Britons of a certain age refer to this as the “Trigger’s Broom Paradox”, after a character from a comedy TV Series “Only Fools and Horses”.
Trigger, who worked as a street sweeper, got an award from the City Council for maintaining the same sweeping brush for twenty years (though the broom has had 17 new heads and 14 new handles).
Black cats of all nationalities are welcome :) The charity that declared the day is from the UK, but the idea that “black cats are beautiful and shouldn’t be overlooked” is worldwide :)
According to the best school playground scientists of the time, opening a packet of crisps upside down (i.e. so the branding/writing is upside down, and you open the bottom of the packet, at the top) actually “made you gay”.
It wasn’t just gay if you did it, but it would literally cause a spontaneous eruption of gayness in whoever did it - who would be permanently gay from that point onwards.
In the 1990s in the UK, it was gay to wear a backpack using both shoulder straps (as opposed to using one strap over one shoulder, which was the heterosexual way to carry things to school).
I genuinely didn’t realise that! It looked like they were missing, and just had the little nubs underneath.
Would you perhaps like to imagine they were missing, if only for the sake of my previous comment? :)
How often do you write the word “wads”? I can see a potential problem.
Or Hocus Pocus, by Focus (youtube link)
✅️ Menacing scream at audience
✅️ As loud as possible
✅️ Crazy eyes
✅️ Flute
Okay, so I’ve just realised I’ve been pronouncing this wrong.
So I’ve been pronouncing it “chit in”, probably as above - perhaps halfway between “chicken” and “shit in”.
Apparently it’s pronounced “kite in”.
Not that it’s a word that crops up too much, but I’ve almost certainly made other people say it wrong too :(
All three of ours play fetch, but only with specific objects. They’re all brothers about 2½ years old.
The tabby cat plays fetch with fluffy toy balls with feathers on them, the grey cat plays fetch with spare cat collars and the little black cat plays fetch with menthol sweet wrappers.
I think you’re going to need some Blackadder to go along with your Monty Python.
Start with the second series though, as the first series is a little weaker (the characters and style are a bit different), and might put you off.
Also used to make Mummy Brown Paint (wikipedia link)
Hahaha. Oops. That one was automatic/accidental, but I’m not going to change it :)
As mentioned above/below, perhaps it should have been wikipædia :)
Twitter is actually 1982’s classic erotic Atari 2600 game "Beat 'em and eat 'em.
There’s Vladimir Putin at the top of the building, firing his pixellated ejaculate over the side and the player controls both Elon Musk and Donald Trump, running left and right with their mouths open to collect it.
Great, I’ll look in to that, thank you - and I hope you do write such a book one day :)
This is fascinating stuff. Is there anywhere where more of this kind of thing is written down?
Okay, this pretty much helps, but now I don’t know what a VMA or an SNL is.
I’m going to go with “Viking Marauder Awards”, a yearly event where people re-enact the sacking of the Lindesfarne Monastery etc, via the medium of song and dance (and pyrotechnics).
and “Sitting Near Larry”, a weekly TV programme where a bloke called Larry sits down somewhere, and then semi-famous people come and sit near him and perform things. Larry has never heard of any of them, so gives them well-meaning but slightly patronising advice. Larry is just off-screen in the image shown above.
I suddenly picked up “allergies*” in my late 30s - couldn’t work out what they were, other than antihistamines (cetirizine or loratidine) made them “not as bad”, and I also needed to avoid certain things in particular (breathing in dust, aerosols, perfumes, other chemical fumes, car fumes, cigarette fumes, wood dust and drinking alcohol).
Turned out to be Nasal Polyps. I was due for surgery to remove them in 2020, but then Covid happened and I’ve been on a waiting list since. Surgery may completely remove the problem, or at least lessen it - but they could grow back within five years.
Basically every day is like I’ve got cold or sometimes flu. Sometimes I feel like I’m drowning in phlegm. If I take antihistamines, it’s pretty mild or controllable, as long as I can reasonably avoid those triggers. Sometimes I have to drink lemsip in the morning (powdered hot drink of paracetamol, lemon flavour & decongestant). It’s there every day, permanently, but how severe it is varies between “slightly inconvenient” and “too unwell to work”.
Antihistamines are essential for me to function at all, and make a huge difference - though I feel they’ve become less effective in the last year or so. Thankfully they’re very cheap over the counter (~£1.30 for 30 days’ worth). I also use a saltwater nasal spray sometimes, and I sometimes eat a lot of menthol sweets. I have to be careful with decongestants to avoid “rebound congestion” where your nose adjusts to life with decongestants, then becomes twice as blocked up if you stop.
If I drink alcohol or breathe perfume etc, my sinuses block up within half an hour, I can get an asthmatic response, and I get crippling arthritic pain in my hands and joints. Sometimes perfume and other sprays can cause severe, possibly dangerous breathing problems. I have an asthma inhaler for these emergencies, and always have to carry it with me, in case someone sprays perfume in an enclosed space (which might cause me to die).
If I keep reasonable control over these things, I can live pretty “normally”. If I actually get a cold, it’s like I’ve got a “double cold”, and it can make me too ill to go to work.
When it’s bad, it’s a pretty miserable existence to be honest, but in the larger scale of things it’s not a serious or life-threatening illness, so you feel guilty for complaining.
When it’s not so bad, I can normally ignore it for most of the day - and I have a pretty active job and am otherwise fairly healthy. It’s worst in the morning/night when I’m horizontal.
Your case outlined in the original post sounds particularly upsetting and you have my sympathies. You’re not being a baby.
*technically it’s an intolerance or hypersensitivity, and not truly an allergy, though it behaves in much the same way, and symptoms can be controlled in much the same way.
Our silver cat is a huge fan of tummy tickles.
He specifically requests them, and he’s certainly gone over ten minutes without any hint of wanting to stop, he just “supermans” his arms out one at a time, and sometimes drools a bit.
Cat tax picture:
Sorry, I might have misremembered the exact process (this was probably three or four years ago), though no need for the nasty aggressive attitude (though my apologies if I offended you somehow).
Maybe it was version upgrades (e.g 18.04 to 20.04) instead of updates, or clean installs/new installs/reinstalls? I expect it was some of one and some of another.
At the time I used to (casually) maintain a bunch of Ubuntu computers for a few community projects, small organisations and older people who live nearby. I don’t remember the specifics, I just remember the phone calls of “the printer isn’t working” “Linux has broken my USB pen” etc, and the fix being “remove the snap version and install the deb version”. It caused a lot of problems.
Back in my day, we had to hand-draw our memes in the back of school textbooks, then wait until next time we had a lesson in there to see if anyone had seen it.