Answer Me This! AMT415: BLTs, Zambonis and the Wingdings Conspiracy
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Feb 26, 2026 They explain what Zambonis actually do on hockey rinks and why they steer from the back. The Scots origins of Wee Willie Winkie get traced alongside clown lore and the clown egg registry. The Wingdings font and conspiracy myths around it are explored. Ring-necked parakeets in London and myths about Jimi Hendrix are discussed. The history of the BLT initialism and reassuring a partner about kidney donation are covered.
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What A Zamboni Actually Does
- A Zamboni resurfaces and smooths the rink by removing skate-cut ice and laying a clean layer of water that refreezes into smooth ice.
- Helen describes the machine shaving the top layer, sucking up snow-like scrapings, and spraying fresh water between periods so play can continue.
Why Wingdings Existed Not As Code But As Icons
- Wingdings is a Windows dingbat font created to embed scalable pictograms in early software, not to encode secret messages.
- Olly explains dingbat fonts predate computers and Wingdings packaged icons into fonts so users could insert images without large files.
How Wingdings Fueled Conspiracy Pattern‑Finding
- Conspiracy theories about Wingdings arose because people treated a pictogram font as a secret language and reverse-engineered meanings from letter sequences.
- Olly recounts NYC and Q33NY examples where random symbol matches produced alleged anti-Semitic or 9/11 messages that spread in chain emails.