Episode 196: The Annual Blocked and Reported Christmas Special with Helen Lewis

Returning champion Helen Lewis is back with our traditional Christmas quiz about the dumbest online events of the year. Plus: the Satanic Temple goes nuts.

“A Satanic Rebellion: Social justice collides with the Satanic Temple.”

“The Guggenheim’s Scapegoat”

“How Did America’s Weirdest, Most Freedom-obsessed State Fall For An Authoritarian Governor?”

https://www.theatlantic.com/author/helen-lewis/

twitter.com/HelenLewis

The quiz (answers here)

* In January, kickboxer Andrew Tate started an online beef with climate change elf Greta Thunberg. On what email address did she suggest that he contact her to tell her more about his 33 cars, including a Bugatti?

* suckmydick@biteme.com

* savethewhales@aol.com

* dressinggowntwat@housearrest.org

* smalldickenergy@getalife.com

* From which Covid-cautious journalist’s book on online life is this a real quote? “Building on the Digitour experiment, Magcon had reset the equation.”

* Susan Meachem wrote books including “Losing Him and Finding You,” “Chance Encounter,” and “Finding Faith.” Then what did she do for two years?

* Jack Monroe’s cookbook, Thrifty Kitchen, was branded dangerous because it suggested various questionable kitchen hacks. Which of these is NOT one of her suggestions:

* Glue a ring-pull to your handbag to secure your sunglasses

* Using the fluff from your navel to make firelighters

* using a frozen glass bottles filled with water as a rolling pin

* Using a large clean square of cotton to drain rice and pasta

* In 2021, Bennett Madison claimed to have written two dozen fake letters to Slate’s Dear Prudence advice column, written by Daniel Lavery. Which is NOT one of the letters Bennett claimed to have written?

* Help! My Friend Thinks I Am Stealing Vaccines From African-American Grandmothers To Attend Sex Resorts

* I Wonder If My Wife Likes Her Girlfriend More Than She Likes Me

* My Mother Is Trying To Convince the Guests At My Gay Wedding To Come Dressed As Disney Characters

* Help! My Husband Won’t Remove His Mask, Even For Sex!

* WHO AM I? I graduated from Kansas State University in 2011 with a Bachelor of Science degree in nuclear engineering and vocal music. I claim to have been subjected to conversion therapy as a child. I enjoyed brightly coloured clothing, sometimes of African origin.

* How much money was conservative personality Steven Crowder offered by the Daily Wire, an amount he described as a “slave contract”?

* In March, Jordan Peterson posted a clip with the caption: “Such fun in unbelievable techno-nightmare CCP hell.” What did it actually show?

* On Dylan Mulvaney’s 75th day of girlhood, she described her journey of adventure finding out about tampons. What topical phrase did she use to refer to a vagina?

* To which of your rival podcast hosts did Spotify’s Bill Simmons refer to this year as “f*****g grifters”?

* Thanks to a lawsuit, who was revealed this year to have texted a colleague about a video of a protester getting beaten up, saying: “It’s not how white men fight.”

* Which fox-bothering legal eagle told a journalist this year: “I identify with the great protesters in history, people like Gandhi and Martin Luther King.”

* “I’m done, I’m dead, you don’t understand, I do it to blow off steam,” a Penn State professor told cops in June this year after being arrested for bestiality with his dog. What breed was the dog?

* What is the name of the magazine I used to work for, which ran competing articles on “what is a woman,” which you pronounced wrong in your episode on the subject?

* Everyone was welcome at the Pink Peacock, a “a queer, yiddish, anarchist café & infoshop in glasgow’s southside” except two groups of people. Who were they?

* In 2009, under the pen name Richard Hoste, who wrote the following in the comments section of a blog: “What is interesting to me is whether there are a lot of high IQ people who simply CAN’T do manual labor. “As a teenager I tried working at a pizza place and MacDonalds [sic]. I was the worst employee there. I actually felt sympathy for low IQ kids, knowing that this is what they must’ve felt like in school.”

* What did the same pundit describe this year as the “trans of traffic”?

* In the glorious socialist future, what did leftie Malcolm Harris say would not be available to people in Columbus, Ohio?

* Here are four redacted tweets about a popular internet personality. To whom are they referring? You get more points the quicker you guess the right answer, starting at four points and dropping to one.

* “I have a theory that X scratches the same “my favorite bloviator” itch for a certain type of resistance liberal culture warrior as Rush Limbaugh did for a certain type of perpetually-affronted conservative”.

* “The only person I know blocks me is X and I only know that because he uses a burner account to check my tweets and complain about them and then when his idiot followers start tweeting at me I can’t see the original thread (until I go into my burner account lol)”.

* “the biggest thing I learned from this episode is that X has been HOLDING HIS MIC THIS WHOLE TIME???? this information makes me feel deranged”.

* “Thomas Hobbes died in 1679 and I would trust his medical opinions more than those of X.”

* In November, Bryan West, a 35-year-old from Arizona, secured perhaps the best/worst job in journalism. What was it?

* What solution did Yale professor Yusuke Narita propose to Japan’s ageing population?

* Which phrase did the AP warn this year was “dehumanising”, along with “the poor” and “the mentally ill” because it used “the” at the start?

* Which friend of the podcast and extremely reliable source for the SPLC once wrote to sex researcher Anne Lawrence “I readily admit to my own autogynephilia”?

* In December, the journalist Sarah Jeong wrote a piece for the Verge arguing that Twitter was a “harassment machine” which had tried to get her fired from the New York Times in 2018 for being “the reverse racist lady, the Asian who hates white people”. Which of these is not a real remark she made on Twitter?

* “Are white people genetically predisposed to burn faster in the sun, thus logically being only fit to live underground like groveling goblins?”

* “speak for yourself, i literally want to kill all the men literally”

* “d*****s f*****g white people marking up the internet with their opinions like dogs pissing on fire hydrants”

* “white people smell like unseasoned chicken and they don’t wash their legs in the shower”

* In November, the feminist website Jezebel, home of the seminal takedown “What’s Jesse Singal’s f*****g deal?” closed down for good. But which of these is NOT a real Jezebel headline by the intrepid writer who did that piece, Harron Walker?

* Mitch McConnell is A Big Poopy Head

* Remembering Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer, Who Died in 1818

* Just Gimme A F*****g Caesar Salad

* Jason Momoa Bad, Naked Mole Rat Queen Good

PRONUNCIATION BEE

Sommelier

Worcestershire

Loughborough

Caiomhe

Leah

Cornichon

Berkshire

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