Posts by J

Blighty's jumpjets under threat in MoD budget wrangle?

revenge for the TSR-2

you realise this is all revenge for the way the Navy (in the form of Lord Mountbatten) engineered the cancellation of the TSR-2, to release funding for the ADO2 carrier. Of course that also got cancelled. Supposedly due to the 1960's spending crisis, more probably because our then labour government were in the pockets of the Russians

@JonB

perhaps we should reopen Churchill's WWII Habbakuk project? That would be big enough for non-assisted take off / landing, with the advantage of being totally unsinkable

Freesat launches in UK

whats new??

whats new about this? Looks like the range of free channels that have been available on Astra for years. Same channels, same satellite.

Oregon man stripped by Craigslist looters

Scousers

Must be a lot of Scousers living in the USA then. And thanks for the confirmation that Scousers are a separate race - most of us thought they were already

DC Comics to kill off Batman?

been done before....

Batman was killed off in one storyline in the late 1960's and replaced by his doppelganger from a parallel universive

Beer makes people have sex with you

Brewer's droop?

So if beer makes you have sex, then Brewer's droop is a myth?

I dunno about others, but it seems real enough to me. No way I can manage sex after a night on the beer.

Google Maps Mobile knows where you are

MDA Vario-II

I also just installed it on an T-Mobile MDA Vario-II and it worked immediately. Found my position to within 400 yards

Now all I need is an easy fix to turn on the GPS chip which is in the Vario - but disabled. Any chance Google will supply 3rd party drivers for that ??

And for Ian McCarthy - no I didn't have to register to download it, so thats one argument against gone.

Headless zombie wanders San Francisco

Fags and Faggots

Sorry I forgot to finish my last post - the term "fag" for the cigarette has two possible origins - either by association with the burning fagoots, or alternatively in some parts of the UK "fag end" was used as a derogatory term for the end of something - e.g. the leftovers from a leg of lamb after carving, or the odd length at the end of a used bolt of cloth. When used for cigarettes it seems that the term may originally have been "fag end" and just applied to the used butts, later being used for the whole cigarette. I suspect a prison or military origin where used butts would have been valued recyclable objects

Fags and Faggots

Sorry, but you're all a bit wrong on this "fag" thing. There are two derivations. One is from the days of witch burning, when fires were started with bundles of twigs or rushes. These were known as faggots (and still are in some parts of the country). However the good olde witch burners never wanted to waste a fire, so when they had someone tied to the stake they'd chuck a couple of hog-tied homosexuals into the base of the fire as well, to help get it going. So the burning gayboys took on the name of faggots as they were essentially doing the same job. I'm not aware that women were ever treated in this way, there seem to be relatively few records of women being executed in the UK for being queer.

The other derivation is a bit more tenuous and more recent- there was a tradition at many of the UK "Public" schools (to translate for the yanks, thats rich upperclass twit private schools) of junior boys having to do menial tasks for the senior boys, By menial I mean such things as lighting fires, shopping, cleaning shoes, running errands, and (knowing the preferences of many of our public-school types) being on the recieving end of a bit of enforced gay buggery every now and again. These junior boys were known as "fags".

As you can see there are traditions in the UK for male gays to be called "fags" or "faggots", but not females