@Alister
It worries me that you might have both saliva and blood traces in your underpants - not to mention a kidney!
It might be someone else's saliva? And those Farmers can be a real pain in the whatsit.
3782 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Oct 2010
Yep.
And, on This Morning next Monday, we'll be talking to an Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, who will be telling us of his plans to invade Russia. On Tuesday we'll be interviewing Mr Elwood P Dowd and his six-foot tall pet rabbit, Harvey. Then on Wednesday we will be speaking to the widow of an African dictator who has $62 million (SIXTY TWO MILLION US DOLARS) that she is trying to find a safe home for, and on Thursday our guest explains how he can cure cancer over the Internet on receipt of £1000.
I understand that the Soyuz at the ISS now needs to come home before its components rot, but couldn't they send another one up empty to replace it? There are several docking ports if I remember rightly, so send an empty Soyuz up as 'launch one' pending re-certification for manned launches, and bin the one that's starting to look a bit furry.
Or are they short of Soyuz capsules?
That would also require having people in the Civil Service capable of writing contracts that protect the interests of their employer.
I think a wider change is needed. So much incompetence and poor judgement in government is covered up because details cannot be published as they are "commercially confidential". These are contracts between the contractor and the public. All contracts, prices and terms for public sector work should be published. If they don't want light shone on their murky world, don't bid.
I've been told that the surname of "English" is most likely an Irishman, and the surname of "Irish" is most likely from England. Go figure.
Well, duh, obviously! How else would it work? Englishman moves to Ireland in the 17th century. Locals just call him John the Englishman. Centuries later his Irish descendants have contracted it to Sean English.
You get the same in Wales with people called Sais or Saes or Sayce. Ancestor was English. It would get very complicated if everyone in Hemel Hempstead was called English Dave or English Mary or English Jeff or even the occasional Bangladeshi Ranya.
The expression started when I used to add to the food bank basket in the supermarket every day at the end of my daily exercise walk. Now I do a weekly drop of agreed staples that benefit from buying in multiple packs.
We've gone a stage further - a group of people contribute cash, and our community shop then uses that to buy at wholesale prices in bulk from the cash-and-carry (who actually deliver). You can get a lot of Happy Shopper stuff in bulk for the price of big-name brands singly.
Of course, the fact that we have to even consider how best to give to food banks shows the evil of our present government.
Unless there was a daughter in there so you could get Glod Glodsondotterson.
I think the Icelanders actually spell it dóttir. But that wouldn't work because the name is made up from the father's or mother's first name + son / dóttir - so you could have Glod Glodsonsonson whose father was Glodsonson Glod, or you could have Glodetta Glodettadóttir but Glodetta Glodsondóttir tends to imply that Glodetta has had some very significant surgery.
I still think the President with the best name ever was Vigdís Finnbogadóttir in Iceland.
But it could be fun trying to confuse Alexa.
Many moons ago a friend got a BBC sound effects tape and had fun with the message on his ansaphone - sounds of police sirens, helicopters and shooting in the background, to a gentle voice-over of "I'm afraid I can't get to the phone just at the moment, please leave a message"
Would Alexa call the plods if it heard shooting?
@GlebP
Reusing paper?
When I started my first IT job way back in the last century (1979) we had filed listings of all the operational programs printed on the good old continuous green-and-white lineflo paper.
I was somewhat baffled to discover that some of the pages had printing on the back as well. Seems the former assistant PHB had decided that to save paper the used listings should be fed back into the printer, after sellotaping the batches together to make a boxful.
A few years later I actually bumped into the guy at a Green Party conference. I just smiled.
Agree about the bacon - even vegan food is better with bacon sprinkles.
And the sprout is God's anointed vegetable, closely followed by savoy cabbage. I understand that some people don't really rate broccoli, and most would agree that kale and turnips are for cattle, not humans. (N.B. Neeps with haggis of course aren't what the English call turnips, but are actually Swedish Turneeps, or swedes, which are lovely)
Of course the potato is in a category of its own.
And celery is Satan's favourite vegetable.
I think we need a campaign for real tea.
Just as the meat-growers are campaigning to ban calling anything 'milk' which doesn't come from a mammal's udders (so no Soya, almond, oat, rice milk etc) we should insist that only the leaves of the Camellia sinensis can be used to make tea. Preferably black tea, not this poncey green stuff. If you want other strange flavours call it a herbal tisanne.
It can only be drunk with milk (sugar optional) or, if you're European, lemon.
For real ethnic diversity yak butter would also be acceptable.
And don't get me started on flavoured coffees - the world does not need christmas pudding flavour coffee. And if you want almond-flavoured coffee just add a slug of Amaretto.
It's reasonable to have a small selection of Festive Greetings cards on sale in late Nov, so that people can catch the cheap post for Australia. Advent calendars can go on sale at the same time (and should not include chocolates, gin miniatures or other treats behind each door). Then it's nothing until a week before Christmas, that's plenty of time to buy presents. And a total ban on Christmas music except in association with Christian religious observances.
And no New Year sales to start until Jan 1st.
But otherwise, I'm fine with the whole season.
I have no earthly idea why any (not-rich) person would buy a brand new car and pay the VAT and massive depreciation.
I think it depends on the car. Expensive flash things it doesn't make sense. My nearly-30-year-old Porsche 944 cost me £2500, and a few grand since then on maintenance.
But for the everyday car, it's often a good deal to buy a fairly basic thing (Skoda Fabia?) for new for maybe £10K (and the dealers offer some good cash deals!) and then drive it carefully for the next 10-15 years. Depreciation under £1K per year. Or buy a low-mileage one that's 4 years old for £6K, so again costing about £1K per year.
And buying from new you know who has sat in those seats!
But now the work is under increased pressure to meet the tighter deadline and to handle a surge in declarations – this could rise from 55 million to as much as 255 million after Brexit.
No, it won't rise like that. That figure assumes there will still be solvent businesses in the former UK wanting to import or export. Bar the drug smugglers and small-arms dealers (have to protect my stash of baked beans and long-life hummous).
So no need to rush guys.
I visit Shrewsbury from time to time, and will definitely try and visit.
When I moved into my cottage it had a couple of Coalbrookdale stoves - a Much Wenlock for hot water and radiators, and a Little Wenlock for heating the sitting room. Lovely. The fun bit was when I found an old invoice for when the mine offices next door were being built in the 1850s, and showed they bought a stove from Coalbrookdale as well. The invoice even notes how it was delivered - no Amazon prime! Railway to Rednal, then Canal to Newtown, then by cart to Machynlleth to be left at a slate quarry to be ollected for the last stage on another cart. (This was before the trains)
Shame they no longer exist!
for a random-background-surfing add-on for Chrome (and other browsers)? Something that quietly runs, visiting random webpages (SFW) and following links, patterned on human habits. That wouldn't stop the Google slurp, but it would bury your real connections in a smoke-screen of cruff.
I am not a fan of Wordpress, largely because of the security issues.
But it can be used in a way that is probably not noticeably less safe than most other systems.
1. Install a decent security plugin, and switch on all the options (I've been use All in One WP Security) - that will block a lot of nasty attack vectors, and also set things up for AUTOMATIC UPDATE of WP! Jesus! How difficult can it be!
2. DON'T install those tempting little plugins from god-knows-where. The ones that will turn out to have an interesting hole, 3 years after the sole developer died in a terrible tragedy involving cold soup, a rhododendron and stolen bitcoins.
3. Only use WP for fairly straightforward sites, ideally brochureware. If it's going to be running e-commerce, look elsewhere.
4. And if you're paranoid, look out for some really solid hosting. I run a number of shared hosting packages, but keep the WP sites on a separate package so any successful attacks can't access more important stuff.
I see what you're thinking, but the way to low-carbon energy doesn't involve creating nuclear waste. Similar skills (good engineers) could be utilised to develop and manufacture tidal, wind and solar power. Scotland is already a world leader in research, and an excellent location for tidal. Let's make it a leader in actually making the things!
When your SSD/HDD is getting full, you look for a few large, unwanted files to delete, rather than thousands of tiddly ones.
So, and I'm thinking out loud here, if we don't have a magic money tree and need to cut back, perhaps dropping a few large items of unnecessary expenditure could help to balance the books. As a start we could save £53 billion by dropping the WMDs, and god knows how much by dropping the National Plan for Economic Suicide. Oh yes, and no more magic bungs. More sensible than closing lots of public toilets and care homes.
Then we probably COULD spend £350m a week on the NHS. Curing people not killing them.
Oh yes, and of course, go for an independent England so there's no need to 'subsidise' Wales, Scotland and NI any more.
@disgustedetc
I think the situation is different to your auntie (gawd bless 'er). A Cliff Richard 'gig' to use the modern parlance, has a strictly limited number of tickets available, and demand may well exceed supply, so queueing may be the only way to be sure of getting a ticket.
Apple phones are not in limited supply. Demand will not exceed supply, at least in the medium term. On the day, perhaps, but who cares about a day, or a week, or a month wait? I assume they have a working phone already, so it's not as if they are cut off from the world and society. It's just wanting to be one-up to queue on day 1. Wanting a new Apple gadget may be basically reasonable (or may not, we all have views on that) as is wanting to see Cliff Richard.
Queueing in the rain to spend sillty money just to show off is not a healthy thing. If they really like Apple just get a refurb 6+ for £250 and give the other grand to charity!
@Phuzz
While I suppose it's not incorrect to say that it is the capital of England, it's not an independent country any more than Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland are.
yet
I'm tempted to have a decent flutter at Paddy Power on whether England will be a sovereign, independent state again within ten years, for the first time in many centuries. Get rid of those blasted Celts! Viva la Revolutión Inglés! #indyengland.