The Instagram magnifying glass knew too much
Chris had been trying to show Scott something on Instagram when he accidentally opened the Explore page.
The grid immediately exposed the kind of content Instagram thought he wanted to see.
Chris’s page leaned towards football and women.
Scott’s was very different.
There were a remarkable number of fit, shirtless men.
Scott explained that he followed plenty of fitness accounts, so the algorithm had probably decided this was his main interest.
Even so, opening the Explore page beside a partner, friend or parent suddenly felt slightly dangerous.
The feature asked listeners to look at their own grids and report what Instagram appeared to think they were.
One straight listener discovered his Explore page suggested he was a gay airline pilot who loved cats.
The algorithm had apparently reached a very confident conclusion from very incomplete evidence.
Armpit-fart ability became an age test
The previous day’s discussion returned with callers actually demonstrating the skill.
One 26-year-old had never deliberately learned to do it but discovered her armpit could produce the noise accidentally.
A 24-year-old then supplied an impressively loud example live on air.
Scott and Chris took this as further evidence for the completely unscientific theory that the younger the person, the more powerful the armpit fart.
The main difficulty was performance pressure.
Several callers found that the moment they were asked to do it on national radio, the armpit suddenly refused to cooperate.
Young people with old names came forward
The show had also heard from 22-year-old Enid.
That prompted a search for young listeners with names everybody instinctively associated with much older generations.
First came Albert, aged 27.
Scott immediately imagined an elderly pub landlord.
Albert explained he had been named partly after family members and partly after Albert Einstein.
Then came Mary Elizabeth, aged 25, whose double-barrelled old-fashioned sound made Scott think of royalty and wartime Britain.
And then Sidney, a 24-year-old lorry driver.
Chris loved the fact that Sidney could almost be the name of the lorry itself.
The callers were perfectly happy with their names.
The show was the one struggling to update its assumptions.
Blow Your Own Trumpet kept celebrating tiny wins
Tuesday meant listeners could once again blow their own trumpets.
Achievements ranged from business successes to tasks which would sound insignificant to anybody else.
That was exactly why the feature existed.
In 2020, getting through something small could deserve a full brass fanfare.
Don’t Look It Up turned phone noises into quiz material
The quiz included familiar notification sounds.
Scott and Chris had to identify apps and services from the little noises phones make all day.
It was a neat test of how deeply those sounds had entered everyday life.
People might not know the formal name of a notification tone, but the brain often recognised it instantly.
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