Answer Me This! - AMT409: Nude Furniture, Cheesecake Factory, and Eating Slugs

Episode Date: August 28, 2025

Today’s questioneers want to know whether to hide bawdy home decor when kids visit, how one comes to own a cemetery, why cities are full of artist-decorated animals, whether you can eat slugs, what to do with three unwanted sets of boules, and what the most ordered item is from the enormous menu at Cheesecake Factory. For more information about this episode, and pics of the very special furniture we mention, visit answermethispodcast.com/episode409. Got questions for us to answer? Send them in writing or as a voice note to [e-mail], OR - thanks to Adam of SocialComms.uk who has revived our phone number - you can call 0208 123 5877. Next episode will be in your podfeed 25 September 2025. Become a patron at patreon.com/answermethis to help with the continuing existence of AMT, and to get an ad-free version of the episode, plus bonus material culled from the show, and our live video question-answering session Petty Problems - you can catch up on previous editions too. 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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Where on a buffalo do they find the wings? Hustra be this, Huston be this. So, Helen, you know how just a few episodes ago we were mourning the death of our phone line following the brutal death of Skype at the hands of Microsoft? Never forget. Well, Adam, head of operations at socialcoms.uk, has sent us the following email. Hello, Helen Olly and Martin. I was listening to the podcast and heard about the number being discontinued, which is a real shame.

Thank you for your sympathy, Adam. Then I realised I own a telecoms company. You hadn't realised that, but. for? And could probably save the number for you. What? Not all heroes wear capes. I'd be happy to host it on my system for free and have any voicemail left forwarded onto your email if you like. I suppose I like. We like. We like. Do we like the drunk calls with poor reception? I like the option to ignore them. So yes, I've been in touch with him and he's beavering away behind the scenes to make it happen. The way that you describe him

beavering away behind the scenes to reanimate something for the dead does make me a picture. Brannar in Frankenstein. Oh, yeah. Was Kenneth Branner at his hottest? Was it? Oh, it was the only time he tried to make himself look fit for a film, wasn't it? I haven't seen his full filmography. No one's fantasy, is it, Kenneth Brannner?

And I don't mean that in any disrespect. I just, he's not that kind of star, is he? He's an actor's actor. Look, you're going to hear from all the Brannaniacs. I was wondering what the collective noun was. Braniacs? Sure. It's sort of easiest to be the fittest thing in that film because, you know, the other two

stars are made up to look like their piece together from old corpses. Look, Helena Bonham Carter is so fit in this film that Kenneth Brunner blew up his marriage to Emma Thompson. There was something going on, wasn't there? The fact that he dressed her up in old meat and then broke up his relationship for it. He's like, Emma will never wear the ham. Anyway, you can once again call this number. 0208-1-2-3-5-8-0-07.

And it's good just to hear that again, actually. Anyway, you don't need to call our phone number, of course. You can attach a voice note and send it to us via email, as these people have done. Helen and Ollie, answer me this. If the French eat snails, why don't we eat slugs? Thank you from Charlotte and Sophie. Well, it's not just the French. A lot of countries eat snails, especially in West Africa, Southeast Asia, Rama Med.

But why not slugs? Lots of reasons. Is one of those reasons rat lungworm? Yeah, rat lung worm, brain worms I got as far as Googling it And I was like, oh, that's why Like Not just any long worm rat It just doesn't exactly

That's in wild slugs isn't it Which is also, it's absolutely also in wild snails Yeah, that's right So eating snails tend to have been farmed for the purpose So that they're in control environments Because a wild snail or slug Can have consumed whatever And also absorbed a lot of pesticides

But I don't know if they do as much Slug farming Can imagine if that was your job What do you do? I'm a slug farmer. It'd be easy to do. It just puts a munt down. I mean, in a sense, we're all slug farmers. Just have a slightly damp British house with an airbrick on the ground floor. The idea of eating them has never occurred to me.

Well, you can. You do have to prepare them very carefully if you're going to eat them. Purge them first thoroughly for usually at least a week. People will either keep them in confinement with no food or like just one ingredient. Often they'll use flour or herbs. Some people use carrots. because when they start shitting pure orange, you know that they have purr.

Oh, right, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay. That's a good idea. And they shrink down when fried. I did get far enough into a recipe. Again, I saw the line, rinse and boil again until they stopped producing slime. And I was like, no.

Yeah, you do have to do quite a lot of boiling to get rid of the slime. I read vinegar helps. I think with slugs as well versus snails. Slugs, you need to remove the guts. And sometimes they have an internal shell, whereas snails, you can just eat the whole thing. Wait, slugs have an internal shell?

Some of them, yeah. What's the point of an internal? shell, the point of the shell is to protect you from things. What's it protecting you from? Your own self. Well, that's what all these creatures with exoskeletons are saying to your human beings. What's the point of having an internal skeleton?

That's true. But that's why slugs are slimy, because they don't have that external snail shell, right? That's the snails protection. The slugs protection is like slime, basically. So I think people prefer snails because they don't have all that slime you have to get rid of. Well, they have some slime, but less slime.

But I was reading about the annual slug festival that took place through the 1980s in a town near Russian River, California, because they had a lot of banana slugs, which are the cool yellow ones. This event, not only had a slug derby, i.e. slug race, and a sort of weigh-in for the thickest slug, but it had a slug-off cooking contest. Right. With dishes such as Sluggetti. Vodka martini with a twist of slug.

Chicken fried slug. Okay, yeah. Strawberry almond slug shortcake. Slug stuffed with sour cream. No. Citwan Slug Rolls. They won one year. Slug Wellington.

Right. And banana cream pie with a live banana slug on top. And while I found quite a lot of newspaper reports with the animal rights activists objecting to the Slug Festival as cruelty to slugs, I didn't see any about the judges dying from lungworm. Hmm. I mean, they would have covered it up, though, wouldn't they?

That would be the end of the Slug Festival. Big Slug covered it up. Here's another question of food. from Zoran from Washington State who says I'm an American and have lived here my whole life I have never been to a cheesecake factory

inconceivable I never have been to one either but I haven't lived in America my whole life Zoran says something I've always heard is that they have a huge menu Oli answer me this what is the least and most ordered thing on Cheesecake Factory's huge menu

Well, leased is all the stuff they get rid of. They get rid of items that don't sell well and they change the menu twice a year. They have done so for 40 years. But what is the most ordered item ollie on their 250-something item menu? There are a lot of articles that are deep dives into Cheesecake Factory Law.

So all the different articles list different dishes as being the most popular. The official data has not been released, but according to Vox. 200,000 times per month, people order the Fetuccini Alfredo. Really? Oh, wow. How boring.

I didn't even know that people went to Cheesecake Factory to eat sort of pasta and things like that. Yeah, everything, Martin, Mexican, Chinese, Japanese, Greek. It's all in one place with Egyptian columns and Californian palm trees. They sell like 38-ish types of cheesecake. So that's only like 15% of their menu. Yeah, it did all start with cheesecakes, though. The originator of the Cheesecake Factory, who is, uh, still their CEO, David Overton.

He's talked about having, quote, the taste buds of the common man. Boring. It's what they say about Benny Blanco, the music producer. If music passed the Benny test, then it is basic and mainstream enough to be a hit. He is the descendant of cheesecake entrepreneurs, proper mum and pop shop stuff.

Cheesecake Nepo, baby. They weren't in California originally. He moved to California and did like a business degree and then said to his mom and dad, come out to California, that's how to make the cheesecake business work. And he totally like nailed it from like a cool joint in Beverly Hills they expanded and expanded. But everything about the way he put that business together is like the antithesis,

as you're suggesting in your questions, Zoran, of what you would do really to create a business you could roll out. I've watched enough Ramsey's Kitchen Nightmares to know. You wouldn't have in an ideal world a 21 page long menu with 250 unique items on it, all freshly prepared in store. You would not do that if you wanted to be a successful, franchise in the States. And yet, by bucking the rules, by doing his own thing, he seems to have managed it. They make more profit per cheesecake factory store than almost any other rolled out American restaurant. And they've survived some hard times as well, being rough times

for the restaurant industry and cheesecake factory prevails. I think it's partly because they started locating them in shopping malls. And if you're in a shopping mall, then you need an all-day menu, because some people come in at 3pm for coffee and cake, some people come in at 10 p.m. for cocktails. You've got lunch and dinner in between as well. So you just end up basically doing everything. I think that a 21-page menu is ablest against people with ADHD. A lot of people even without ADHD were going to full decision paralysis when faced with what is essentially a novella of food items. I'm a bit like that. So, okay, so I love the cheesecake factory. It is an absolute dead set stop-off on every trip I've ever done to the United States. It's the sort

of US version of Pizza Express. Right. It is as upscale a casual experience as you can, you can get. It's good value. It's fun. It's predictable. It's tasty. But I do do that thing of like limiting myself to choosing something from the first four entries on each page because otherwise, indeed. It's just you need a PhD to finish the menu. Is that why Alfredo is the most ordered item because the menu's alphabeticised? I wouldn't be surprised. The long menu is part of their brand values for a couple of reasons. One is I think that actually you can't really patent cheesecakes. The actual recipe he was shilling was from the 1940s in the first place. There's only five ingredients in it. Cheese, cake, what are the other three? Exactly. How do you make it your

cheesecake? And one of those things is just like putting ridiculous amounts of options onto it and that being the thing that you've done. The other thing is that in the original branch of the cheesecake factory apparently, they had a bloke come around selling menus with ads in. So he was like, don't pay for your menus to be printed anymore. I'll pay for your menus to be printed in return for you letting me sell advertising space in your menus. And they took him up on it. And that became the kind of tradition of the cheesecake factory menu so that even now, although they now obviously own and operate their own menus, they put ads in the menu for cheesecakes. So as you're flicking through the salads, you're getting an ad for the very berry, cherry, whatever. So it's not like

ads for a local tire changing shop or something. It is ads for product. In which case, it's not really adds, it's more like highlighting cheesecakes. Now, but originally it was indeed, go and visit the guy down the road to fix your rubbers on your car, yeah. It's like when you get an advert in an old novel, like at the back, whatever they paid for that, the fact that it's still there 100 years in is a very good CPM. Cheascake Factory makes such a big deal out of how everything is cooked there from scratch, which is incredibly unusual for such a huge menu. Yeah. And it is all freshly made, apart from, ironically, the cheesecakes, which was ironically, and they literally are made in a factory, frozen and then thawed.

Really? I suppose the clues in the name. There's a place in Vancouver, which is called Cheesecake, Etcetera. And it is one of the only places in Vancouver I have found that has the vibes of a pub in Britain, you know, the gloom, the dark wood tables, the dark paintwork on the walls, the late nightness because cheesecake, et cetera, is only open in a city that goes to bed pretty early from 7pm to 1 a.m. every night. Oh, right. Okay. It's huge as well. It's kind of rambling. And I thought, how on earth can this huge place that sells three kinds of cheesecake

exist in such an expensive city as Vancouver? And it was founded in 1979 by a couple who were touring jazz musicians, who were sick of performing in places. where people were drunk and smoking. So they set up a sober jazz bar that sells cheesecake and teas. I mean, it's the only thing that makes jazz bearable for me is that I'm drinking at the same time. The idea that someone would make me eat repeated amounts of cheesecake

to sit there to make it bearable would be hard. I don't even like cheesecake, but I like cheesecake, etc. I just go there for the vibes. A question of bulls now from Neelan from Cape Town, South Africa, who says, I recently found myself in a strange predicament. In November last year I bought my husband a set of bool

as per his Christmas list as expected he hasn't taken them out of the bag yet What I did not expect was that the online retailer would accidentally send me three of the same set of bull complete with their own bags Oh now you can play mega boole It's a bull fest

They cost a pretty penny each It's not my place to judge hobbies But the word daylight robbery has come to mind I contacted the retailer in November when I got the extra sets and they asked me whether they should pick them up at the same address

but this was November and it was a crazy time in my life and I never replied Mayor Culper. I recently started organising and throwing out stuff and realised I still have these two unused

and unopened extra sets of bulls three if you count my husband's set. From the moment I rediscovered them it's been like suddenly discovering a crack in the wall you can't ignore I mailed the retailer

but they haven't replied to repeated requests. Okay, you've tried. So Helen answered me this. What do I do with these two extra sets of bull? I don't want to resell them because that feels unethical. And I don't want to use them or see them because they irritate the crap out of me. Don't chuck them out the window.

That could really hurt someone. You could wrap them up and give them to your husband for his birthday and next Christmas. See if he notices, yeah, absolutely. He might think it's the same bull set this has been re-packing. Yeah, but that might give him an excuse. used to open up the old bull just to check, least they'll have touched them.

Start a Bulls Club. I was thinking host a Bulls tournament. Yeah. And give the money to charity if you're worried about the unethical nature of monetising your bull. Yeah, because I was just thinking, take them to a thrift shop

because if they're unopened and unused, that's great. Facebook Marketplace, where we live, you could just put them out on the street with a sign saying, free ball, and they'd be gone by morning. If not, gag gift. Who else do you know who might find Bull

a funny gift and then it's their problem? Or you could redecorate them in the style of ancient bull. What's that? Well, it's a game that comes from ancient Egypt and Greece and Rome. Oh. People who are into this sort of thing, I got a bit lost down a bullhole on the internet, do put like studded steel on them.

So they look almost like medieval weapons. That's the thing you can do if you want to. Bulls were made of wood in the Roman Empire. You can't really play bull if they're covered in studs, though. They're not going to roll. That's true. It's more of a decorative item for the true bull fanatic. It's actually a really beautiful amount of craft.

that goes into even a bog standard bull. I presume that maybe the ones that you're buying on the internet in South Africa are generic and made in China. But if they are made in France in the artisan way, you get a cylinder of steel, you bash it into a disc, then you bash the disc into a shell, then you join it to another shell, then solder them together. It's all quite a process.

That's why they're expensive. She's saying it's daylight robbery. It takes someone like an hour to make a set of bull. And you've just stuck them in a cupboard and say you can't bear to look at them. How much is the annoyance? at the husband for not appreciating the gift of bull and how much is the annoyance at the company for mistakenly sending triple bull?

I think it's better that they haven't responded and I think the people in the company think that too. Yeah, the postage on these is going to be more than the bool are worth. Exactly. It gets the point where they've made the commercial decision to write it off and you chasing it is going to make you unsatisfied as they're like, oh, you can't be in on Tuesday. Well, he can only come on Tuesday.

Do you want to mean? It's gone forever. They've decided to just let you keep them, I think, is probably the case. It is annoying when someone asked for a gift and then never uses it. I remember when it was my dad's 60th birthday and we got him a day of racing at Brandt's Hatch and he sulked all through his birthday dinner, go, I wanted a hammer drill. So then my mum got him a hammer drill and he never used it. Did he go racing at Brown's Hatch? Yeah, and he enjoyed it because he used to love driving fast.

I know that Nielin is currently irritated by these bull, but what if Nielin took up bull and became a keen boolist? If Nielin's a woman, there are very few female bull players. So actually, you know, you could be making your mark internationally very quickly. Well, that's exciting. I wonder if you could use the bull to create your own garden game that isn't bull. You know, create a new game. Lawn snooker.

Exactly. Or giant pinball. There we go. Turn your garden into a pinball. That sounds dangerous. That sounds very dangerous. I got a question. Email your question.

Answer me this podcast at Googlemail.com. Answer me this podcast at Googlemail.com. Answer me this podcast at Googlemail.com. Answer me this podcast at Googlemail.com. Here's a question from Erica, who says, I'm so glad you guys are back. We're glad you wrote to us, Erica. Absolutely.

It's mutual. I started listening when you started the show, and I had just moved to England to do my master's degree. Three career changes and two cross-continent moves later, and I'm happy I can still tune in. You're not that older decrepit, I'm happy my fingers still work on my smartphone. I've popped out two kiddos of my own, now seven and nine years old. Congratulations and also welcome to the less hard bit. The fun era.

I'm finding it more fun than the under five bit, certainly. It's in between the high dependency and then the teens. It's between I need you and I fucking hate you. Erica says, my kids have their friends over to our house to play pretty often, and our home decor has started some conversations. My partner and I have always liked weird stuff and have a lot of random art and found objects in pride of place. Things like a butt mannequin, we spray painted sparkly purple and use as a plant pot,

a set of candles in the shape of naked ladies, coffee table erotica art books, swear word cross-stitch, etc. She's attached some photographs, it is indeed. a sprayed silver butt mannequin and some swear words spelled out in cross-stitch. Yeah, an elaborate embroidery of the word fuck. Very nice. Yes. Olly, answer me this. Am I supposed to put all this away before the under 10s come round?

We're pretty maximalist in our day court, so there's quite a bit. And we've got a smallish house without many places to put it. My general premise with my own kids is butts and swear words are funny. They are funny. And I'd rather be open with them about questions. then have things be secret and feel shameful. But I recognise I don't get to make those decisions for other people's kids. I've never had another parent saying thing to me,

but my kids' friends will point and laugh or whisper about stuff and I can hear them. Do I just laugh and say, yeah, we think butts are funny too? Or am I supposed to be a better grown-up than this now that other people trust me to have their kids at my house? Olly, I think that you are very well placed to opine about this as someone who up around unusual decor and now has children. Yes, as a child, as you, I mean, I didn't even realize how many clowns we had in the house until you came round, and I was 19 then. It was amazing.

You really hadn't seen that your house was strewn with clowns. Infested. Yeah. No, I mean, I knew it, but until you pointed out to me, it was like, okay, no, that is, that weird thing is clowns, but also that weird thing upstairs is also clowns. Clowns, clowns, clowns. But even leaving aside the clowns, the clowns, My parents had a wacky sense of humour and an open sexuality.

My mother had a selection of lubricants on display in the hallway when I was growing up. On display? Or just left there for convenience? Somewhere in between, I suspect. Cool. I think it makes you a stronger character having to defend your parents' daycare choices. In general, I would say, don't cover up, don't put it away. It's your house. It's your taste. There are limits.

I mean, it's interesting. don't think your embroidery spelling out fuck is a problem, even with a nine-year-old. I think if it was cunt, I'd consider whether you should put that on your mantelpiece, but I'd consider the reason is not because children will parrot it back and say, what's that, but because so many people are offended by that word anyway. Yeah, especially in America, in North America, that's not, doesn't fly. You probably wouldn't want to offend everyone who comes in your house or have a good chance of doing that anyway. It's just too much effort, really. Exactly. So I think within those usual constraints, equally it's interesting, isn't it? I think the butt mannequin is fine because it's both

funny and potentially sexual. And it's facing the wall. So if it does have a graphic penis and balls, you can't see it. Again, I don't know why I'm drawing the line in this place, but I think if it had a stiffy, that would probably be inappropriate for children as well. Your mum made that coffee table, which was a sort of kneeling figure with a detachable stiffy and also their body sort of turned into a giant penis end. That's right, yes. It also had a finger on its house. So it was being fingered by a partner. You could see the detached hand of a partner up its rectum. What did your friends make of things like that? Or were they just so used to what was involved in coming to Olly Man's house? So that particular effort was kept in a separate room that

my friends didn't go into, although the mould that she'd sculpted it from was in the shed that I'd sometimes play in as a teenager, and obviously that was hilarious. But I was 15 by then, so that was okay. But there was a sort of test case before all that explicitness, sculpture-wise, which was, I don't know if you ever saw this, but in my parents' living room until about, I think 1998, but I imagine it was still around the house somewhere when you came round.

They had a coffee table, which was a sculpture of a naked man. Did you ever see that? I don't remember. So you used the word coffee table to describe what my mum built. My mum built was more like a side table, an occasional table with the stiffy, right?

Oh, sorry. But this was the actual coffee table in the middle of the sitting room. So it wasn't a sexy thing. The sculpture was called self-portrait in bath or something. And it was a bald, middle-aged, thin, wily looking man who was the sculptor who had built the thing. Right. And so the water level was the sheet of glass that was the coffee table. And his knees were poking over the glass and his head was poking over the glass

with his kind of his mouth under where the glass was where the water level would be. But obviously because it was glass and it didn't have an edge around it, you could look down and see all his bits. But it's like having a man in your living room that you happen to put cuts on. Yes, exactly. and I grew up with that as our coffee table and when I was training for my bimitsvah which involved weekly sessions with the rabbi coming round my parents decided that the way to deal with the coffee table with this exposed uncircumcised man in the middle of our sitting room

was to take a cushion off the couch and cover his genitals which was so much worse could you not have put a little pants on him exactly that would have been better putting the cushion was just so obviously temporary and obviously done to spare imaginary blushes that this supposedly conservative man would have

at seeing the original offending object and yet he knows what a penis is that would be so much more straightforward to be like oh yeah that's a piece of art it's a piece of modern art we know the sculptor than to be like we've covered his genitals because the rabbi's coming around but anyway I had to navigate that

and I'm fine it doesn't sound like you are you're fine you're just scared of coffee tables now but you're fine so yes I would say just leave everything out like I say I do think as well by the time nine year olds can spell fuck they can deal with it

like Harvey's watching Clarkson's farm at the moment and that's full of F words but it's counterbalanced by the fact he learns a lot about farming and he's into it and he knows not to say it himself it's fine that's the thing in Martins and my current live illusionist show there is quite a bit that includes the cunt word

it's all educational and historical and stuff and friends have brought their kids to it like 9-10-year-olds and the kids are a bit like he-he and it's not like they've never encountered the word before but they don't say it so I think kids are quite good at self-censoring but I wonder what Erica has heard the friends kids say because I feel like a lot of kids would be kind of excited that someone has cool parents with interesting taste and also that they do get to snigger at something butt-shaped but not in a negative way they're not like oh god I can't believe how disgusting this is they're probably like oh how outrageous

I've not encountered this before I think they probably just think I mean, even just from the photos you've sent us, you have a wide use of colour, as you say, maximalist style. I'm not even sure that they'd notice the stuff that you think is particularly utre per se. It's nice that you're like, here is a butt and bodies aren't a source of shame. They're just facts. We've all got a butt. But also little kids, like younger than the seven and nine-year-olds that Erica has, are very anatomy curious. So it's not a mystery. At some point, your children are going to encounter this kind of thing. If my children came home from someone's house and said, my friend's got a sculpture of a part in their sitting room. I'd be like,

oh, well, that's a learning moment. Everyone has different tastes. That's, you know, they like that. It's funny. Or they think it's, you know, artistically interesting. I think that's all right. Although that said, I was driving Toby, the younger one, the five-year-old home the other day from Cubs with Harvey. And Harvey, he's now nine, said, Dad, Dad, at school today, it's really bad. It's really bad. Someone called me the C word. And I was like, okay, yeah, that is really bad. Can we talk about it when Toby's out the car, please, because I don't want to talk about it if it's all right. And he goes, no, no, but it's all right. I know what it is. I was like, yeah, can you just, can you just save that conversation? Just wait until Toby goes to bed and then we'll

discuss it. And then he couldn't wait to have this scandalous conversation with me. And then when Toby finally left the car. And I was like, what happened? What happened at school to make someone say that to you? He said, well, you know, Blake stole my toy and the teacher got involved. And, you know, Bailey turned to me and he said, you are. And then he used the C word. And I was like, what did he call you? He goes, you are a piece. of crap. I laughed so hard. Oh yeah, that is the C word.

Yeah, that's bad. Oh dear, way, he shouldn't have done that. Intent is important because if he said Harvey, you're serving cunt, that would have been complimentary. Yeah. I retired at 30. I live on a beach. I'm a little bit bored, but passive income's a peach.

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Here's a question from Katie, who is 38 years old and 29 weeks pregnant and from St. Ives, Cambridge, Shear, not the other ones. She says, lots of towns and cities have large painted animals. for people to see and find, such as giraffes, cows, hairs, etc. They're often decorated by local groups and then get auctioned off for charity. Helen answered me this, what was the first one of these trails, and where was it? It was cows, it was Zurich, it was in 1998. These sound like the lyrics to a Eurovision song. The cow sculptor is named Pascal Knapp,

and his father was an art director called Walter Knapp, and this was his idea. Pascal Knapp said, my father called and asked me, can you make me a cow? I said, sure. So then he called a veterinarian and a taxidermist to help him make sure that he had properly depicted a cow, but also decided to sanitise some parts of cow anatomy. For instance, these cows have extra wide tails, presumably to conceal their a-holes. I do do a lot of these trails with my children, and cow a-holes have not formed part of it.

I'd never really thought about it before. I've seen others. I've seen others you can squeeze and get water from, but not AOL. Oh, that's cool. Walter had the idea because in 1986, lions, which are a symbol of Zurich, were placed all around the city. I think they were decorated as well. And he was like, why not cows? Switzerland loves cow. And so they had 812 fiberglass life-sized cows decorated by different artists, boosted tourism by 1.5 million extra visitors that year. But just to stop you there, if there were lions the year before, why is the answer not lions? Like what was different about what he did that made his the first one?

They'd already put lions around everywhere. Yeah, great question. It was really hard to find pictures of those lions as well. I mean, to answer it myself, I imagine that the lions wasn't this kind of idea where different artists do different versions of the lion. Yes. I mean, that's what I like about it for my children.

And I think generally for the public at large, it's for most people the only art they engage with. Public art is cool and often it is rare. Yeah. And this is also a way for not only the cow to be an object of art, but also local artists to get some exposure. And then also there's money raised for charity because they auction off the cows.

But what happened was that year of the original cows, Chicago businessman Peter Hannig happened to be in Zurich. Was so inspired by the cows that he decided to call it cow parade and put it on in Chicago the following year. Oh, home of the balls. Oh, my God. Weird to have a cow parade. So true.

After which it exploded in popularity and appeared in many more cities and different creatures ensued, but the credit was taken away from the NAPS, as it has been taken away from the original Lions, because the Cow Parade official site says, cow parade events have been staged in over 100 cities worldwide since our inaugural event in 1999 Cow Parade Chicago.

Well, they've got the website, haven't they? They do. Anyway, there's a cow parade happening in Mexico City this year. And other creatures in the spinoffs have included elephants, bees, dolphins, teddy bears, the London 2012 Olympic mascots. Oh, those were weird. Oh, yeah.

Wenlock and Manville. They were odd. Not a fan. They were sort of phallic and yet not sexy, weren't they? Like deeply unsexy and yet that shape. Not every phallic shape is sexy, Olly. No, well, that's what we learned.

Get used to it. Some of us already knew that. Stephen in Yorkshire here. Helen and Olly, answer me this. I've been using Spotify for quite a few years now, as have we all, and increasingly it seems evident that, and I'm not going to get into the details of it, but the way that their functionality is set up and the lack of customizable settings, etc.

They seem to make life more difficult than it should be to listen to albums. So they don't have album shuffle, for instance, or you have to go through like three processes to save albums and have them downloaded and have them in your liked songs, whereas they make things very easy when it comes to playlists. So answer me this, why do they make life so difficult for albums and what is in it for Spotify to incentivise people to use playlists instead? In shittification, in a word. Yeah, you make it sound like it's intentional, Stephen,

but often it's because they don't give a shit about you. Sorry. They don't care. They don't care if it's a worse experience for you so long as you continue to subscribe and you carry on using it anyway. Yeah, as long as Daniel Lack has got all his... money for spending on very bad things, then yeah, they don't care. They want you to use playlists rather than they don't want you to look at albums.

The reason they want you to use playlists is because they have data and they're a business that says even if you say you don't like it, you are more likely to continue streaming and listening when you're in a playlist than when you've listened to an album and then the album ends. And also, they have preferential deals with the record labels who want to promote certain artists through those playlists, which they can't do in the middle of an album. That's basically it. They don't care and it's slightly more profitable. God. Now I just want to lie down and stare at the wall. Well, whilst listening to any song ever released, I mean, I'm a fan of Spotify. I've been on it since 2012.

I think the ability to stream everything ever is extraordinary. But I am someone who used to like to discover albums. Like, we're all of that generation where we used to go to HMV or Virgin Megasaur or R Prize, wherever it was, spend what is now a month's subscription on Spotify on a CD and listen to it for a month. And I still, in the early days of Spotify, was doing that. I would be the person who'd go to the home page, go to the album chart, and then find something at 30 to 50 and try it. And now you just can't, it's really, he's right. It's really, really hard to do that. The thing that really annoys me is when you get into an artist, you can't listen to an artist. Even once you get to their album page, which is like six clicks away, you can't listen to the albums in chronological order, only reverse chronological order.

You have to listen to their most recent one first without making a playlist to do that, which is nuts, isn't it? I mean, that's such a basic... If they've only got three albums out, you'd want to start with the first one, wouldn't you? If you like them, then you're going back through the back catalogue. It's so weird you can't do that, but you can't. Well, you're not making me regret not using Spotify. What do you use for your music discovery?

Well, basically nothing. Since I stopped using Spotify a few years ago, because Daniel Eck was spending a huge amount of money to ruin podcasting for anyone who wasn't Spotify. And unfortunately, it means I'm not using very much, except for buying albums directly from the artist or bank camp, But then there's less discovery. I did use to like the Discovery playlist

and I found some of good bands. But no more because of Daniel Eck. I like it in a utilitarian way. I like that there is the thing of music whilst I'm working and music whilst I'm having a dinner party. But I also sometimes want music not to be a utilitarian moment. Right. I want it to be precious.

I want another human has thought about. Yeah. Yeah. You know, maybe we're going to get back to listening to live music radio, Wally. Maybe that is the conclusion. Well, actually, in all seriousness. So I like country, yeah. I don't know, it sounds ridiculous to American listeners.

You're like countries everywhere. It's not in the UK. It's growing, but it's still, you have to seek it out. I would rather listen to Bob Harris' country on BBC Sounds and listen to his radio two show with all the links and the stories and the curation than listen to a country playlist that is actually authentically out of Nashville on Spotify. Because it has that more human connection. I do that.

I do a lot of listening back to radio shows. That's what Spotify has driven us to. Back to the old ways. I can give you a hack, though, if you've got a Mac, if you can't be asked to go through the seven steps of trying to get an album, Stephen. Do Apple K when you're searching for something, then it gives you the results in the search bar.

So rather than then having to navigate a load of visual tiles, if you're like me and you're not a visual person, it gives you a list and you can quickly, it says album, single, playlist, quickly see what's the albums. It's a few fewer clicks. Apple K. Okay.

There you go. Thank you for changing lives. After my commute, when I find the time, always send a question to the question line inquiries are wanted as all part of the plan a la helen or holly or martin stone man Kate from Rhode Island USA says Olly answer me this podcast to Olly answer me this how does one become the owner of a cemetery?

Can one buy one outright? Or is there professional licensure and permits required? Is their gravekeeper university? In terms of official training, it extends to basically asking authorities for advice and then checking you're within the law. But there are sort of unions. In Britain, anyway,

there's the Federation of Burial and Cremation Authorities. There is the institution of cemetery and crematorium management. They do do a course in how to become a sexton. It's only in one day. to people what a sexton is? Person who digs graves. Grave digger, sexton. But also like maintains

the cemetery, so it goes a bit beyond just the digging. You can just get a labourer to be a digger, but a sexton is considered more of an art. And there's also the National Association of Memorial Masons. I presume the invite to their AGM is just a big slab of courts. So those are the three options for, in this country, places you can reach out to to say, I want to, like, own a cemetery, can you help me?

what do I do? What do I need to do to stay within the law? But in terms of, like, how do you just go about buying one? Can anyone do it? Yes, if you've got the money, there are two ways of buying it, just like any other property. One is as land that you want to read to develop into something else for which there are certain rules, of which more in a minute. The other is as an ongoing business. And I found one for sale right now. The Garden of Remembrance in Spring Garden Road, Longton, Stoke-on-Trent can be yours right now for 1.5 million pounds. Okay, what's the area? How many graves are we talking? You get 2.7 acres of established Garden of Remembrance slash cemetery slash burial ground. It points out on this commercial property

sales website. You get regular income from the existing family clients, but also with the increasing preference for cremations, this dramatically increases the future revenue potential of the business because you can cram in more of those crems, can't you? You don't need to just pile them all up in the ground in their full body state. Annual turnover of circa 300,000 pounds, it says, with ample room to improve. Improve. More people are going to die. Inevitably, more people will die. Yeah. I guess a lot of cemeteries are run by the local authority. So, you know, whoever owns municipal land in Rhode Island, or they are religious operations. So a private cemetery is not every cemetery, is it? That's right. And the Church of England, again, to return to

this country are quite picky about who they allow to continue using their churches. And in fact, the United Synagogue will not allow it. They say no, a place of burial is a consecrated holy site and always will be and it doesn't end. But while this hints at what I was saying before, there is the option to completely disregard the fact that it used to be bodies at all. You have to wait a minimum of 75 years. Oh. So 75 years after someone's been in the ground before you can do anything to their body. And even then, it has to be with the approval of the burial authorities and or the church. Because I was thinking about how in London

there are so many former cemeteries that now have other things on them. Like when we used to live in the flat in the church where aunts me this began. Of course, yes. The former cemetery behind it was a car park surrounded by houses. Yeah.

And our neighbour attributed that to why the people that lived in those houses were often quite fighty. I'm not sure I believe that, but I can believe, you know, there's a vibe. Do you know what I mean? I don't believe in paranormal stuff, but I do think if for centuries

it's been a graveyard and then you build something else completely on top of it, it might have a strange vibe. I can buy that. There's some bits of parks that you walk through. Remember one particularly in Greenwich where they've propped the gravestones up at the sides and then just made park where the bodies are? Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, well, so those ones obviously are more than 75 years old, right? So when you're looking through like medieval graves and stuff, yes. Okay. Fuck them. Exactly. But I find the 75 years. year limit. I'm sure there's a lot of paperwork to do it. I'm sure they normally say no,

but even so, the fact that it's only 75 years, that is in living memory, isn't it? Like, my children went to my grandmother's funeral. In 75 years' time, they'll probably still be alive. Seems weird that someone could dig her up and put something else there. Do you know what I mean? theoretically. Should be 175 years. Do you what I mean?

75 doesn't seem very long. It's weird that it's short than copyright. Yeah, exactly. The person who did the stone has probably got more rights than the person in it. Do you know about the Torajan people? of Indonesia. Not off the top of my head. So apparently every year they dig up

the bodies of their relatives and like dress them and give them cigarettes and things like that. I think that's quite nice. No, it's not nice, it's rank. I mean, they'll be covered in flies and worms and stuff. It's all right on year one. Year 10, I mean, come on.

Year 10, they're probably just skeletons, right? Give the persons of dignity. I don't know. Actually, I've not looked into the corpse decay aspect, but that's quite a nice form of sort of honoring the dead. I do feel like the corpse decay aspect is quite important, though. I do.

What I'm saying is like a few weeks is bad, right? But a year, maybe it's, you know, it's not. Oh, I see. So maybe after a year it's basically just a skeleton anyway. It's quite shriveled. I think there's still flesh, but it's like mummified. Maybe they bury them and prepare the bodies in such a way, knowing that they're going to dig them up against,

they'll dress them nicely and stuff. Exactly, yes. Yes, that's probably a bit less scary. Yeah. I grew up next to a churchyard. So I always felt quite respectful of that space, because that's how I was brought, like I'd walk through the grave.

all the time to go to and from the bus stop or whatever and like from the youngest age was told this is a graveyard I'd be respectful of that so for me like it was such a horrifying concept that you could reuse cemetery space when I was a kid I wrote a novel when I was 12 I only got like four pages four chapters in more of a novella then yeah well it didn't have beginning middle land it was just the beginning but I'd been highly inspired by reading both Stephen King's four seasons and Ben Elton's book stark you'll see the influence of both when I tell you the plot. And in my book, an evil CEO came up with a horrifying concept to me of building apartment blocks on cemeteries. Oh, so innocent what an evil thing a CEO could do. That felt to me like satire, like that you'd recycle dead people for commercial game. And then I learned, oh, that is actually what happens. That's why the English teacher was unmoved when I gave him my horror novel. I didn't understand that it was so scary. Imagine a world in which the ruling classes. Do not care if you live or die and then just spoil your corpses. If you want to buy a former graveyard and you're happy to abide by the laws that I was saying regarding, you know,

you're not allowed to take anyone up for 75 years, then there are still covenants usually in the property purchase. One that I found, for example, was a Coxall Baptist Church in Shropshire. That was put up for auction a few years ago at a guide price of 25,000 pounds. It was a bargain for an old church. Yeah. It was small. It was one of those like one room village church. is, but still, evocative structure, but that came with conditions, which would compel the owners to allow, quote, reasonable access to the cemetery and keep it in a good condition. So even though they were intending to turn it into studio flats or whatever, they had to allow new graves to be opened up for the handful of people who had already booked a plot there, and they had to

allow existing graves to be reopened for family members of those buried there. And you have to allow funeral services to take place at the time of burial, which could be, of course, basically any time, really. Okay. So it's a bit of an imposition on your garden party. You've got to basically treat the garden as an optional extra, haven't you? The garden is like an evocative Tim Burton-style entrance way to your house. But you don't own it.

It's probably the best way to think about it. It's like having sitting tenants who are very quiet. Yes, yeah. Well, that brings us to the death of this episode. Don't be sad. It had a good life. But for the next episode to live, we need your questions, which you can leave in the form of text or voice-ne.

note at the address listed on our website. Answer me this podcast.com. Also on the website, of course, links to our Patreon. Now, thank you everyone who joined us last week for Petty Problems, our Patreon exclusive live stream. If you're now like self-flagellating because you missed it, I understand. Don't do that. Don't hurt yourself. Don't do that. There's no need. It's not too late. You can catch up with last week's live stream and you can watch the first one as well. All you need to do is sign up and give us some money at patreon.com slash answer me this and then you can click collections and then petty problems

and they're both there as YouTube videos that you can stream whenever you want them. Well, isn't that nice? It's more than nice, isn't it? It's nice plus. Yeah, and what is nice plus plus is you supporting the show financially so we can afford to exist in this day and age. I very much appreciate that, yes. Yeah, and you

do. I bought myself some butt-shaped furniture in celebration. Doesn't come cheap, not available at IKEA. That's right. What else can people do? They can listen to our old stuff, answer me this store.com for that. And they can find us on the internet. Helen, what can they find of yours in August? Well, you can find The Illusionist at The Illusionist.org. If you are an aficionado of four-letter word decor, perhaps you would enjoy the Illusionist's four-letter word season about the F word, the C word, and then some words that

are not rude. Martin was just in an episode. In fact, debuting a new song about Poisoners' Plants. Yeah. Also, I'm soon to appear on a stage in Vancouver at Nerd Night on the 10th of September talking about Dracula, specifically big surprises in the Scandinavian translations thereof. I've linked tickets at the allusionist org slash events. What about you, Ollie, man? This may not be for everybody. Sometimes, in addition to my answer me this persona, I can be serious and talk about the news. If that appeals to you, then you should know that I, if you happen to be listening to this in the week it comes out, this weekend I'm going to be hosting drive time on Times Radio.

That's 4 to 7pm on Times Radio this Saturday and Sunday. And also in a similar vein, I have a news podcast, The Week Unwrapped. It is the official podcast of The Week magazine. And every week it's me and the journalist from the week, Harriet Marsden, Jamie Timpson and Felicity Kipon, unearthing three stories from the week's news that you may have missed. You can find the link to that and all of my shows at Ollyman.com. What I've been up to? What have you been up to?

What have I been up to? What have you been up to? What have I been up to? I've been doing little Beatles videos. I've been making covers of Beatles songs from my friend Jim because I don't text them often enough and I've been putting them on Instagram. What's been your favourite so far?

Oh, I mean, I'm covering them in chronological order because there's so many Beatles songs. Of course you are. So you're still on the Juvenile now? Well, Please Please Please Me. Their first record slaps. It's really, really good. The song Please Please Please Me is great,

and there's a bunch of other great tracks. their version of Taste of Honey is really great. Oh, the Beatles have got some good songs, have they? I know. I don't know if you know, but Lennon and McCartney are actually quite good songwriters. It's news to you, Martin. I know that you've resisted it for a long time. They were like 12 or something. They were good. Well, they were. They were, weren't they? I think 14 and 17 when they started right. Yeah, so that album is probably when they're in the late teens. It's great.

I'm actually, I'm going to read on holiday John and Paula Love Story. I've got one chapter in. It's good. When I've read it, I'll say more things about that to you in real life. In Ollie Mounds book club. Well, why listen to the Beatles original album Please Please Me when you can go on my Instagram At Martin Oldswick And your friend, Jim, while appreciative, I think still doesn't understand why any of this has happened

And nor do I Oh, it's because middle-aged white men Would literally rather cover the whole of the first Beatles album In order to communicate with their friend Rather than go to therapy Great, well, that all sounds very wholesome We'll be back on the last Thursday of September That's the 25th market in your diaries now

And have a wonderful month Bye!