Monkey has been busy answering the first few questions to the all-new and refurbished Ask Monkey service. Here he gives answers to some pressing questions:

Sociable Monk
Patience Ann asks:

Actually, Mister Gorilla has a question. He wants to know if you would like to hang out sometime. He says to give him a ring on the bananaphone if you would?

Monkey answers:

Ice like the Olympics
Metalouise asks:

Dear Monkey, are you watching the Olympics? If so, what is your favourite event?

Monkey answers: Ooh, yes! I am watching as much Olympic coverage as I can find spread across the various channels. I sit and watch the ice-skating with Mimi, as that’s her favourite event, but I really like the ski-jumping myself. Sometimes I like to slide down one of Mimi’s outstretched legs and leap off of her foot for practice, but that has almost ended up with me breaking a leg, and has already been the cause of a spilled glass of Orangina, so it’s been suggested that I have a go at the more sedate sport of curling, and get practising on the kitchen floor. Hold on a second!

Regular bananas
Paddington Bumblewax (I believe this may be an alias) asks:

See how bananas are full of fibre & fibre makes you poo, how come they can constipate you?

Monkey answers: Bananas are a very healthy and tasty treat for most people, and they do indeed contain good levels of fibre to keep your tummy healthy and happy. Indeed, it is believed that bananas serve as a good treatment for constipation. But as you probably know, bananas ripen in the home quite quickly, and it is believed that this is the key to how bananas affect digestion.

As a banana ripens, the high levels of fibre in the banana can help lead to a healthy tummy environment. An enzyme that stops ripening bananas from fermenting is also believed to help with your, erm, ‘movements’.

Unripe bananas, however, are high in starch (which later turns to sugar as the banana ripens, hence the sweetening of the banana as it turns from slightly green to bright yellow) and this is thought to be the cause of constipation.

You should eat bananas when they are nicely ripened, anyway, because that is when they are at their sweetest. Nom nom nom.

A long time ago, on my old site, I used to have a section called ‘Ask Monkey’, where people would fill in a web form and ask me questions about everything from sea-monsters to peanut butter, but a while ago the form stopped working and I couldn’t fix it, and so there were no more questions for me and my monkey-chums to research and report back to people with.

Well, Ask Monkey is back! and we have a new working form and everything! So, if you want to know if an Aardvark can sit in an armchair, or discover the aerodynamic properties of the average geography textbook, my team of monkeys and I will get researching, experimenting and otherwise getting to the bottom of all the things that make you go ‘hmmmmm?’.

You can Ask Monkey using this simple and quick to fill out web form, so drop me and my monkey-chums a line, and we’ll get our brains working on the matter as soon as we can.

Now that the first few questions have been sent, Monkey Answers! is online.

Monkey, cardigan'd up and ready for action.

Hello there, friends of monkeys everywhere.

World of Monkey is six years old now, and the internet has changed a lot since the first time I fired up the old steam-powered monkey laptop and started this website, and to be honest things have moved on since the days when my new learn-as-you-go approach to basic HTML could make this site look OK.  Well, OK-ish.  So, welcome to the brand new, completely refurbished, World of Monkey.

As you can see, there are a few tweaks that need to be made, but hopefully the new interface will mean that I can update the site much more frequently now, because I have to admit that I have been neglecting it for a while, as it became so difficult to navigate and organise, and so now there will be much more opportunity for all friends of Monkey to comment and join in.

Ask Monkey, Friends of Monkey and all of the other interactive Monkey fun will be back as me and my Monkey chums fill the site with new content.  In the meantime, why not add us to your bookmarks, or grab the snazzy RSS feed to keep up to date with what is happening in the World of Monkey.