another beach hanama bay it's just around the corner from waikiki and um they had white sand shipped in in the 70s to make it look more attractive to tourists and i was like what the fuck did they bring in with this sand hawaii's ecosystems are delicate so now waikiki i think they pump the sand in from offshore so that it is locally sourced because transporting the sand as well is so expensive because sand's really heavy. But also then it

doesn't have the organism problem. The Chicago one, that comes from the Indiana shoreline. So that's just along from Chicago. It's probably the same sort of ecosystems. Some of the sand mining companies do talk about, they're like, oh yes, we wash it. And then we sort it into different types, which I think is by size and texture and colour, because they want the particular size of sand for what they're doing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But because so much of this stuff is either not legal or no one is really regulating it... It's hard to find out.

...then I think they're probably like, oh, whatever, we don't give a shit. So, troubling. Yeah, that is depressing but also fascinating. I mean, I've been on beaches that I've been told are fake beaches. But they felt so real to me the thing is i feel like the quest for the perfect beach quote on quotes is sort of impossible anyway we actually once went to siesta key on the west coast of florida because it is routinely voted the best beach in america and i was like we're going to uh the east coast

of the united States on holiday. Where should we go? Let's go somewhere with a good beach. Googled it, found Siesta Key. Only to realise that when we were there in September, it was the red tide. And the red tide is this seasonal algae that turns the water red.

And then all the fish die and their bodies litter the sand with a carpet of blood. Perfect. And it is not what I was imagining for my Instagram. And I thought, why was I greedy? I could have just gone to Marbella and they would have had a better beach than this.

You know, sometimes perfection is the wrong thing to attain. Exactly. But also, what is it? What makes it a perfect beach? For me, I wouldn't want the landscape to be so flat, for instance. I want a bit more topographical interest i mean i think shade for me oh yeah that's the big one doesn't solve the wind problem in britain i mean that's the you know unfortunately like whatever the surface of the beach is it's the lashing wind in your face

blowing it into your eyes that's the problem right people go to beaches to get exfoliated then your fake tan goes on smoother afterwards. Here's a question preceded by a life update from Simon, who says, when I first listened to you at age 13, I was doing my paper round, round Tunbridge. Now I'm old enough to buy a house. Simon, when am I going to be old enough to buy a house? I'm way older than you. That was a well-paid paper round. Thus, buying a house has engendered Simon's question.

Simon says, Olly, answer me this. Where does the word solicitor come from? What are they soliciting? Well, it comes from the old French soliciteur, which found itself into Middle English to mean agent, one who conducts business on behalf of another. There are some who say that literally solicitors used to solicit for business at one time because solicitors didn't have offices like they do now. But in any case, whether you believe that bit or not, it is true,

isn't it, that a lawyer as a practitioner of law is a little bit more straightforward to understand. And that's why in most countries people know what a lawyer is. Yeah, but there's so many kinds of lawyer, particularly in the English system. The English law system got more complicated more quickly than other people's because, as always, English people are obsessed with class and status and education. So a word was needed for those who did legal transactions that didn't involve litigation so that barristers and so on kept their status, proctors and doctors and attorneys and all of that. Sergeant with a J. Yes. But it's essentially because the British courts professionalised more rapidly than other countries as well,

because we had a monarchy, we had banks, we had the empire, there was more to legislate about. People came to London to formalise things, and so they separated out this class of lawyer.

Other countries are going to be like, what the fuck are you talking about? Because lawyers can be both solicitors and barristers, whereas in Britain, they absolutely can't. Yeah. The solicitor is the person you pay

to tell you how much to pay a barrister. And they do a bunch of paperwork for the barrister, but they don't get to wear the wig. But the one that has faded away, Helen, is the feminine form solicitress and solicitrix. That's hot.

Which I love. A hot term. Isn't it? It might be a slightly different profession that they are offering because that form of the word solicit, which is still around in like signs that say no soliciting. Yes. That doesn't mean no one drawing up contracts. Yeah.

That means no offering of sex work. Yes. And other things like I think it started with like traveling salespeople, but thus came to mean like street business of various kinds. I was interested as well to discover that when that separation was made roughly, solicitors then reformed the English legal education framework to make it based on common law, i.e. the practical stuff like how do I buy a property? How do I write a will? And before that, people had to study Roman law and then base contemporary law on what they'd learned about classical law yeah rather than being taught the practical that's a very england thing to do how did the romans do it all right that i'm sure works 2 000 years later exactly i mean of course

start the syllabus like that do a couple of weeks of that fascinating but i mean it's not practical education is it what the romans did here's an email from M in Loughton who says, Helen, answer me this. Have female werewolves ever existed in literature? And then puts in parenthesis, don't pull Twilight on me as literature. Okay, then. Shant. And if so, a supplementary question, would they also have their periods or would you reckon that would be too cruel? Too cruel? I mean, the things werewolves uh experience well also they're unlikely to drink their own period if that's what they're hinting at isn't it but werewolves aren't like blood drinkers like vampires they just eat eat stuff exactly they're not interested in blood apparently only polar bears are drawn to

menstrual blood i've done some gross research today i'm gonna have to obliterate my browser history later i think whether they get periods or not depends on whether you think they are biologically more wolf or more human because wolves don't get periods is that right well i've learned something well like dogs don't either they have estrus which is their period of being in heat which is the mating season and during that they might also spot a little bit of blood whereas humans humans have an estrus in the middle of the menstrual cycle, and then the blood is when you're shedding the womb lining. But not every animal has such a womb lining shedding situation

because they don't have as aggressive placentas as humans, etc. I mean, when you think about it, there's lots of do they do this human thing question you could ask about werewolves, actually. Like, can they eat chocolate or is that toxic for them? Oh, good question. If you eat chocolate and then turn into a werewolf and the chocolate's still in system is that bad for you well similarly when you're in human form can you eat raw meat what happens if a werewolf gets pregnant during that wolf time what kind of creature do they give birth to right but some werewolf lore does have menstruating werewolves i think because now you can get

fiction about every mythological creature um also the film ginger snaps oh yeah i think it happens before she's fully transformed but when she has been werewolfed a bit she she gets a very heavy period but she's not fully in wolf form yet if i remember correctly but that answers the question anyway doesn't it i mean i know ginger snaps maybe doesn't count as literature either but that's a female werewolf so yes there are female werewolves, right? They're just not as popular or well known. Oh, yeah. I mean, there are actually a lot of female werewolves

in thousands of years of myth. And also, okay, it depends what you think of as literature, right? Because for, say, a thousand years, you've got written accounts of female werewolves. I'm going to call them weef wolves because were means man. So it's confusing to have a female man wolf. But you have quite a lot of sources where they're writing about female werewolves

and you're like, do they believe this? Are they perpetuating a myth to keep everyone scared? Are they writing about a kind of mental health condition that some people had where they thought they were wolves or they excused the fact that they'd murdered everyone. So Gerald of Wales, one of your favourite authors, Ollie. Devoured his podcast series. He was a priest and historian who worked for King Henry II and then King John.

And in the late 1180s, he wrote a book called Topographia Hibernica about Ireland. And I don't know whether he was just like very credulous or fucking with his readers because he also talks about barnacle geese being born from barnacles it was acceptable in the 1180s and he talks about a floating island that could disappear which might have been high brazil or might have been a different one But he recounts the tale of a priest who was walking from Ulster to Meath and was flagged down by a werewolf who was like, help, help, can you give last rites to my female counterpart who is dying? We've both been cursed to be werewolves on a seven year cycle. So the priest does and they peel back her wolf skin and he sees that she's an elderly

human underneath. And the werewolf is like it's all right we're both christians it's just the curse so i feel like that was both cleaning up werewolf myth and making it christianity compatible whilst indulging in it but when you're talking about the writings of someone like gerald of wales do you count that as literature or journalism or conspiracy theory nonsense. If you're talking about actual fiction, then fast forward to 1839 and the book The Phantom Ship by Frederick Marriott, in which a weef wolf kills her children and also exhumes a corpse to eat it. And then I think after that, you have to go to 1896 and there's an erotic novel called

The Werewolf by Clements Housman, which you can read on openlibrary.org if you're so inclined. Erotic why? Well, I tried reading a bit of it and it was mostly a man being like, oh dear, this werewolf's just grabbed my axe and she's run away. So I didn't get any erotic stuff,

but there's like 160 pages to shuffle through and not for me. But then in the 20th century, you get a lot more female werewolves, courtesy of like Terry Pratchett and Angela Carter. And now, you know, fantasy and erotica and horror are such big genres. Oh, can't move for them, can you? I mean, actually, if anything,

the point in a series where a character comes out as a werewolf or a weefwolf is the point at which I turn off. I mean, it happens too regularly for me. I'm like, I don't want them to be a werewolf. If I wanted a werewolf, I'd have watched the werewolf series. Agreed, Ollie. Agreed. It really ruined that plot line of The Archers, didn't it?

We were just trying to rewild the farm. LAUGHTER Down and lonely Life is so confusing. I need some answers, preferably amusing. Now I find a podcast that will suit. I listen to Helen and Ollie on my half-hour commute. Here's a seasonally appropriate question from Julia.

Hi, Helen and Ollie and Martin the Soundman. My name is Julia and I'm calling from Dublin. I want to know why the date of Easter moves around every year. Now, I know that it's the first Sunday after a certain phase of the moon, after I think the spring equinox, but why does Easter have a lunar date when Christmas does not? I first thought Easter was the outlier, but I think actually most Jewish and Muslim holidays are lunar and also maybe Hindi.

So I guess Christmas is the unusual one. So Helen and Ollie, answer me this. Why is Jesus's birthday on a solar calendar and his death is loony solar? Yeah, I've been wondering this for a few years and every time I thought about it, I wished I could ask you. I've never gotten around to Googling it, so you can see I'm pretty helpless without you and I'm glad you're back. Bye. Here to Google for you, Julia, of course. So the date of Easter Sunday is always coinciding with the first Sunday after the Paschal full moon, which is the first full moon after the vernal equinox, which is on 21st of March. This being in the Gregorian calendar following branches of Christianity, Orthodox churches on the Julian calendar,

an extra Easter date range, but stick to Gregorian for now because anything involving calendars is enough to make your brain explode from things that aren't even sad. It's the Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox on 21st of March. The reason it's called Pascha,

or Pascha depending on which language, that is the root for the name for Easter in a lot of cultures, and it means Passover. I was going to say, the Last Supper, that was a Passover meal, wasn't it? That was a Seder night meal. I would never have made that connection,

but that does make perfect sense. Yeah. You can't just set it to a particular date because we know, because of Judaism, that the Passover does follow the lunar calendar. You can't then just pretend, oh no, it would have been three weeks ago. Like it always has to follow the Passover,

doesn't it, theoretically? Passover is the 14th day of the month of Nisan, or at least the Passover feast. And so the date of Passover is going to fluctuate on the Gregorian calendar because the Gregorian calendar is not a lunar calendar. Yes. Hence Easter's date is different each year.

But then why not Christmas? Christmas was tacked onto ancient Roman midwinter festivals and ancient pagan festivals that are based around when the winter solstice is. So the winter solstice is something that we know when that is, even though the day it's calendarised on has changed in the ancient Roman calendar. I think it was the 25th of December,

but a lot has happened since then. Because there's nothing in the Bible about what Jesus's mum was doing festival-wise before she gave birth. Harder to pinpoint. She was celebrating Saturnalia when her waters broke. Exactly. I did read a book once about the science of Christmas

that went quite deep into this, and they said it's far more likely that Jesus's birthday was in April or September. He's just so an Aries. As I understand it, not only do people doubt the month and the day, but even the year is debated

up to about 6 BC, I think. Yeah, it's a massive span, isn't it? Yeah, because he was a baby. Like, he wasn't actually doing anything remarkable until afterwards they decided it was remarkable. Oh, he probably did an amazing shit

in the shape of God's beard. The thing, though, with Easter, right, it's never really recovered i don't think as a festival since the puritans banned it well you look back through what people used to do pre-1647 and there was a lot of like parades and you know community stuff like you'd get at christmas and also lent was a huge deal right everyone gave Everyone gave up sex for Lent. Everyone. Strictly enforced. Well, sure. It wasn't done to boast about not doing that.

I mean, if you were in other countries than Britain, then Easter often still has parades. Still a big deal. And loads of stuff happening. Yeah, but isn't that interesting? Like, since 1660, when it was restored, people were like, the other stuff that's been restored,

I just prefer. I just prefer Shakespeare. I'm just going to wait until, the other stuff that's been restored, I just prefer. I just prefer Shakespeare. I'm just going to wait until they invent the Cadbury's cream egg and then maybe I'll give a shit. I do find that being secular at Easter is harder than being secular at Christmas because you get the day off,

but it's like, apart from B&Q, what do you do? You get loads of days off. Yeah, you get two, yeah. A four-day weekend. What's it for? So that you can contemplate how sad it was that Christ was crucified for our sins, and then how rad that he flew to heaven.

One year we did a Hot Wheel hunt because I didn't want to do an Easter egg hunt because I didn't want the kids to eat too much chocolate. So it sounded like a really fun idea. I was like, I'm going to get all your Hot Wheels, I'm going to put them all in different places around the garden, and you're going to have to find them. And then being dyspraxic, completely forgot where i hid all the hot wheels you still finding them still finding them occasionally had a lot of tears that easter

yeah it was um not a good move i've noticed though the last few years there's been a lot more easter tat to buy yeah and it has been more of a big deal in terms of like our valentine's day is over what's the next thing we can decorate the shit out of our houses for and buy a lot of stuff? But now there's like four foot high flocked rabbits available in the supermarkets and stuff like that. And it just really harrows me like that and Halloween, just how much like plastic shit people are buying.

I can't bear it. Don't ruin Halloween for me, Helen. Halloween is my festival. I'm in TK Maxx in August buying the Halloween data. If it's orange, I'm there. All right, well, just keep it up all year round. Well, talking of calendars, many of you, I'm sure, will now be anxiously hovering a biro

over your Filofaxes wondering, are we going to continue, Luna or not, to release episodes of Answer Me This throughout 2025? Because we did originally say we were only going to continue luna or not to release episodes of answer me this throughout 2025 because we did originally say we were only going to commit to three new comeback episodes well maybe we'll commit to another one maybe we will maybe we will so yes we are thanks thanks everybody for supporting the show and thank you for being excited that we're back yeah we will be back for the next episode not on the last last Thursday of each month like this one, but the 1st of May because Ollie's going to Disney World.

I am having an epic Disney World binge, which I did book way before we decided to do these. Like it's been in the diary for over a year. On the Disney calendar. On every calendar. Actually talking about calendars. So my son Harvey has a special calendar that he's made where he crosses off the days like an advent calendar. So at the time of recording, we have 11 days left till we go.

Fuck you all, I'm going to Disney World. But when I get back, we will be back from, yes, not the last week of April, but the first week of May. And then on the last Thursday of every month, you will have new Answer Me This. For the while, yeah. But we did say that we did want a target of a thousand paid members on patreon at the time of recording we're at 850 so it would be churlish

to uh turn our backs on those people but if you are perhaps available to stump up and help make that a thousand that would be lovely and we can keep this show going all year so patreon.com answer me this please not please that's just me being polite patreon.com answer me this please not please that's just me being polite patreon.com answer me this but also we really need your questions for without those there is no show that's right money and questions feed us if you have a question that you would like to ask us then all our contact details are listed upon our website answer me this podcast.com and while you're on the website, there's also links to our first 200 episodes

at answermethisstore.com as well as our special albums. And there's links to our other work, such as the many podcasts of Oliver Mann. Did that in the style of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. The cabinet of Dr. Mann.

Yeah, let me highlight this month my daily history show, Today in History Alfred Hitchcock presents. The cabinet of Dr. Man. Yeah. Let me highlight this month, my daily history show today in history with the retrospectives in which every day me and my friends, Arion and Rebecca uncover curious stories from history highlights this month on our feed right now for you to find include how Las Vegas became a magnet for vice. The time that the FIFA world Cup was stolen from a museum,

and the most expensive divorce ever. Ooh. It was in 1152 and it involved large swathes of France. You can find us wherever you get your podcasts. Just search for Today in History with the Retrospectors. It's just 10 minutes each day.

Fit us into your commute if you still have a commute. Helen, what do you do? I make the entertainment show about language, The Illusionist, which has 200 plus episodes in the back catalogue for you to catch up on and um just thinking about the the werewolf chat we had today there are a few episodes in there about other mythological creatures there's an episode called nightmare where we talk about like demons and lemurs as in the animal but lemurs are related to some kind of evil mythological creature oh right

also there's an episode where um i discussed terms from buffy the vampire slayer in the company of jenny and christian from buffering the vampire slayer so maybe you'd like to check those out at the illusionist.org and in the pod places there you are and martin what about you what have you got uh i make an experimental podcast called neutrino watch which uh uses computer code so every episode changes every day so there's uh there's a song which where the lyrics and the instruments change there's um advice for the creatively blocked and then there's stuff which is more like kind of poems and monologues and sound pieces and so if you're into the esoteric end of audio have a listen and then go back tomorrow uh download it again or stream it and you'll get a slightly different version of the

same thing and you get that neutrino.watch and um if you are one of our handsome benevolent very sexy and discerning uh patrons at patreon. slash answer me this you also do get bonus material halfway through the month stuff we lovingly did not include in this episode you get to hear and we love to see your reactions to the episodes and your comments yeah we were asking you last episode which artist dead or retired you'd like to have one last work from michael from glossop previously from wankheim nominates john kennedy tool who wrote a confederacy of dunces but never lived to see it published sue's pick is author sue grafton who completed 25 of her alphabet kinsey milhone series before her death and never completed the zed oh it'd be good

to read that final book oh that's harsh timothy. Timothy in Berlin picks George Gershwin. And Madeleine in Fremantle, Western Australia, says Douglas Adams, popular pick. And Jim Henson, inventor of the Muppets. Oh, well, now you're taking me back to my Disney World trip because one of the reasons that I'm very excited about taking my kids to Disney World is because, very sadly, this hurts me to my core,

they're closing Muppets 4D in June. And I'm so excited because had we booked the holiday two months later, we would never again be able to see Muppets 4D, which is this foundational text for me. So I'm essentially taking

my two children to Florida just so I can take them to that attraction. And that is Jim Henson's last work before he died. He died basically making that film, that 4D film at Disney World. And if it had closed the day

before you arrived, you would have kicked the whole place down. Yeah. Anyway, the conversation can continue about everything we've discussed today over at patreon.com slash answer me this. If we don't see you there, we'll see you in a Toby Carvery, or if not, we'll see you on May the 1st. See you then.

Bye!