We live so fast I can't even finish this sent... Call me an idiot* but I have no idea what you are talking about, why you're saying it or indeed what's going on any more. Oh, and welcome to the Year 51-85-139. Do you know what I'm talking about? No? Then you know exactly what I'm talking about. Worried that my weekly outbursts of cynicism here might simply betray a …
At first, upon reading that sentence, I thought "what the hell is that ?". When finished with the article (nice rant btw, great start to the New Year there), I searched for it, and found that it is yet another way to get valuable aid to poor countries. No way you can complain about it in this era of enforced political correctness.
However, there are already several high-profile aid organisms working in poor countries and funneling masses of money and effort to help out, so why is there a need of yet another organism which is much more obscure and whose reliability is not well established ? I am always wary of non-profits I've never heard about ; you have no idea what they're actually doing with the money nor how efficient they are in bringing the aid they say they bring. I'd want to see other photos of twinned toilets to control that they're not sending the same picture to every company that forks over the money.
There are indeed lots of high-profile aid organisms [sic] but they tend to come with CEOs with high-profile pay packets so I steer away from them and work directly with local people where I can, avoiding any expensive overheads.
I'm sure the toilet-twinning bunch are good folk but if you are still basking in the post-Christmas glow of goodwill and generosity, could I point you towards here - http://kitegacc.org/. I am personally connected with this fine organisation and can vouch for their work.
Oh, and they build toilets, too.
It seems legit, I've used them a few times...they've been around for more than a few years as well.
But...there is a disclaimer that the toilet in the photograph is not the exact one you're sponsoring. Not only is it not cost-efficient for them to go round photographing every single toilet in Africa, but it also gives them the freedom to pool resources if it is decided that it's more economical to build a public multi-user facility in the village...or it's possible that the toilet you're paying for is going to be BUILT using your funds, so obviously there's no photograph yet.
It does seem like a worthwhile cause, given how bad sanitation is one of the deadliest problems, yet one of the easiest to fix.
It's also not that obscure. They frequently advertise in service stations up and down the country, and have been for a long time.
Not only is it not cost-efficient for them to go round photographing every single toilet in Africa
Dunno, my pal Quentin --- well, acquaintance, really -- was in charge of a scheme to twin public toilets [ men's only ] between London & Home Counties and Newcastle and mining villages, to encourage a warm brotherhood or something: so he spent a lot of time hanging around public lavatories in Hampstead or Blaydon with his little camera in his hand.
I really didn't know him very well.
In case anyone is interested, the good folk running Toilet Twinning used to be an independent charity, but to reduce overheads it is now run by www.Tearfund.org, one of the UK's largest Disaster Relief and Community Development charities. My loo is twinned with one in CAR.
And in case you want to know what 2020 is going to taste like, the official flavour is salt and vinegar.
The cult of fleeting change at an ever increasing rate has more than a little to do with the fact that not only is implementing a tech solution with something new and shiny much more exciting than using something perfectly adequate that's been aound for decades, it also allows people to blame the incompetent mess they produce on the fact that the technology's not yet "mature" and claim that all will be miraculous once all the magical new features arrive in the next version. After a few cycles of this, they decide to reimplement everything using a completely different new hype. This has the marvellous benefit of covering up the fact that the system would have been rubbish whatever was used to create it, and devalues the concept of experience in favour of the constant trend surfer.
> And in case you want to know what 2020 is going to taste like, the official flavour is salt and vinegar.
Why stop at "xxx of the year"? Let's further moronize this nonsense by asking "influencers" what they thing will be the xxx of 2021, and flood the web with sites like "We discovered what will be the xxx of 2021 and you will not believe your eyes!".
And let's do all that by June 2020.
-- Satan (aka the Satan of 2020)
It sounds like you poor heathens back in the Old Country have missed out on the veritable renaissance of crisps that we've been enjoying here in the colonies.
Here at my elbow is a bowl of hand-cooked, organic, beer-flavoured (Nelson hop) "Proper" crisps. As far beyond "kettle chips" as kettles themselves are beyond the cheap, oily experience that is Walkers'. And they're not the only domestic manufacturer of gourmet crisps - there's at least a couple more.
Re: "proper" crisps - my local branch of Aldi (cheap supermarket in the UK and other bits of Europe) were selling Guinness-flavoured crisps before Christmas. They were so good, I bought many packets (since Aldi tend to stop selling anything you want to buy fairly quickly), but now they have all gone. Now I feel 51-85-139...
Anyone remember ChipMonk\Munk crisps (Not seen them since the late 60's).
Golden Wonders flavors to bring back & properly, not tasting like half a dozen varients of acid.
Savoury Sausage
Sausage & Tomato
Icon because they go well with crisps.
the official flavour is cheese and onion
Ew! If you like eating something that tastes like satans jockstrap after a particularly vigourous burning (I imagine - I lack direct experience since satan is only a human imagination..) then feel free to eat cheese and onion crisps.
They probably wouldn't taste as bad if they actually tasted of cheese and onion. But they don't. They taste far, far, far worse.
Anyone that doesn't think that salt and vinegar is the One True Crisp Flavour (with the occasional nod to ready salted) is an evil unredeemed heretic and will burn in the bonfire of (crisp packet) vanities. So there!
(And I refuse to mention the utter abomination that is the cocktail made from 'shrimp'. Because even thinking about it imperils my utterly mortal soul.)
Only a Sith deals in absolutes. :-)
IMO there is no "best" crisp flavour, because different brands of crisps have flavours that I prefer that others do not.
Walkers: Worcester Sauce
McCoys: Bacon Sizzler
Highlander: Bacon and Brown Sauce
Hula Hoops: Chilli
Kettle Chips: Salt and Pepper
Sensations: Chicken and Thyme
Pringles: Salted
Back in NZ it's Sour cream and chive which I feel is a closer description of the trope. They are thickish crinkle cut as well and very moreish. Though the bags you can buy online here in the UK tend to be too well travelled and full of crumbs when you want something you can dip.
De rigeur in NZ is onion dip. Take one packet Maggi onion soup, add reduced cream and 1tsp vinegar, mix and refrigerate for at least an hour to firm up. Even if there are more sophisticated salsa type dips there will ALWAYS be an onion dip.
With all the fuss (from the idle commenterai) about the noughties, the teens and the relief of being in the twenties - a sensibly-named decade - I couldn't help but wonder that this is only a recent phenomenon.
What culture in history would be some disposability-obsessed as to name its decades?
Cultures where life changed sufficiently quickly that each decade could have a distinct identity. Just look at computers since the 50s along with a view on what a computer from that decade was like from a '90s child. At no other point in history has the rate of change been so great that each decade could be readily distinguished just by the tech you would see in people's houses.
50s - An analog world with only the daring looking at these new-fangled whajamacallems.
60s - An analog world with computers that are as small as a garage. Two computers occasionally talk to each other under laboratory conditions.
70s - Everything massively process driven is computerised: banks, ATC get their own software. It's very basic and would be polished to a mirror shine over the next 40 years. Computers have an opportunity to get chatty every now and then.
80s - Everything else starts taking a look at computers and realises that a computer that fits on a desk could make white-collar work so much better. Computers start getting chatty regularly.
90s - The internet starts. People get their own computers with this fancy new thing called a start menu.
00s - THE INTERNET really happens. The nerds have won.
10s - THE INTERNET gets populated by non-nerds and ruined by Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Amazon. Everything is awful.
The above being said, the scary thing is that the rate of advancement is increasing. It's possible that in the next 20 years or so we will have to break decades in half because the world of 2030 will be so different from the world of 2035 that you can't pin the decade down to one area.
Decades were always approximations. Depending on your priorities, the 80s, for instance, may have started anytime between 1979 (Thatcher's election) and 1983 (when The Smiths released Hand in Glove), and (again, depending how you want to count) may be said to have ended as early as 1989 (season 1 of The Simpsons).
It's just easier to say "the 60s" than "the intense counterculture and enthusiasm for civil rights and drug use that really only lasted about five years".
There were also the Roaring 20s - and the narrower "fin de siècle". Both times when things were changing. In 1890 Hollerith started the data punched card industry. The 1920s saw advances in motorcars, aeroplanes, radio, cinema, and uses of electricity.
The 1950s were the decade of the transistor - particularly transistor radios aiding the creation of "teenager" pop culture.
What culture in history would be some disposability-obsessed as to name its decades?
This is called "modernity". It's been around for about three to five centuries in European-based cultures, depending on what subculture you were in. It seems to me that it's a bit late to complain about it now, but if you'd like more material, there are a number of reactionary works available, such as All that is Solid Melts into Air.
Previously, of course, when things were a little less fast-paced, things were generally measured in reigns, as in "the Elizabethan era" or "Victorian times" (for the UK I suppose) or even (earlier) "during the reign of Ceasar Augustus".
It amounts to the same thing as naming the decades, just on a longer (normally) timescale.
M.
Even they would subdivide things. Early Victorian, mid Victorian, and late Victorian were all used when needed. The decade time unit is pretty useful because the average person will live through a small number of them, and their parents lived through two to four before they came around. If things are changing, the changes are noticeable across the decades when they wouldn't necessarily be as obvious from year to year. I couldn't say there were really obvious differences between 2014 and 2015 in many realms (except things like geopolitics where a boundary occurs whenever a crisis happens), but doing the same between the 2000s and 2010s is very easy.
"Early/mid/late Victorian" were periods invented well after the event. People in, e.g., the 1880s used to have a very clear idea of what they meant by "the 50s".
People like to wank on about the pace of change today, but Victorian Britain was arguably changing even faster. There's a huge difference between the London of 1850 and 1890 - much more so than from 1950 to 1990. It's the difference between a loose conurbation of small towns, and a single big city.
Politically, the period saw the invention of trade unions and socialism. Culturally, it's the distance from Emily Bronte and Lewis Carroll to Arthur Conan Doyle and JM Barrie. Militarily, it's the introduction of breech-loading rifles, machine guns, percussive shells that actually worked, ironclad steam warships. Homes went from candle and lamplight, through gas, to electric lights. Tap water became drinkable. First trains, then telegraph, then telephones. Heck, even cars were invented in the period.
Sure, times are changing now - but to say that the changes are bigger or faster than ever seen before is very doubtful.
And the official smell of 2020? I suspect it is going to be a combination of uncleared latrine and eucalyptus-fragranced wood smoke. This decade has already started off so horrendously with the bush fires in Australia so slapping a colour, smell or flavour to it is really is not going to make much difference AFAIK
It is the phrase "weekly outbursts of cynicism" draws my ire, not the term "idiot"
Whilst I am keenly aware that, at our age, a month passes the way a week used to, and also that we have had an abnormally frequent dose of Dabbsy lately, I would suggest the term "weekly" is applying an iota too much pressure to the envelope of the words meaning.
TFI Friday but next week will be hell, so I shall be looking forward to another little SftW,S next Friday.
ICON - raised to all those sods at work like me, and of course Dabbsy whose life is always a struggle, despite it also being a long holiday.
Was it perhaps the invasive non-native harlequin ladybird?
Thank you for providing a color patch for Pantone Classic Blue and telling me this is what it looks like. Unfortunately since my monitor has not been calibrated or certified to properly present the color space required, I can only imagine what Pantone Classic Blue actually looks like.
It's probably that stupid color that millennials *FEEL* should be the TEXT FOREGROUND on EVERY WEB SITE (with blinding white as the background, so it KILLS YOUR EYES).
(I think at least SOME of the links on this edit page also use that color - but then again the edit font is half the size of the one that shows up in the article and it's ALREADY hard enough to read, like I'm ALREADY being discouraged from commenting through the web page CSS, and color choice and font size are 2 of those factors)
And, WHO is it that picks these things FOR us anyway? Must be a bunch of idiots.
fortunately I've toned down the blue on my monitor, to preserve eyesight for another few years... and I can sort of distinguish the fuzzy/tiny text and hit 'preview' a few times to correct any spelling errors, where 'll' and 'lll' look kinda the same in the edit font...
Tom Cheesewright's High Frequency Change. The book tries to explain why idiots (ie, anyone who isn't a futurist) perceive modern tech business as being founded on the cult of fleeting unsustainability, and how to go about convincing oneself that it isn't.
Ahh, a book on self-delusion, got it.
On a trip to Kitega earlier this year (kitegacc.org, mentioned above) we were given a boat tour from Jinja on Lake Victoria. On this tour we visited a fishing village where the local catch seemed to be millions of tiny white fish, with the previous night's catch all laid out on the ground to dry before processing. The village and the villagers were extremely poor and the people lived in very primitive conditions, with little likelihood of indoor sanitation in their huts.
At the centre of the village was an open area, where stood their two major buildings. One one side was a quite splendid mosque, gifted by the Sultanate of Oman: on the other a sturdy toilet block, gifted by the fishermen of Iceland.
One is a secular state with a high standard of living for all, and 100% powered by renewable energy, the other a theocratic republic with high standards of living for only the very few, and fuelled entirely by oil and gas...
I certainly know which one I'd prefer to live in, even if it is dark there for three months of the year...
gifted by the Sultanate of Oman
Ah, an exercise in public Omanism.
(Sidebar: Why are people attracted to the use of "gift" as a verb? Does it really convey any useful connotation that "give" lacks, in any realistic context? It's always struck me as false elevation.)
""gift" as a verb is common in Scotland,"
Probably inherited from a Scandinavian language. The words "gift" and "give" seem to be a reasonable case of a language's evolutionary consonant shift.
In English one talks of a father "giving away the bride". In Swedish the root word "gift" leads to two meanings of "marriage" and "poison".
His own home was a boat in the harbour in Bristol, which is now (and has been for over two decades) a nightclub / gig venue, and is known as The Thekla.
... but I'm buggered if I can work out what the last infographic is trying to say. "This hill can give you a headache"? "Thinking about climbing this hill can make you sweaty"? "Our gardeners are really crap and havent gotten around to making the hill smooth yet"?
Come on someone help me out here!
> I'm buggered if I can work out what the last infographic is trying to say
Obviously it's a person angry to have been hit by a falling wheelchair person. You'd notice the ground line is the same as for the wheelchair picture. He's clearly at the bottom, insulting the people pushing wheelchairs over the cliff.
As for the middle one, it apparently says it's up to elderly couples to define the slope. Why else would the sign makers put the "x%" on the picture if not to signify that the slope is a variable?
Strange combination warning sign:
Top section: Wheelchair users careering down the hill should look out for sweaty men coming up.
Bottom section: Wipe the sweat out of your eyes and keep a look out for wheelchair users careering down.
Middle section: Old people are required to take a trigonometry test.
[Icon: Because X% might just be the Paris Hilton angle]
On a somewhat related note: here in Portugal there often is a profusion of road signs in urban areas, showing the direction to schools, social security centres and supermarkets. Part of this is due to the municipality receiving money from companies planting their sign, but the effect is that it is impossible to spot the sign you look for...
Hold on: Dabbsy was in a local public park on New Year's Day!
Is it because:
- he did not party on New Year's Eve?
- he did party too hard on New Year's Eve?
- he celebrated the New Year there?
- he slept there? Did Mrs. Dabbs turf him out of the house?
"there's no point worrying my idiotic but pretty little head about questions such as "why?"
Why you would use pretty to describe your dashing good looks when you would obviously be better described as the next Bond, James Bond?
Don't suppose you drink martini and like a bit of parkour?
It's not the why you should be asking but who? Who needs Daniel Craig. If Idris Elba doesn't want the job I propose our very own Dabbs, Alistair Dabs.
Or is it a plot by rogue freemasons to design a coat of arms replete with colour symbolism to revive the Knights Templar with the support of Vatican 2 agents, Agnes Nutter and Bigfoot? Are we being led annually towards an ultimate Pantone reference that lies beyond the spectrum of human visibility and whose first implementation in a CSS tag will trigger the awakening of the Old Ones?
Do you want to bet it is definitely not such an improbable plot? :-) That would energise an opposing competing interest for the generation and direction of capital flow and fiat churn to prime agents ..... which you might like to think be at least two Rare Raw Core Source Drivers Hosting and Toasting Success ..... with Future AIMissions Accomplished Excessively Financed ..... Overly Super Seeded.
The inexhaustible supply of cheap fiat money easily proves answers to where a great may faults reside ....... and if you aint spending it whenever you have more than anyone would ever need, are you to be considered something of a disgrace ....... as Andrew Carnegie was minded to pass fair comment on practically ages ago.
Put in very simple terms, which nearly anyone can understand although demonstrably not yet necessarily believe, ... the sort of system you are in, is paying the wrong type of people to spend Earth's treasure trove. ....... for there is more than Just Enough Flash Fast Cash to Crash and Burn and Rebuild Any Chosen Market/Public Utility/Private Facility/Parallel Pirate Operation always freely available for both Global and Universal Experimentation in the Nature of Existence with Command and Control in Sublime InterNetworking Streams with Ports of Call Everywhere just as easily placed elsewhere in spaces just like these here on El Reg.
That's AIPathFinder Work Hosting, El Reg. Bravo! To the Valiant Victor Deserved Vulcan Spoils :-)
And please, let's not be having any of those wildly speculative and assumptive presumptive "Are those meds not working" quips .... for they would be certainly misleading and ....according to Sister Agatha van Helsing, a very English trait/fault/root to boot ..........
Of course not. You are an English man. A combination of presumptions beyond compare
"Do you want to bet it is definitely not such an improbable plot?"
Yes. I am willing to bet the farm that is it not such an improbable plot. In fact, I am so absolutely certain, that I have done that very thing ... The alternative, assuming your scenario is anything close to reality, is to curl up and quit living due to the futility of it all. I'm not a quitter. Are you?
That's an interestingly engaging reply, jake, which has other alternatives for such a scenario in reality, ...... one where one simply belts up, as in safely secures oneself for flights of fancy in a living that makes maximum use of the utility .......... a Revolutionary Renegade Rogue Program and/or Almighty Pogrom ...... Grand Inquisition.
After all, it is not as if IT is not readily available virtually for free, practically anywhere for everyone to try and master.
Who Dares Win Wins .... and all that jazz, and such living is not for quitters and therefore quite possibly very probably right up your street too for self-actualisation and virtual realisation with, Novel Noble Explosive Force Source Partners, for it is universally accepted one cannot do such as miracles alone and unaided. That is why Heavenly Help is made Universally Available ... to prove to oneself one is not ever left alone in command and control following leads. I Kid U Not.
Dammit, Alistair...
Anyone to develop a CMYK monitor? Drop a PM please*
PM - a personal message. Not a Prime Minister.
Holmes by Vasily Livanov here. With at least one of ElReggers qualified to write a humble screenplay to blow some Thomases' minds away totally.
A secret sigil, displayed on your mobile device using the specified Pantone colour, opens the wormhole which connects the toilet you're in with its far-flung global twin. Really, why else and in what other circumstances could you plausibly display the latitude and longitude of a destination portal—to which you can travel in privacy, unseen?
Next time someone tells you they're going to the loo, you'll know why you didn't see them again for a week, when they turned up filthy, covered in leeches and suffering from malaria.
Of course, before taking a dump while reading this article on your phone, you may want to check the twinning status of your cubicle ....
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