mc5 - The Banter Page

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The Banter Page

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If you're wanting to get something off your chest, make general comments about the server, or post lonely hearts ads, then this is the place for you.

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[Knobbly] Milk no sugar please.

Black with ginger please.

Variable opening

[Rosie] I believe I've spoken on this matter on another site, but the crux of the matter is that I'm with you on this one. My pub is licensed until 1am on friday and saturday, but I close at 12. Customers need consistency, and they need to know where they stand. On very rare occasions, I will stay open until 1am, but that is for the likes of our football team's annual prizegiving, and they all know in advance. They tend to leave about 12.30 anyway though. If the pub has 50 customers one friday night and you stay open the extra 30 minutes, what happens next week when there are 45 customers. You make yourself an immediate target for bickering. If you going to take punitive action, may I suggest you let the gaffer know before you do so, as he may not notice. He also might be more likely to change his ways in advance of losing custom.

[Rosie] Your other question. No, there is no variation in cost that tallies with what your licensable activities are. You do, though, open yourself up to a much bigger can of worms in the matter of your neighbours and their potential objections.

Chucking-out time

(Phil) I think the manager may have seen sense, though not through customer persuasion AFAIK, because there is now a completely new regime after less than a fortnight of this arbitrary stuff and the pub now has a 24-hr licence all week and is advertised (in the bar) as being open from midday to 11.30 a.m., the half-hour closed being apparently to put a few things in order each day. There is no mention of management discretion on the notice. Does this mean I can stay there drinking, probably alone, until 4 in the morning (say)? What on earth is the point of that because Carshalton is not exactly Soho. I'd like to know what's going on but the barman (not the manager) couldn't help, or wouldn't.

[Rosie] Have you been in the bar since Monday then?

(Phil) Sanity has prevailed with the appearance of yet another regime in which closing time is 1130 (pm) except Friday and Saturday which are midnight and Sundays which are 11 pm. These are modest extensions to the original times. The manager could have kept his itchy fingers off the keyboard and printer until he'd made his mind up but all's well that ends well.
(pen) Shurrup. Wha' if I 'ave? :-)

Hours and Hours

Over here one has to move pub to get different closing times, it's all according to the type of licence issued, i.e. whether or not the licensee is able to have live music. Very strange but one gets used to it.

Hmm, looks like this site is about to become target for a lorryload of spam. Will need to think about tightening up the security I guess.

In the meantime, you might want to check the status of our latest building project.

[rab] Nice lav ;o)

[pen] That one's on its way out. The new one is sitting in a box in the spare bedroom.

[Rosie] Glad to hear you have stability again.

zbchk bnud

maith fthmri fuqv ktndamcs yetxq latids umgjkyftd

So nice to see we have visitors from another galaxy.

I thought it was one of us posting from a palm raspberry thing straight after emerging from the dentist's surgery.

(pen) :-)

Ching

Nice dusting of snow this morning, oddly, more in front of than out the back of the block.

Noting a slot and the date, does anyone have any inspiration for an advent-themed game of MC?

[Tuj] Done. Can you wait up until midnight to make your move? Sorry if that was a bit rude...

[pen] I knew someone would be able to hatch my half-idea =) thank you!

[Tuj] You're going to have to wait another day for a morsel of chocolate. Softers just got today's.

Odd Problem

Sorry to interrupt, but I need to get a message through to rab and the firewall here is stopping me posting to OMC/N&Q at the moment. I'm seeing a nod problem with the index page here at MC5. The names and moves displayed on it are not the same as those showing last in the games themselves. Is anyone else seeing this, or is this confined to my proxied-by-idiots world? Am I living in pre-cached hell again?

All looks fine here, Stevie.

Looks like a caching problem at your end, but I've resynched the index with the game data anyway.

Chocolate covered cache. Ooh!

[rab] *sighs* Okay. I'll resign myself to never seeing the site in it's real state then.

I could try adding the appropriate http header to try and request a non-cache.

OK

See if that works.

Cache Deals Only

[rab] Seems to have fixed it for now. Clever, you.

It's almost a week since anyone said anything, so I'll break the silence. I think I've moved into the 'finishing off projects' phase at work before my last day in the office on 23 December. How strange this is...

Not at all unusual if you are a proper professional, pen, which I assume you are.

I'm definitely demob happy now. I'm finishing off other people's jobs and bringing mince pies into work. I don't even like mince pies that much.

It gets very quiet in here over the weekend. Does that imply that most of mc5s posts are posted when the poster ought to be working?

[Knobbly] I am shocked, shocked to hear such a suggestion!

[knobbers] How very dare you??!!

I'd really like to express my hurt at the suggestion but, since I'm at work at the moment, I can't.

[Knobbly] Now look what you've done! Everyone is too ashamed to play any more. There has hardly been a move in any game for two days.

Shhh! Some of us have work to do, keep the noise down.

BOO! .....apologises to neighbours.....

Chirp

We've had a lot of dealings with tradesmen recently. None of them too disastrous (although there is still one job outstanding in the bathroom, scheduled for 8am tomorrow). But when something really good happens, I get so pleased. Our roofer was scheduled to check a few things out tomorrow morning in advance of the down-tools period (I had visions of a waterfall coming though the extractor fan on Christmas day). He phoned me up just now saying "I'm in the area, shall I come now?"; leapt onto the roof, found everything that was wrong with it and told me it would be thirty-five quid to fix. It was done in about the time it took me to get to the cashpoint and back.

Oh, and when I told him that one of his rivals told us we needed a whole new roof, he looked at me like I was mad and said, "Nah... this one will last about 20 years".

[rab] Is your bathroom fixed now?

This is my last day at work...

Woken by the telephone at ten o'clock this morning. Augh! The four best hours of the day lost in slumber, never to return! Oh well, I doubt if anyone else is at work today.

[Raak] I'm trying to plan a night off on Jan 2nd. It looks like it might work -)

[Raak] I'm still at work... Can't afford any time off, as I need all my leave for the imminent arrival of a new addition to the family. So I'll take this opportunity to wish a Merry Crimbo to everyone at MC5!

Merries

Happy wotsit. I'm obliged by the cult of Jobs to tell you this comes via my Father's iPhone.

Happinesses

Phew, Christmas successfully accomplished in the traditional manner. The Windy Miller is, this moment, accompanying the AA man in their attempts to get the car started, in anticipation of driving back to the Netherlands tomorrow. I have a chicken curry simmering on the hob, and was until a few moments ago, studying a book of Heath Robinson illustrations. Next, we will play with the new kitchen-windowsill weather monitoring station and see if we can't find out how to turn the outside temperature up a bit.

(pen) Move here. You may "glow" a little.

twelve days of Christmas

Monday, 2 December - the third consecutive day with a visit from the AA man. Today, they are taking the car away to a garage to be fixed. The advantage is that I get to spend extra time with the Windy Miller (we went to the cinema to see Australia last night - our first-ever cinema date. Marvellous cinematography, probably a lot of it CGI, but sh*t writing - maudlin, predictable and worst of all, it had Nicole Kidman in it). The disadvantage is that he is getting impatient as he has work to do back at home.

this year

I'm packing, and moving. Moving and packing. Eek!

[pen] You have my deepest empathy.

[CdM] Ignore Pen, it may not be great, but her way of seeing Australia is a lot less bother than yours.

[pen] It's a new beginning - sounds exciting. I enjoyed my 2 years in the Netherlands and would probably have stayed longer except for my ex.

epjlqroab nfpaub

epjlqroab nfpaub

hajoqpr budr znbq zoaidfeum cbrglknov mtsjiaex bveowfzyt

My heavens he's found me - anyone available to give me a lift to Bletchley?

Very cryptic, Duj :o)

I wonder if epjlqroab nfpaub is the same person as zbchk bnud from back in November?

[Knobbly] Don't be ridiculous, the names are completely different from each other.

Moving day T-3

I have two chairs and one lamp left. Everything else has been sold or is in boxes. Even my bed will sell on Ebay today, and a mate with a garage will sell my car for me. Lummy.

So you weren't joking when you said you were leaving, pen. :o)

Holland

[penelope] Where will you be living? Will you be using only public transport once you move? I've never been to Holland but I understand they have invested heavily in public transportation.

dead game?

Has Film Club run it's course, or does someone else want to suggest a new subject for it?

Public???

[SM] Public transport? Heavens no. I will be riding a stately omafiets, a birthday present from my schatje molenaar.

omafiets

[penelope] Would that be a bicycle, horse, moped or skateboard?

It's a 'granny bike' - big wheels, sprung seat, upright handlebars, luggage rack and shopping panniers, enormously comfortable and particularly suited for flat places.

Fietspads

[pen] In my my experience the wind always blows in you face whichever way you are cycling in Holland, making the traditional bikes hard work.

[Softers] Yup. But mine's aluminium so pretty light. And the wind blows against you wherever you cycle in Lincolnshire too, so that's nothing new.

Velocity vectors

(Softers, pen) The only possible conclusions are that either there is no wind in Holland, Lindsey and Kesteven or that you never cycle at less than about 50 mph. Impressive.

Bike

[penelope] The sprung seat is particularly suited to flat places? :)

Does this bicycle come with one of those teardrop-shaped "Pifo" electric horns that were so popular the last time I rode a bike?

biiiii-cycle

[Sierra Mike] I like this. It works very, very well.

[flerdle] Nice one. I read the linked article, then took a mouthfull of hot coffee just as I got to the bit about "30 blasts from one pumping-up". I immediately pictured Inspector Clouseau, in disguise, madly pumping as he cycled toward a pedestrian crowd (the parrot-inflation bit in the "Salty Swedish Sea Captain From The Salty Sea" scene is one of my favourite Sellars moments).

I'm probably going to need a new workstation keyboard now.

I've been a fan of Matthew Somerville's alternative front-end to the National Rail website for quite some time, traintimes.org.uk, on the grounds that it works better than the real one. He's recently added a live train map, and I particularly like the description of how it works:

Live departure data is fetched from the National Rail website, much like my timetable site, and then it does a bit of maths and magic.

Blowin' in the wind

*blushing* I drove the windy miller to his usual Saturday leading the volunteers and various lads at the mill this morning (practising driving (a) on the wrong side of the road and (b) on the wrong side of the car) but we were a bit later than his normal arrival time. You can see the mill from some way off because of the flat landscape, and when we were about half a mile away, the WM could see the sails were already turning and exclaimed: 'There are flags on the sails!'. As we got closer, we realised what they were. There was a Dutch tricolour on one sail, and a Union flag on the opposite one (bought specially off t'internet). And there were muffins and stroopwafels to have with coffee there this morning. Then I came home, made soup, tidied up a bit, and watched Alec Guinness in Cromwell on BBC 2 which you can get here. Bloody marvellous :o).

Arrivals

[pen] Yay!

*fancies a stroopwafel - all of a sudden*

Welkom

[pen] Nice. Watch out for the speed cameras ;o). The cable channels carry only the BBC (for copyright reasons, apparently) but if you live near the coast you can get all the UK channels (analogue ones, only probably) on an aerial.

[penelope] Happiness to you.

Thanks all :o)
Back to the mill tonight - it's floodlit farming night, so farms and mills on the island of Hoekshe Waard (that's this one) will be floodlit for busloads of sightseers to tour.
This morning's trip to the small supermarket lead me past two market-stall type vans in the main street of this large village/small town. One was a cheesemonger, on whose stall I spotted a small solitary block of English cheddar, bright orange and tightly encased in plastic, amongst the big wheels of Dutch cheese and the small morsels of some of the better-known French cheeses. There are so many good British cheeses, but none of them are known here. Hardly any of them are known behind the counters of Tesco either, but that's a different problem. *goes to chivvy up the British Cheese Marketing people*.

Cheesy lines

[pen] Perhaps if you polish off the advent chocs we could have a game writing slogans for cheese!

mmmm, cheese...

gah

I was putting together my advent chocolate feast when my internet connection broke - actually the wind dropped on the windy miller's wifi network. So if anyone can polish off the chocolates and start on the cheese, they'd be welcome to do it.

Pilgrimage

BTW, there will be a Pilgrimage in London on Feb 14th, if anyone's interested.

[penelope] eat local food - the world will thank you for it much later.

[Phil] I do, mostly - the potatoes here are particularly good, they actually taste of potato. But if they're going to import some cheese from the UK, you'd think they'd cart the good stuff about, not the orange plastic-wrapped-in-plastic stuff, wouldn't you? They seem to manage to bring in some decent French cheese.

Cheese

[Pen] Actually, the Dutch tend to like their plasticky orange cheeses - Edam and Gouda being cases in point - but some of the smoky varieties are very nice, and you should be able to get tastier Boerenkaas and goat cheeses if you look hard enough. I don't know where your windmill is but I assume there isn't an English shop round the corner. Are there no local farmers who make their own? Have you tried whingeing to Windy? On an unrelated note, are you coming to Othello? I can put you up...

Good try

[IS,P!] I'm almost ashamed to admit it, and please don't take it personally, but theatre ain't my bag. I struggle to appreciate drama and hardly watch films - Jan and I went to the cinema for the first time together in December, two years after we met. Sooo I will leave an Othello seat for someone who will appreciate it more.Perhaps we should have a Brussels Sprouting Pilg at some point though.

*has just google-mapped peneloopij's woonplaats*

Pilgrimage

[SM] Is that for people who don't have anything else to do on Valentines Day?

Slogans for cheese?

And now there's a new game slot, shall we start a Cheesy slogans game?
[Kim] What else might one have to do on Valentine's Day?

Cheese

[pen] I remember being aghast in a supermarket in Perigord (admittedly in a fairly ex-pat-filled town), and seeing Red Leicester amongst the French cheeses. Especially galling was the £11 per kg price tag!

a nice bit of...

[Phil] That's marketing for you! I'd like some jong Lincolnshire Poacher, voor mij.

[Phil] French Cheese. Galling. I get that.

I like all cheeses, but some better than others, obviously.

[Softers] Have left a question for you in AVMA - I assumed you would be looking in there. Perhaps a reply in here might be best, if that's OK with you. [ Then all will be revealed :-)]

[Soft] Ah - I've just seen it. Thanks. The reason I asked - have to go to St Helier to do some work in early Feb and thought it might be nice to connect. But as you're not there ....
:-(

3rd time lucky

Potty mouth? You ARE in Jersey, then?

St Helier

[Chalks] Yes, I am here, well I work in St Helier and live just outside. When you over?

[Softers] Any chance of you emailing? k/e/davenport/@/// gmail.com [sans hyphens - natch] :)

Well?

We're all dying to know - did Softers email Chalky? Will the Jerseypilg go ahead? Find out in next week's episode of... Chat

*chuckles*

[peneloopij] He did. It may.

In the meantime...

Sunny and very cold today in Zuid Holland. We may even yet go for a bike ride. I have no idea what my windy miller is doing downstairs while I'm upstairs trying to write something, but it sounds like he's reorganisisng something and I'm afraid to go and look.

Windy Miller

[Pen] Please tell me he has a blue coat, a red necktie and a brown upturned-flowerpot hat...

As You Like It

[IS,P!] why certainly. He has a blue coat, red neckerchief and a brown upturned-flowerpot hat. The coat and neckerchief are in the laundry basket waiting to be ironed, but he keeps the hat in the car.

You don't press his hat?

Good grief, woman, what are you thinking about? Everyone from where I came from has a flat hat (they, the wearers, are said to also have whippets and cobblestones and ghosts, but that's just not true). Even I have one! (pictures available at £150 each, on request - and after a full security cheque (price to be negotiated)).

Highly Rural

It seems to me that Pugh, Pugh, Barney McGrew, Cutherbert, Dibble and Grubb will be getting jealous of all this attention.

Clarification required

[Dujon] You have one what? Ghost? Cobblestone? Whippet?
And anyway we'll have the RSPCA round to you for ironing your whippets.
You don't need to iron a flat hat - the incessant beating of the rain on it will do that for you.

Just so you know, reading this conversation is like looking at a Dali painting to me. Every time I think I'm getting the drift of it, one of the pieces flops over and makes a shape like an elephant (or a swan).

hatters

[Duj] it's not a flat hat - we're talking about the traditional attire of windy miller, the hat is upturned-flower-pot shaped. The landscape here in South Holland is flat. I can see how you got confused.

[pen] Wait. You are ironing the landscape?

[CdM] A man knocked at my door and asked if I wanted my garden landscaped. I don't think my neighbours would appreciate me turning my portrait garden sideways.

[Phil] proper lol and in the office too.

Well, well, well

I suppose that the next you lot will tell me is you don't launder your money. Honestly! What are Great Britain and the Nederlands coming to? Whatever, I bet it's a bit warmer here (excluding the Mint investigations) than it is at your picturesque location. Na, Na, Na Na Ner. ;-)

Sweat, y'bugger

(Duj) You're welcome to 39°C with high humidity. 39°F would do me OK at the moment. There was a foot of snow here on Monday morning and still about half that even now.

Life threatening thingiwhatsits

Rosie, that is not funny. ;-) So it was you who peeked at my weather site from an area somewhere near London. You can keep your snow as I'm just hoping my air conditioning unit keeps running. Today (Saturday) should be fine - sort of - but tomorrow I fear. 47ºC is most definitely not going to be fun.

(Dujon) It would seem to be a good day to hang out the washing around here. I doubt if you'll get a true 47°C though Melbourne might. The cool change could be quite something. I'll keep an eye on it.

By contrast

(Duj) To cool off try this rather agreeable city.

Newsflash

I rudely interrupt to bring you the essential news that at 23.09 today I will be exactly* 1/3rd century old. Oh, and it's snowing.

* Subject to how one chooses to define of 'exact'

Optimist

As a special not-birthday treat, my wife took me to the optometrists. He (the optometrist, not my wife) said my prescription had changed "a little bit", but when I compared the two sets of numbers I could detect no correlation between them whatsoever.

[Rab] Were you wearing glasses at the time?

Ageism

(rab) Date of birth 9 Oct 1975 at 5 a.m. then? I have taken a century as 36524.25 days. On 18 July this year at 6 pm I shall be two-thirds of a century old. On 23 July last year I was twice as old as you. I do like faffing about with a calculator.

Rosie old chap, too much time on your hands? Very good though!

Tempus ambulat

(Bigsmith) I see mathematics (or arithmetic, which this is) as a recreation. Time to spare? Work out my date of birth. (Don't forget the leap years, all n of them.)

[Rosie] We seem to disagree by a day and an hour, even though I used the same length of a century as you... bother.

[Rosie] You're not the only one... a good friend of mine (and a Cambridge Maths graduate) recently delighted to inform me I was 7884 days old. Not long 'til the big 8000!

(rab) 10th October then? My mistake. But I don't see how I can be an hour out because 36524.25/3=12174.75 exactly. So we have to subtract 0.75 day (18 hr) from the time you gave initially, making it 5.09 a.m. I called it 5 a.m. because we're not shot from guns exactly. My double-your-age date is wrong, too. It should be 31 Aug 08 at 6 pm, if you were born at 6 a.m. 10/10/75.

Rosie's date of birth

17 November 1942 (n = 17).

[Rosie] Did you take daylight saving time into account?

uohrixg yzrqmefdx

uohrixg yzrqmefdx

bvkj kqna hojxkmtd uzrltjvx ityksr owucr nxdawbgvc

(rab) No. I will have no truck with such arbitrary adjustments in my sophisticated numerical analyses :-). You are right, of course, provided you were born in Britain, or possibly Spain or some West African countries.
(Bigsmith) And so are you. (6 pm, they tell me).

Accuracy

[uohrixg yzrqmefdx] That, good sir, was jolly close, as I believe even Rosie would acknowledge. I do think though that you have missed by a bit. Rosie does not live 'south of the border' and nor does he live so far west of the meridian.
I would give you 'bvyk anq.s and ityksr+polar co-ordinates' when related to the orbit of Triton as seen from Earth.

[Rosie] 6 pm aye? Then by applying the Euclidian theory of longitudinal drift to a trans-Mercator projection I determine that that would have been in Crowborough, Sussex.

(Bigsmith) Correct yet again. Amazing. Would have been Purley (nudge, nudge) but for the war. The OS Grid is a Transverse Mercator projection BTW. Very gudermannian. (Dujon) 0° 03' 36.8" W. Can't be too accurate; don't want to go in the wrong house.

[Rosie] Bugger, I thought I'd made it up! I remember we have discussed things map-wise before. I do enjoy a good OS map so it must have been subconcious. WildpantsMC may be long gone but the player profiles page is still on-line and easy to search.

That's how I know about your London Welsh parents!

Apologies for my recent absence

I can proudly announce the arrival on planet Earth of Maxwell Theodore Stanley Kirby!

MTSK

Hullo Max.

Maxwell - he'll be a demon at physics. Congratulations. Hope all are well.
(Bigsmith) I thought that's where you must have got it. Still up, is it? I haven't looked for years.

as per MCiOS

Welcome Max!!

Ex Libri Bardus

Are we done? Does anyone have a good idea with which to replace it?

[SM] Bear in mind there's been an open game slot beneath it for quite some time now. Ideas and energy seem somewhat lacking in the Morniverse lately.

Bent Saws

Don't count your chickens before the fat lady sings.

Unused Games

[Tuj] I was under the impression that there was some sort of inner council that came up with games and were the only ones able to make them. I should add that I don't have any good game ideas with which to replace Ex Libri Bardus, I was just thinking that it was looking a bit threadbare, and that my last few moves in it missed the point so widely that the sooner they were hidden in the archive the better. I don't know what I was thinking when I made them (he said in his best "Kryten" voice).

Bent Saws

[Software] That sounds like something Marlon from The Perishers would say. I like it.

I've done the honours for Ex Libri.

Max

Cheers for the good wishes, folks - pictures are up on my Facebook!

Mad Max

[Uncle Korky] Congratulations and felicitations to all. I haven't gone a-facebooking as a picture does not always tell a thousand words. The question, therefore, is, "is he smart?"

Bent Saws

Where there's muck, there's hope. Let's have a go. [UK] Congratulations to you on the arrival of Maxwell. A silver hammer is in the post.

Bent Saws

A jolly good idea and I like the game name too. Let lightning strike while the iron's hot.

Bent Saws

Raak, I loved your "bank" saw. It's (not) funny because it's true.

Sponsored silence

OK, it's been silent for a week... someone say something!

oblig.

something

Not that I'm proposing any changes, but I wonder if games would become more or less active if they weren't stamped with the date and time of the last move. Less active is my guess.

Max

[Dujon] Can't vouch for smart, yet, but I'd like to think there's potential! [Kim] Ta muchly!

ONe week later

Bright and cold here (can also be said for me as well as the weather) and today I am going to take to the road. Enough of nerves, I've just got to drive. But after 25 years of driving on the other side of the road, and the other side of the car, it's all a bit weird.

Left Hooker

Hi pen, hold your breath and prepare for a few rapped knuckles on you left hand! You'll get used to it quicker than you think. Just watch out for those nasty entry/exit points that the Clogs like so much, you find yourself merging with traffic entering the motorway as you are trying to leave. Very unnerving the first time.

The bit that un-nerves me is the crossroads with no marked priority here in the village - like a US 4-way stop. I struggle to use those to turn left across oncoming traffic and end up lurching about.

Technical writing test

Changing the subject just a little, I've got a job interview tomorrow for a tech writer role. And they've given me a little test document to polish. It contains a clever twist on bad documentation technique I've not seen before: 'Note how Figure 1 does not show the following....'

I just love that. Specially creating a diagram that doesn't show the thing you want to highlight. Hats off to 'em. I'm just hoping this document was intentionally altered to make a harder test. But in these cases there's always the risk that a legitimate document really was genuinely that badly-written. Still, if so, at least I'll have plenty of rewriting work to do.

This page was NOT intentionally left blank, comes to mind :o).

This Page Intentionally Blank

[Software] TPILB has a very good pedigree. It was used extensively in the 1970s when replacement pages for technical manuals had only half the content of the original, resulting in one blank side right where everyone had hitherto been used to finding text. It was a way of avoiding the (then) expensive customer service calls about non-existent missing text that went nowhere. It also meant that the original contents page would still work, mostly, as the page numbering wasn't screwed up by the change. The only alternative would be to reprint the entire chapter from the change onward which would likely prove to be prohibitively expensive. These days, one often sees such material reproduced either electronically, which makes no sense, or on single-sided copies of the original material, which makes sense but is still odd when you come across it.

Tech Speak

[SM] I know, I'm an engineer and at one point in my distant past was responsible for the printing and distribution of technical manual updates (on a subcontract). It still bemuses the uninitiated though.

You Tech the High Road

Ah! Reminds me when I was a technical author myself. I can still take a 20-year-old New World gas cooker to pieces... Just don't ask me to put it together again when I've drawn the pictures.

[Software] Sorry for lecturing the knowledgable.

I think it's spring.

[penelope] Are you loving Holland? Are the tulips growing yet? Have you been overrun by clog-wearing mice?

[SM] Starting to withstand/endure/cope with Holland rather than like it or love it. Still not quite sure what I'm doing here... The tulips are just poking their leaves through in the garden (we're further south than the main tulip-growing areas - there are mostly pear and apple orchards and celeriac fields here), and there are precious few mice, or even rabbits. Apparently the water table is too high for them to dig warrens. But there are lots of hares, herons, some large bird of prey that I have yet to identify, kingfishers (ijsvogels - I've also realised I have a whole new vocabulary of wildlife to learn) and the most interefered-with trees I have ever seen in my life. There is not one tree here that has been allowed to grow accoring to its natural form. Every single tree has been either trimmed, clipped, pollarded, coppiced, brashed or felled. Tree-fiddling is the national obsession.

Clogland

You'll grow to love the place, pen. The south is a bit severe, the Dutch reclaimed most of the land so they do what they like with it. I lived in Nord Holland which is a bit less over-cultivated and the trees are allowed to do tree things, to a degree anyway. I lived in a town called Huizen, my garden used to back on the Ijsselmeer but it is now about 1km away!

[Softers] I take it all back. The invitation to an interview for a promising job which was issued and then witdrawn has been issued again. I'm hopeful once more. More on this later...

Expansionism

[Software] Those Dutch hey? Having given up their world exploits they are now about to invade the Channel by stealth. I shall now make a concerted effort to monitor the Indian and Pacific Oceans; the thought of the whole of Huizen sneaking across to reclaim Van Deimen's Land has my kernees kernocking.

[Dujon] We in Britain have a cunning plan to foil the Dutch takeover by stealth of the North Sea. As they gradually move out to rebuild the land bridge we are simultaneously moving the coast of East Anglia inland. By the time the Dutch catch us up we’ll all be in Dublin.

[penelope] I expect Software is right and that once the fast-relocation shellshock has worn off, the ground turns colours other than brown and you have gainful employment you will wonder why you didn't move years ago.

(INJ) Coastal erosion will see to that anyway, so they say.

Those Darn Dikes

[ImNotJohn] This plan will play merry hell with the old Risk and Diplomacy games. I expect after-market stickers will be available for pre-game coastline reconfiguration.

* waves from Santa Fe *

*twiddles thumbs*

I had an interview yesterday, and did a looong written test today, by email. Now I'm anxiously waiting to hear if I've got a fantastic three-day a week, English speaking/writing job at the university that pays as much as my five-day-a-week not-for-profit job did back in Blighty...

Mmmm. Part-time.

Huisvrouw

I can see you getting used to the lifestyle in Clogland, pen.

Mmmmm....five-day-a-week.

And the rest of the time, I am...

Housework, looking after the windy miller (who does 5 x 12 hour days and all day Saturday at the mill), and some freelance work... Pah!

(pen) 60 hours a week sounds like trubble at mill.

[Rosie] Sounds like a part-time job to me :( *(moan, moan, bleat, whinge etc etc etc ad nauseam until someone points out I chose to do this for a living, and that I get to live in a pub)*

[Phil] Presumably you also have the option to hire someone so that you work fewer hours, but with obvious consequences for your finances.

Welcome to London Heathrow, The World's Most Miserable Airport. I've just been biometrised and hassled at security despite the fact I've been in secure areas for the last twelve hours.

[rab] Yes I could pay someone to some some of the stuff I do. But they wouldn't do it as well as I do. If they did, I wouldn't able to afford them. Also, I enjoy 95% of what I do - especially the quality control :-)

[Phil] I hear you. The windy miller is the same - he takes huge pride in the work that he does (construction project management - and this one is a HUGE project) but being on site to make sure things happen on schedule takes its toll and he's usually too exhausted to do anything on Sunday - which is the only day we have at home together. So much for moving here to spend more time together. Part of my 'job' at the moment is taking care of him, as much as he'll let me. *sigh*

*was in England for three days and thought it was lovely*

* was on Iona and Colonsay for four days and thought they were lovely *

*was in East Grinstead for two hours and thought it was awful*

*is envious of rab*

*was in the Crowne Plaza Buckingham Gate for 2 hours and it was so dull we moved to the Holiday Inn, Oxford Street*

*was at home*

*thought, therefore was*

[CdM] Was what? ;o)

(pen) Cogitavit ergo erat. I dunno.

*just got a phone call telling her she's got the job*

[pen] Congratulations!

*Thought that congratulations were due to Penelope*

*just got a phone call from Job*

belen

Well done.

*Has an idea for a game*

Called "News has come to Harvard": we make up new elements for the periodic table and provide hilarious, surreal or topical explanations of their nature and purpose. Eg:

Excusium: constituent element in whitewash. Frequently used by politicians.

Any support?

rab's phonecall

Is that Job of Old Testament fame?

[Kim] I see! Good title, tidy idea. One on board =)

[Tuj] Thanks. Any against? Where should I slot it?

Luminous silly Kates

(Kim) Go ahead.

Thanks. No slots currently available here or anywhere else. Has "Bent Saws" reached its proverbial, do you think?

Outage

Hello there. I'm going to be taking the site down for a short while for an upgrade.

Outrage

Let's see if that has worked? It seems I've even stopped the galloping slashes this time!

Just saw the Elements game. There is a site that I had bookmarked and only deleted on Friday which is very enjoyable. Apparently now been published as a book - http://www.chm.bris.ac.uk/sillymolecules/sillymols.htm - Molecules with Silly Names. Some of them were featured on QI a few years ago.

jdf397dhf

aaaa525zzz

Shh! It's fallen asleep.

shavonda@hotmail.com

suck all the channel on tv sucks badly

Parse the preceding sentence, thoughtfully provided by someone.

Actually, I think the real problem with TV is that most of the channels suck quite well.

Suck all. The channel on TV sucks badly.
It's the voice from the future. When interactive TV is the norm a lonely politician's husband has to get a 'helping hand' when the signal gets a bit fuzzy.

Suck! All the channel on TV sucks. Badly.

There's usually suck all on TV worth watching anyway.

Speaking of which, ten days without a move suggests that UK GAZETEER FILM CLUB might have outlived its span. Does anyone have a suggestion for another one?

Six word stories?

"Six word stories?" Simons suggested. Silence.

(No, really, I'd be up for that.)

Six word stories

I was about to suggest that

Six Word Stories

How does it go?

You tell a story in six

Damn! Bad planning on my part

With a short preface (say "Story One", and so on) this could be hatched inside the Eight Moves Game, giving it a kick up the jacksy also.

I love the idea of 'Precisely Eight Words' being bent to stories. I may try that, even if it's not an official diversion... Also, I had an idea the other day for a one-line-at-a-time Gilbert & Sullivan play. Ambitious, but not impossible. Thought I'd run it up the flagpole of the collective.

Good news, bad news.

Hello there. The good news is that the company that provides the disk space and bandwidth this site needs to function is upgrading the capacity of both of them this afternoon, at no charge. The bad news is that this necessitates a change of IP address (the server will be moving from Edinburgh to London).

What this means in practice is that after 4pm BST today, some of you will see the old version, and some of you the new. You'll be able to tell the difference, because you won't be able to post to the old one. It typically takes about 24hours, maybe longer, for the process to complete. Restarting your browser/computer/modem may (or may not) help - it depends on where the old IP addresses are being cached.

Don't be perturbed if the site fails to load for a bit.

Back up

Right, this is back up, but you can only get here if you know how to get here.

First!

Er, second, then

In the medals!

*sour*

Yes, you can tell it's London-hosted now. It just feels so much more... familiar.

(Pj) Aye. Mebbe.

[Projoy] A euphemism for contemptuous?

But is it Sarf of the river, in which case no-one will visit it outside the hours of daylight?

It'll soon be wanting a little cottage in the country for weekends though...

I see the spammers have found the film club - perhaps this is indeed a good point to pull the plug on it.

Eight word stories.

If this is proposed as a new game (perhaps to replace the Film Club) then may I suggest a title?
"A man was born; he lived, then died."

A novel in 6 words

If it's going to be eight words, then I'll post my favourite 6-worder here (not mine but can't remember who did write it - though Orson Welles is the name in my head):
For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

[INJ] Hemingway.

Another game idea

Tarol Hunt (of goblinscomic.com) has been writing nonsense Twitters, usually of the form 'If I ...' Some of these are worthy of Jack Handy himself: "If I was stung by a bee, it'd better not be a laser bee because those guys are puuuuuure laser." Can we have a go? "If I was a caveman, I probably wouldn't ever say 'Yabba Dabba Doo' unless I was being deeply ironic."

"If I was going to speak, I'd try to be there to hear it. It'd be a pity to miss one after all these years."

this week...

I can't believe no-one has anything to say for a whole weekend! So this week, I'm going to post something in here every day. Monday: Whit Monday public holiday here in the Netherlands, so I'm accompanying the Windy Miller (a veteran of four well-executed restorations of stationary engines - portable and wheelbarrow-sized sources of farmyard power, some of which are almost 100-years old) to the largest exhibition of stationary engines in the country, in Eindhoven. I will come back smelling of kerosene, a bit sunburnt and a bit sooty. In return, I get a day's outing somewhere cultural. I'm lining up the Vermeer exhibition at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, and a Tennyson Society thing in England next week.

Eindhoven

[pen] I don't expect that you'll have time to visit the Philips Museum while you are there, but it is worth a shot. No holiday here, that was last week in secular UK. I spent a surprisingly dry and sunny weekend in west Wales, even managed an afternoon on the beach, though the sun failed to hit my Channel Island hardened skin.

Hols

I've been in Scotland for a week, with no access (although I was told that wi-fi at Boat of Garten post office cost 'buttons'). 5 days of mostly showery weather and then a stunning day on Friday, so I left the ladies to go cycling in Abernethy Forest and walked into the heart of the Cairngorms (Loch Avon via the top of Bynack Mor). I now have a nicely-burnt left side to my face - the perils of a circular walk.

Unhols

On the Costa Brava for three days last week, attending a conference held at a hotel on the beach. Wednesday was free, so a colleague and I drove up to see Cadaqués. Came home with a developing cough that took out most of the weekend.

Yet another Game idea - well not really

Some herbert has put something in Carpe Diem - Fish of the Day. It was a good game that ended five years ago and could be worth restarting. Any takers?

[Raak] Not swiney cough, one hopes?
[Rosie] Agree - a cracking game which generated huge chuckleness way back then. I have a hunch that it was the game that spawned Breadmaster's legendary " For pity's sake child ..." and then something about tying down the moons of Jupiter. Anyway, my friend, just thought I'd point out that the same game is currently steaming along in OrangeMC under the title Ubersetzen Sie (add umlaut to first letter) - but if one don't play in there - the information I have imparted is rather irrelevant. :)

(Chalky) Let's continue with it on Orange, then, which frankly I'd forgotten about.

[Chalky] No *cough* fever, so *cough* *cough* hopefu*cough*lly not. *cough* *cough* *cough*

Tuesday's events

Tuesday... hmmm... work. Gridlock traffic getting into and out of Rotterdam, too much good coffee trying to stay awake through meetings, and an hour and a half of ironing when I finally got home. Wednesday? Gridlocked traffic again this morning - a 34km drive took an hour and ten minutes, not enough breakfast (have already made a start on my packed lunch an it's only 09.40) but there's the prospect of a proper English haircut with a proper English hairdresser in England on Saturday morning (it means I can actually ask for the haircut I want, rather than have the one the Dutch dameskappers want to give me) so anything is bearable this week. Even another 3mph crawl home this evening.

Saw Holland (well, bits of it) on the TV last night in an advert. It looked frenetic.

(penelope, Re: Ironing) Can't you just feed the clothes through the millstone?

ironmilling

[SM] Nice idea, but the milling faces of millstones are designed for cutting and shearing the grains, not merely crushing them, so you'd have to piece together the shreds of clothing afterwards. More trouble than it's worth really. The drive home this evening was only 45 minutes - the best time for a week now. Some bits of Holland are frenetic. Luckily, I live in a nice rural bit :o)

freneticism

(pen) I thought the Dutch were sort of stoic.

[Rosie] Yeah, but they drive ruthlessly on the motorways in their Calvinistic rush to be at home being stoic.

Green ironing

What you need is not a grain mill, but an olive press. Of course it would be hard to get the oil stains out afterwards, but you could definitely get a good crease in those underpants. That would have the additional advantage of being drivable by donkey-power, so you could iron on a windless day.

donkeyfarts

[INJ] I don't understand how you can control the donkey's flatulence so accurately.

Donkey Flatulence

(penelope) I think you just have to stop them eating the mashed olives.

* waves from Haifa *

* waves from Rehovot *

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