Last day of working before two weeks off. It'll be a staycation mostly (we've both had a lot going on this year and we need some space to just be), but we might nip to France for a night to eat the food and stock up in a French hypermarche. On my shopping list: French washing-up liquid, which comes in lots of flavours that are way less boring than the Dutch ones, and a dozen of those glass jars of pates and rilletes that last forever. I'm hungry now.

Where are you going?

[Bis] Wherever it isn't going to be raining in Nord Pas de Calais or Normandy - a comfortable few hours' drive from home in the Netherlands. We're watching the weather radar like a hawk now...

I suggest you bring your ironing with you. Many hotels have a steam iron in the room.

[Pen] say hello to the hydrangeas from me. And it's been non-stop rain in Belgium. The choice seems to be drowning in the North and burning in the South.

I found an old forum game and it was simply, "Things You Don't Want to See in Your Living Room." But, the point was to be brief, but outlandish. I had put, "A really hairy gorilla shaving his armpits while he sings Handel's Hallelujah chorus."

[KS] Sounds... interesting! Give it a go - is there a free slot or do we need to make one?

Well, we could put it on Orange if we want guaranteed fast turnover.

[Bis] August 20 was third anniversary of my house being destroyed. Insurance quit paying everything and had to hire a lawyer and only FINALLY got settlement back in March! I used up ALL of my funds as the lawyer didn't provide any advances for living expenses, so things are always tight for me right now, though trying to get online theatre classes started once I get all of my lessons made.

[pen] Last I saw, a new slot needed to be made.

[Kagome] much sympathy.

Gotta put this in even though I wrote it in 2010. It's the 65th anniversary of the best thunderstorm I have ever seen, even allowing for distance lending enchantment and teenage impressability. Spoilt for life at the age of 15.

In the most sweeping interpretation of this bill, the UK government will have the choice of either fully providing and even externally imposing the verification system -- a stupefying technical undertaking of something like wartime scale -- or forcing nearly every web forum, wiki, etc., that's hosted in the UK out of business or at least offshore and under non-UK proprietorship. I do not see this going well.

Yeah, maybe I'm being melodramatic. I guess we'll have to see how it shakes out with OFCOM. In the meantime, I've make a few twerks which means that the shutters will fall on any finished game that goes uncommented on for three days. If things pan out as badly as we expect, I'll disable new game creation, and we'll just play everything out...

Three days is a bit optimistic, no?

It's slightly ironic that Orange MC, which is being spammed to death, is the one site which won't be subject to these new rules as it seems to be hosted abroad.

[Superman] Yes and no. When a game finishes (which hasn't happened for a while), it hangs around on the front page for three days, then you have to delve into the bran bucket of eternity to find it again. Until now, it's been possible to resuscitate games from there, but now it won't be. I don't recall that last time that happened for a reason other than spamming activity, so I don't think anyone will be too put out.

MCiOS is located in outer space, so will also duck the legislation. It's possible that OFCOM will set a threshold of as to what constitutes a 'significant' number of users, which I am sure we'll fall well below, so maybe we'll not be affected after all. On the other hand, the fact that each and every word we post is visible to the entire universe, maybe we will.

Well, given that every participant passes an exam (aka Cymraeg Epistolariat) and can create and close forums at will, one can only conclude that everyone is an approved moderator and thus exempt. As for exposing the tender masses to the awful, pornographic reality of wordplay and transit stations, well; I've been at some pains to discourage spidering. I don't see how someone with the brains of a modern UK cabinet minister is even going to find the place.

"In the meantime, I've make a few twerks..."

No wonder they want to shut you down.

Could be a pun game in this... "Britain isn't twerking" or somesuch... "Twerking 9 to 5"

Go to twerk on an egg (the title of almost least four TikTok videos)

Pay's good but t'werk's 'ard.

Hi ho, hi ho...Here's an approximation of what the associated dance number in Disney's live-action remake of Snow White will look like.

I'm so sad and crying at times. I had to make that terrible choice of saying goodbye to one of my dogs, Niblet, on November 27. I talked to him and asked him if he wanted to go to heaven or stay o earth. I always had a way of communicating with him by showing him the fingers and he could nose or lick the choice.

His kidney enzymes were so high that the computer coulndn't read them. He could no longer walk correctly. I tried to feed him a tiny piece of ham and he wasn't able to eat it even though he tried. His tongue was so dry because he was dehydrated.

He was my Mama's dog first. When she was really bad in a nursing home, all she would write was "take care of Niblet." I loved and still love that little baby so much. I truly believe he is in heaven, but it is difficult.

Thankfully, my little service dog, Radar, is just fine and is with me.

Also,

I was wondering if y'all could help me brainstorm. I'm trying to figure out ways to promote my online theatre classes. As a friend of mine said, it just takes the one right person to get the ball rolling. I've told a few local connections about the classes and that they'll let people know if they know of anybody.

Also, perhaps on how to get more followers on TikTok. I'm VERY SLOWLY gaining followers. If I get to over 1,000 followers, then I can be a guest on the LateTok show (I'm pretty sure the reason for that is simply because that's what you need to go live on TikTok) and obviously, I could also go live on TikTok to answer questions about theatre - like I see vocal coaches go live to answer questions about the voice and singing. So, if you have ideas, please let me know!

And if you are interested, you can find more info at https://theatregeekery.neocities.org

[KagomeS] I'm sorry about your dog - they have such short lives compared to the amount of life they bring to ours. We just have to make sure that those short lives are the best.
And this theatre thing... maybe - maybe - the way to bring TikTokkers to your theatre skills is ... to make TikTok content that tells people how to put theatre skills into their TikToks, or identify the theatrical techniques that TikTokkers are already using? I'm thinking of something in parallel with the linguists and etymologists who keep appearing on my Instagram reels. They make post after post by digging deep into language and introduce their mini-lectures with a trending TT reel or something newsworthy or a factoid, give a burst of proper intelleckshual linformation in very ordinary and usuable context, and then encouage viewers at the end to 'Follow along if you feel like it. I'm thinking in particular of https://www.threads.net/@abraham.piper with 600,000 followers.

Ooh, I think Pen's is a great idea. "How to stage a play in 180 seconds"

From my own experience slowly building a followership on Google plus (I worked up from a couple of dozen up to the high hundreds), consistent posting is overwhelmingly the most important thing. Doesn't matter what the frequency is, but you gotta stick to it. I wasn't really trying, but I did make a point of ensuring some activity 'every few days'. If you were a regular weekly visitor you would have seen something new every week. Vital to pace yourself and allow a good amount of slack. Also mentioning and cross-recommending other good posters is a great idea; even if they don't reciprocate (and they probably will), becoming a good 'hub' is highly valuable.

Once things start getting serious, which I hope they will, then it becomes worth setting up automatically scheduled posts and building up a buffer. I never got to that point and as it was only vanity posting I probably wouldn't have worried about it. Even so, if I'd ended up with a really big followership I might have decided they deserved more care and set things up properly.

[Simons] I'm not really sure how to use Google Plus. I have a Google One account. I bought that back when I thought I was going to be home a few months back and had a bit of money.

[pen] I'll have to look for videos that could go with my stuff. That's a good idea.

[KagomeShuko] Google plus is long dead. I strongly recommend doing everything you can to limit your exposure to Google products. They're notorious for killing them off. YouTube and Gmail look all right for now, but I wouldn't count on even them long term. See https://killedbygoogle.com/ for what I mean.

A merry foodmas to you all, hope it's a restful one and that you're all safe, warm and have some treats.

Happy Christmas!

Merry, and Happy, everyone
And thanks as always to the Rabs, the Dans, the Dunxen, and all the other past hosters of international silliness.

HNY all. First snow of the year here in NL - a decent dusting of big wet snowflakes, enough to white everything out and make a mess with slushy tracks holding ice cold water along all the paths. (And a flash of lightning and a big clap of thunder this morning at 7am too).

[penelope] HNY2U2! I got snow here too, but it only just reached the point where you could no longer keep count of individual flakes. Pathetic.
But it's freezing out there now. And the garden is lightly scattered with older unmelted ice chunks cracked out of the bird bath. I am worried about the sparrows. I still have my regular starling visitors but haven't seen any of the sparrows since before Christmas. They had to go a few days without mealworms because I was away; I hope they didn't all starve when their worm supply was interrupted. They did have fallback fatballs but they're barely touched.

We had 11 cm of snow here in Belgium (between 4 and 5 inches). It's still around as the temperature hasn't got above freezing. We're having a real winter for once.
Looking for animal tracks in snow-time is fun - last night we got some strange ones that I'd almost swear are rabbits, and our red squirrel is still there. We're in a typical suburban area with gardens.

Woke up to a crashed mail server this morning. Closer inspection revealed that it had found the disk full... which was due to this site generating reams of warnings in the webserver logs, due to what used to be bona fide PHP convenience shortcuts now being considered bad programming. The easy way out was to stop the warnings being emitted. But I never take the easy way out, so have tried to track down all uses of the shortcuts and replaced with their more explicit counterparts. It's been a game of whack-a-mole so far... but I'll keep monitoring the logs and keep whacking as you (or, more likely, search engines) find cases I've missed.

Looking good so far.

Nicely does it.

Got some fox tracks the day after the rabbits. Was most pleased. Yesterday the temperature went from -2 to +9 and the snow simply disappeared as a front came through.

It was quite a front, though - a bit blowy! The snow didn't completely disappear until Sunday afternoon, and there was still some ice on little stretches of water. Today was the best lunchtime dog walk for ages: no nasty weather to contend with (I had to take off me hat and gloves after half of it) and the dog set up a pheasant, which has made his day.

[rab] Thanks for the hard work to ensure at least two MC servers stay up :)

The appendix to Stovold, hidden these many ages long in the CAMREC library, include the prophecies relating to the demise of the universe, in which those who may reach Mornington Crescent will be announced as the late arrivals, while all others will be put in spoon, to be knidded by ostriches throughout all eternity to the sound of the trombone. There's something about Felicity Kendal as well, but it's disputed.

still taking into account everything said here. Also, looking for contractor fraud lawyers in Louisiana. The contractor that I hire is threatening to sue me if I go public with the information of how she hasn't done the work she's been paid to do.

[KS] Sheesh... Sorry you're going through this over such a long time. is there a contract clause that states "we can do what we like and you aren't allowed to complain, same to you and no returns"? How do they deal with people giving them negative reviews on social media?

Happy Easter!

Happy? You're not a Chelsea supporter, are you.

Nope, Chelsea is not important to me. I do follow another blue-clad side, but they're not even as high up in the leagues as Chelsea.

So coy, Bismarck!
It's a very good time to be a fan of blue-clad Ipswich Town at the moment. And I've just stuck my cricket fixture calendars up, so am hoping for some dry weather to enable more sporting joy!

The man from The Grauniad reckoned that hard as Chelsea tried to lose the game, as usual, they nevertheless won it 4-3. They were playing Man U, after all.

[Bis] Pretty much. Like, they don't require them to have contracts and they don't require them to follow the contracts if they have them. Then lawyers don't take contractor fraud cases.

I'm technically back in my house as I am in the house, but it's not great. There's no heat, but there is air. Thankfully temps seem to be 60F and up. I certainly hope it stays that way. I can then bundle up.

I don't have hot water. I don't have a kitchen. The tiny passageway of a hall makes it so I can JUST get trhough using a rollator, not even my transport chair. This contractor is a hue jerk. I'd have much stronger words, but I'm not putting them here.

In February, when the place I was staying was shut down by the fire marshal, we had one night in another hotel and then I was literally TOLD that I was going to be at her house. She said that I would be there for one week and she wouldn't let me have my little service dog. There was only one day where she wasn't trying to break my spirit with all of her yelling at me and insults.

I was so distressed that one day, I called the police to help get me out of that situation. They didn't help. Instead, they call her and talk to her, despite my protesting. I didn't give them her information. A guy that was living in her guest house called her. She's claiming to be traumatized by that. She wasn't even at the house. I was outside waiting for the police. She's just a huge jerk. Only reasons she would be traumatized are that she already has a record and if she doesn't, she absolutely knows that she's done wrong.

[Kagome] Anything I can do to help?

[Tuj] Congratulations!

Hidden text

Admittedly, you probably cannot take much personal credit

[CdM]

Hidden text

None whatsoever

:D much appreciated!

This is a fairly recent nickname but then to me, of course, Harold Wilson is a fairly recent Prime Minister. I've only seen Ipswich once but they lost 10-1 to Fulham for whom everything turned to gold, including a a goal direct from a corner by the great Tosh Chamberlain. It was a filthy wet afternoon in 1963 with rain and hail. Later, Ipswich had a couple of FORRINERS, two rather good Dutch players, Thijssen and Muhren. This was quite a novelty then. In their new flashy surroundings they will need more than that, preferably access to the huge piles of loot in yet another boiling-hot backward desert shit-hole. Otherwise they'll be out of their depth and have just one season in the Moneyball League. A great shame, but that's modern sport.

I've just booked Friday 5 July off work. I intend to pull an all-nighter in front of the telly and social media on Thursday night. Anyone else?

Love to, but I've got to inspect a train those days and I'll no doubt be too frazzled. I was wondering if I should binge on "Life on Mars", what were you thinking about watching?

I suppose we should ask if it all went well?

Yesterday the European Championships of football got under way, and as usual people were straight onto the statistics of rare occurrences. While it might be interesting to have the fastest goal or the youngest player record, saying that something is the third this, or only the fourth time that..., is of far less interest even for those interested in football.
I'd like to propose the name of "the Grover effect" for this, after the limerick:

There once was a batsman called Grover,
Who scored thirty-six runs in one over!
Which had never being done
By a clergyman's son
On a Sunday, in August, at Dover!

With me on this?

(Bismarck) No, not by a clergyman's son on an August Sunday at Dover but by the great Gary Sir Garfield Sobers on an August afternoon in 1968 at Swansea, off the bowling of Malcolm Nash. Serve 'im right. Bloody South Walians.

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They've got another five hundred and fifty to go, this could be quite boring.
Spam starting like this is like finding a couple of ants in the kitchen - you know there's going to be more along shortly.

[Raak] Please could you remind me of your email address (obfusc. as necessary). I've largely rewritten my, er, mathematical thing for the Summer of Math Exposition, and I think the new version is significantly more convincing. Even though you never said you'd seen anything wrong with the old one... My offline email database is currently extra-offline thanks to a hardware failure.

[SM]
My first is in Richard, and so're the next six
An at sign; the next begins kerning, and kicks
The next starts elopement, and is most of epee
Then the middle of and, and the start of "no way!"
That letter once more, and then half of an aa
And a "way" to complete it; if you're with me thus far
A dot and an org and a dot and an uk
And that is the whole of the handle — good luck!

Bonus clue: I'm probably distantly related to these people

I tried asking ChatGPT 4o to decode that, and it couldn't quite manage it.

I’d have got it wrong; I assumed way = rd!

Lovely. That should be the standard way to obscure email addresses.

A friend of mine is a Greenaway which is also quite a rare name. Slightly etymologically connected, if not genealogically.

So how's everyone doing?
I've got bloomin' loads to do at work. Haven't managed to look in here for a while.

Well I'm okay, apart from a week's pretty horrible toothache. My work is kinda chill - I feel a bit underemployed at times. But it's partly because I'm doing stuff that generates work for others, and then I have to wait for them to do it before I can do my next bit. I definitely get more done when I'm at the end of a chain like that than in the middle. Out of work, I want to enter Grant Sanderson's Summer of Math Exposition competition this year, and I've co-opted Raak as maths consultant. Deadline for that is mid-late August so I've still got weeks to go. I think/hope the work is in the last 10% (the part that takes 90% of the time) but... we'll see.

[SM] Did you get my answer suggesting that the Collatz jelly has fallen off the wall again? :) I just noticed I sent it to the zen[randomnumbers] address instead of your readable email.

[Raak] I did receive it - the darn webmail form constantly auto-refills the zenxxxxx address every time I tweak the email (such as by adding an attachment), and it's easy to fail to catch it. My short answer to the jelly question is that I don't think it matters because even when the numbers rise, their 'rail number' still ticks down inexorably. Showing that numbers can rise as high as they like and yet it still doesn't help them escape is a key thing I'm trying to make clear. But you exposed an area where I'm not saying what I really wanted to - so I'll be fixing that and sending you a reply, probably at the weekend. I was also sidetracked into wondering whether numbers in the sequence have a provable 'high water mark'. If you could show that no number n can ever rise above, say, 2^n, that could be another clincher. 2^n ought to give sufficient headroom, right?

[nominative etymology] There's a place called Kenovay on the island of Tiree, which looks like a phonetic rendering of its Gaelic name Ceann a’ Bhàigh, which means "head of the bay", or Bayhead ("the parst of a bay most distant from the larger body of water with which it is confluent"). There are a couple more Ceann a’ Bhàighs and Bayheads in the Hebrides. So that could be the origin of the name.

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[1] Welcome back!

I don't seem to be able to post in the AVMA game. Is this working?

How odd...

[CdM] I was just able to post there (then "whoopsed" it away, which sounds a bit toilety) - using Safari on latest MacOS in case that helps.

[blame] Turned out the issue was that ā, entered directly from the keyboard, apparently upsets mc5 to the point where it can’t even. It works over at Dan’s place.

Does anyone know if ISIHAC ever played Just A Minim with Aretha's "Respect"? - I found myself giggling a little too much imagining the "sock it to me" and "just a little bit" parts in that game. For that matter, and plummeting to the opposite end of the musical quality spectrum, Gina G's "Ooh ah, just a little bit" might have been rich territory too.

I dunno, but in the movie Rat Race Rowan Atkinson sings it to a different tune playing on the radio.

Been awhile since I've been here. Things are still not great for me. I'm having to save up to afford a consultation with a lawyer. My cousins in California have it arranged so I get paid a monthly amount so I can pay my bills. I'm looking for a work from home job, but it's also difficult because ALL my nerves are healing (long story) and they make me feel AWFUL and make it difficult to do things.

The lawyer consultation is needed because the contractor fraud hotline that is supposed to take things seriously didn't take things seriously at all. They let the contractor give a list of five things that were done and didn't pursue the case. So, here I am, sitting in a house with an air conditioner that doesn't work properly and burning up so much during this very hot August. And constantly hearing some critter in my walls. Knowing that what was done was probably only worth up to $100,000 and that there are tons of used items (should have never happened) in my house.

Sorry to hear of the continued troubles, but welcome back - hope some silly word games here can be a useful distraction.

I echo blamelewis' sentiments. Don't forget you have friends here even if we are a bit mad (in the British sense).

Not long ago I put a few hundred dollars aside to help someone whose roof needed repairs. They didn't need it in the end, so I've got no probs redirecting that cash

Ah right, just checking a few things...

(rab) Yma o hyd, ti'n gwbod

[Simons Mith] I'd appreciate the help, but being I'm in the US, I don't know if you'd be able to help me out.

The previous was just a GoFundme. I paid, then it was cancelled, then I got a refund. An electronic transfer probably is easiest. Or I could just post a cheque, but it would be in pounds.

I don't actually know how big the bite GoFundMe takes compared to just a bank, but I presume they're similar.

[Simons Mith] I've never done pounds to USD. I have all the payment methods we use in the states - CashApp, Venmo, and Paypal. I don't know if they do conversions. Of course, then there's my bank account . . .

I don't know about a check in pounds and the conversion.

(KS) Pounds are big. One pound is currently about 1.31 US dollars.

[Simons Mith] I tried joining Revolut, but they don't have it set up yet, or again, or something, for people in the US to be able to receive funds.

[Simons Mith] I found this: https://wise.com/us/send-money/send-money-to-the-usa-from-the-uk I'd be glad to give you my information in private somehow. I have Facebook Messenger and Instagram and TikTok where I can send private messages. I'm not sure if I have anything else.

zen*co*uk

simon_smith followed by a hippopotamus symbol

I tried using an actual hippopotamus emoji but it seems rab.org frowns on their use.

Wise is, afaik, a reputable and reliable source for transferring funds (though I haven't used it). I have used OFX, which I have found to be straightforward and reliable.

I signed up for OFX, so now I have an account there. I hadn't know of OFX or found it when I was searching.

I got a text saying that they needed me to call to finish setting up my account. So, been waiting for over 10 minutes for them to answer the phone to get me connected with one of the OFX . . . and as I'm typing, they answer. But, I was told that I don't need the account to RECEIVE money, just need to give my bank details to the sender.

KS - did the latest hurricane Francine cause you any problems?

[Bis] Thankfully, Francine didn't hit where I live. They thought there would be storms, but all that happened was a bit of rain where I am.

I contacted a contractor . . . on September 19th and they came out and I sent them the insurance estimate, but I've not gotten an estimate back for what repairs would cost. It sucks knowing that the contractor I had was constantly lying to me and purposefully taking advantage of me, KNOWING my disabilities and my troubles. She barely finished ANYTHING. Nothing is 100% right in my house.

Hopefully a contractor is coming in about an hour.

In the mean time, I'm watching this guy on TikTok and I like this video. English breaks French with words that seem like they should rhyme.

“I think you’ll find it’s fewer miserables.”

[CdM] .. and fandom of the opera. A game idea perhaps?

I like this idea

So, that means it's should be Buttbuttins, right?

Hahah, you said butt!

[Simons Mith] Haha! Butt, butt, BUTT of course.

I have Cash Giraffe on my phone, which gets me a few points for playing games and then converts them into rewards. I found out that it pays in Euros, but that Paypal converts foreign currency to USD!

Happy holidays to those who have 'em, and safety and warmth to those having tricky times. I delight at the Morningverse, still a corner of the internet unspoiled and fun.

Merry Christmas everyone!

It's the 6th already so it looks like we have our feet firmly into 2025 and there's no going back. Good to see you all still here.

We may be all here but are we all there?

[pen] Don't we get 28 days to reconsider? Don't think I want the old year back anyway, but Statues have rights... or something...