“To be fair, that’s how labour just won.”

Exactly, and in large part owing to disaffected Conservative voters ticking the Lib Dem box rather than drawing a cock and balls on the ballot paper!

“Don’t underestimate the amount of people who when asked ‘what do you want to see in a political leader?’ answer ‘a paunchy, middle-aged bloke in a wetsuit on a big water slide’”

That’s good.

Appologies to the Lib Dems as well, I forgot about them. Perhaps because they are the box that people tick when they’d rather draw a cock and balls on the ballot paper. (I should know, I’ve voted for them twice in the past).

The Lib Dem vote is more an expression of how the electorate view the failings of their preferred party rather than enthusiasm for any particular values or policy expressed by the Lib Dems..

Hoping for a Reform – Conservative merger of any sort is nihilistic in the extreme, do we really want the Conservatives to turn into The Front Nationale? Those Labour supporters licking their lips at such a prospect should be careful what they wish for.

What Badenoch has in her favour is consistency, something both her admirers and detractors can agree on. The result isn’t even in yet already the conversation, from both the left and the right is how Jenrick will flip-flop at the first opportunity.

I don’t know about you but I’d rather the far right stay in the margins of British politics. Badenoch will divide a Reform Party that like a wolf in a dog’s costume have preyed upon voter disaffection based (amongst other things) on what they see as a lack of consistency from the political classes.

It might be good for the political health of the country if a clearer offer were made to them:

Labour=Left Wing.:

Conservatives = Right Wing:

Reform = Far right.

Greens = Far left

(Apologies to the Scots and Northern Irish, whose voting patterns follow a more complcated route)

“I reckon my bet on Honest Bob is definitely going to pay out. The chinless, corrupt, morality-free, right wing, privately educated, Oxbridge, middle-aged white guy was always a shoe in”

Like your 9/1 bet on Braverman eh binners???

“Bring the pasta to a rolling boil. Put the lid on. Turn the heat off. The water stays hot enough to cook the pasta perfectly well.”

Acceptably maybe  it not perfectly. Though I’d say for fresh egg spaghetti it’s fine, for any thing thicker, like tagliatell or pasta shapes it is sub optimal.

Probably the most important pasta question though is do increased energy costs eliminate the savings made from using dried pasta instead of fresh??

“Put the lid on and turn the heat down once it starts to simmer – you use less electricity and less of the contents evaporate away”

You’re late to the party IdleJon, we’ve gone all Tomorrows World and American Scientific on this subject now.

Simmering the pasta with the lid on will result in the starch forming a frothy mess that will burp out of the pan all over the hob. That’s why a rolling boil with a wooden spoon laid on top of the pan (which stops the froth from boiling over) is preferable.

However, I have discovered an energy saving happy medium, I now boil my pasta with the lid half on with the wooden spoon poking out, which still achieves the rolling boil, no starch boiling over result but with the gas on slightly less than full chat, thus closing the gaps in the energy / time / quality coefficient to a level that the average STW  forum member might find acceptable.

Reading that article there seems to be a lot of factors at play, including (and I stand corrected) evaporation.

The article does clarify that hot water may not freeze faster than cold water but will freeze faster than lukewarm water. When I tried my ice cube tray experiment I filled one tray with lukewarm water from a filter jug sat at room temp (not cold from the tap) and the other with hot.

I’m still fascinated by those bottles of water that freeze in an instant with cracks both visible and audible, like an electric shock

“Is that actually true?  If it is then it’s surely negligible and probably as much to do with evaporation (ie less liquid) than convection currents.”

Yes, ’tis true. I was sceptical myself so I tried it and it worked. It’s  not about evaporation, it is as you mentioned, convection currents and you can see it in the results.

A standard ice cube tends to be clearer on the outside and white in the middle, kind of illustrating how the water got cold on the outside and progressively colder towards the centre.

An ice cube made from hot water has cracks and fissures running through it, tracing the path of the convection currents as they redistributed temperature through the body of water.

Sh*t ice cubes though, they tend to crack and disintegrate when you put them in your drink, turning your Bacardi and Coke into a Slush Puppy.

(Perhaps that’s how they make slush Puppies? Using ice made from hot water so it crushes more easily??)

You started it Cougar! I’m tempted to refer you to YouTube videos of bottles of water that are hovering around freezing point that instantly turn to ice when tapped lightly, you can se how the convection current principle works within a fraction of a second as the water instantly turns to ice as the cold travels through the water like bolts of lightning. The same as happens within a more gradual timeframe when freezing ice cubes from hot water.

But the more important question is why has that bottle of sparkling mineral water that I opened yesterday and put in the fridge gone flat?

I think we all know the answer….

“The pan of boiling water frothing away with the burner on full chat , because it cooks faster is exactly the same logic that dictates a room MUST heat up faster with the thermostat at 30c instead of 20c”

Not really, transference of temperature is affected by motion.  For example, ice cubes will freeze more quickly in a tray of hot water than they will in a tray of cold water because of the turbulence present in hot water.

Ergo the pasta will heat up more quickly and evenly in a pan of fast moving boiling water than it will in a simmering one, albeit both being at the same 100 degree temperature.

Owing to the price of energy I too have tried to cook pasta at a simmer but the results take longer and are not quite as good so I’ve reverted to the rolling boil method, at least the hob is on for a shorter amount of time so the savings made by boiling lower but longer might be minimal.

Having worked in an Italian restaurant I was taught that pasta should be cooked at a rolling boil.

This helps prevent the pasta from sticking together when it’s cooked, wether it’s dried or fresh.

With fresh pasta, which cooks in 2 or 3 minutes it helps the heat get to all the pasta quickly by moving the water around with a bit of turbulence. If you simmer it, the pasta towards the outside of the pan will cook a little more slowly than that in the centre.

Boiling it quickly gets the starch out quicker (starch is like glue) and you don’t want your pasta glued together, so pasta should be cooked with the lid off, with a wooden spoon laid across the top to stop the starchy water boiling over.

Was at OT today and the thing that struck me was how physically strong Liverpool looked. They won all the important battles but was as if they still had something in reserve, their fitness levels were excellent and they never looked tired for a minute, heads up and shoulders back at all times.

It’s clear that Arne Slot’s style is going to be less heavy metal and more hard rock. They’re going to finish above Arsenal this season and they’re going to wrong-foot a few teams with their more solid tactics.

Oh, and a shout out for Wetherspoons. When I go out in Chorlton Wetherspoons is the place where I still see all the generations, the trendy bars sell beer at nearly a fiver a pint and are generally populated by single track types.

Wetherspoons on the other hand has beer at exactly half the price, so that’s where the kids tend to go as well as the old folk.

I go to both by the way, live and let live etc.

“You’re going to deny that in your day kids didn’t get drunk at houseparties and make out awkwardly on the sofa and instead went to drink Boddingtons bitter in the Dog And Partridge”

Don’t be silly, in my day we did both, I said these days kids don’t tend to mingle intergenerationally in pubs whereas in my day they did.. I didn’t deny that we also got drunk at house parties and the local parks.

And in my day it was Holsten Pils because the adverts were cool, not Boddingtons.

Pubs are (were) Inter-generational. Sneaking into a pub as an underage kid was a right of passage.

It meant that you learnt from your elders and had to mind your behaviour if you wanted to be accepted. It bought you incrementally into the adult world.

Stricter implementation or age restrictions, I.D. requirements and stricter implementation of the law haven’t helped either. Just means the kids get someone to go to Lidl and go crazy in an adult free environment.

“Yeah smoking drugs in doors is the peak of awesomeness in 2024. Proper edgy.”

Edgy or not, he had the best night he had in ages and I for one am happy for him. Whatever happened to having a bit of fun?

The irony of people drinking themselves to death in public houses seems to be lost on some people. A pub isn’t a health spa, (although the social health benefits of pubs should not be ignored) it’s more likely that it’ll be the alcohol that kills you than a bit of passive smoking in the pub garden.

“So middle class = non-smoker, working class = smoker?”

Basically yes, it’s why you can buy a bottle of wine for the same price as it was 25 years ago but fags have gone up tenfold.

A massive tax on predominantly the working classes.

“I’d rather see that focus placed onto our diet which is currently causing a health epidemic”

Given your user name, I’d imagine that diet would be meat, lots of meat.

If the smoking ban and skyrocketing tobacco prices had a positive impact on people’s health then we should have seen a marked increase in life expectancy over the last 15 or so years.

But we haven’t, in fact life expectancy is declining. The biggest influences on the lowering life expectancy are supposedly loneliness, isolation and poverty.

It wasn’t just the pubs that were affected, it was bingo halls and cafes, the elderly were hit hardest by the ban. The govt may have saved the elderly from the dangers of passive smoking but for many, the only social contact they had was closed off to them, so they stayed at home by themselves and died of loneliness.

Poorer people tend to smoke, so why not make them poorer by massively increasing the price of tobacco. Keep the middle classes happy though, you can get a cheap bottle of good wine for the same price as you could a generation ago. Meanwhile, tobacco has increased in price ten fold.

Of course smoking is thoroughly unpleasant for those who dont smoke, but there are unintended consequences to every action, perhaps the worst being that kids at school are no longer sneaking a flag in the bike sheds, they are vaping cannabis, or what they think is cannabis but is more than likely spice.

Spice the drug that gained traction once David Blunkett up- classified cannabis back in the 2000’s. Spice didn’t even exist before that legislation.

The nanny state wants to make everyone better but it actually makes everyone iller.

Nurse.

Seeing as everyone seems to wants to talk about the Nazi’s, have we done Haj Amin al-Husseini yet? .

“I do however find it interesting, and a bit depressing, that the civil war raging in Sudan gets so little mention.”

I know a family from Sudan whose parents were chased out into a Libyan refugee camp. The children were born and grew up in the camp and they stayed there for years until the U.S./Anglo French coalition started bombing the place and the locals became more hostile after Gaddafi’s demise.

A large part of what has been going on in Sudan  has been Arab militias trying to ethnically cleanse Sudan of black Africans, and that doesn’t square with  current white oppressor / people of colour narrative that is so popular within the universities and much of the media.

I’m a little suspicious that the acronym BAME was substituted with the acronym POC because Jewish people could be included under the BAME umbrella and it was deemed necessary by some to shift Jewish people from the ethnic minority column into the white oppressor column and moreover, to the top of that column.

Which is stupid really, as we know the term Semite refers to people from the Eastern Mediterranean, thus affirming that Jewish people were ethnically from that region, as opposed to being of white European origin.

“if Hamas and Hezbollah had an air force or armour they would be blowing up as many children in Israel as they could”

Short answer… Yes.

Hyperoptic for the last couple of years, they instal their own fibre and download speed and upload sped have been better than advertised!

150meg broadband, was £20 for first two years, now £25. Miles better than previous BT and Talk Talk offerings, that barely registered half the advertised speeds.

I feel a bit weird when I read the Guardian too Bruce.

In fact anything written by Zoe Williams has tended to make me all dizzy with confusion.

File the Guardian with the Daily Mail these days when it comes to making sense / relationship to the truth.

Deleted.

No complaints from the French rider, he sees it as part of racing.

Props to him really, he helped make it a cracking race, think he was just cooked at the end.

I think they create dual routes like that to encourage naughty moves like that. Proper racing, proper drama, probably exactly the outcome the course designers were hoping for.

“’m sure there’s a layer of the “woke” insult that just means “I don’t like it”.”

That’s a fair point, a little more charitable than ascribing everybody who uses the word as a bigot. Ultimately, whilst some use it  viciously and some wear it as a badge of pride, for the most part it’s just used lazily.

Just be kind folks!

Masterclass.

This is awesome stuff

Lewis asking his engineer if he had the pace to catch Russell with 12 laps to go suggests to me that that was the point at which he knew Russell wasn’t going to do a second stop.

I’d heard that he hadn’t been informed when the initial decision was made on the other side of the garage, had he known he would have driven harder immediately after his own, second pit stop. As it was, he left the pits thinking that all he had to do was maintain the advantage he thought he had.

I think the glum expression on Lewis’s face at the end of the race was the realisation that seeing as he’s leaving Mercedes at the end of the season, he might be playing second fiddle for the rest of the season and miht not be included in all the strategic conversations, which is understandable really.

“I’m puzzled why any of them are standing now. Recent history has shown the relatively short term nature of Tory leadership”

Have you seen the pension package?

So basically the engineer/s forgot there was no warm down lap at Spa.

Also, did anyone else notice Toto Wolf’s expressionless face when the chequered flag dropped? Is it because he knew the car was going to come in underweight? Or was it because he knew that Lewis would be fuming because he hadn’t been told that Russell wouldn’t be coming in for a second stop and he would be racing him in he finale?

Had Lewis known, he would have got a move on much earlier.

“I’m perplexed as to why people misappropriated a term that applied exclusively to the African-American struggle, when the existing discourse within gender research is already awash with terminology?”

Intersectionality… It has been the dominant ideology within Universities for a couple of decades and has filtered down into all the institutions. It explores the overlap between different categories such as race, gender, sexuality, capitalism, climate etc, etc.

Whilst it is true that there can be an overlap between categories it is applied in a blanket fashion in order to suffocate discourse. Instrumentalzed in this way it means if you offer criticism regarding one or other of those categories you will be assumed to be critical of all those categories and therefore a bigot.

Intersectional theory started within feminism, where it was observed that being a black woman presented specific difficulties that being black alone, or being a woman alone did not. It was an intersectional condition.

Over the years the concept of intersectionalism has grown to include an ever expanding number of categories but what tends to happen is that everyone begins to piggy back on the original racial context,

So if you’re critical of any of the sacred categories, you will be called racist. The second Bill Burr video posted at the top of this thread explains this perfectly.

Usually the drivers weave around on the victory lap to pick up extra rubber from the track but for some reason there wasnt a victory lap at this GP?

“If your response to “be nice to people” is “or else?” then, well, I’ve got nothing. Do you only aspire be a good person when threatened?”

Well, at least you admit that the ‘be nice’ meme is a threat!

“Do you meet a lot of people who introduce themselves going “hi, my name is Terry and I’m woke”?”

On this thread?.. Yes. There’s literally dozens of you proudly self identifying as woke.

“Regardless of topic, sneering at people speaks more about the sneerer than the sneeree.”

Oh the irony, this entire thread has been an enormous sneer fest.

The “rules” as you put it are simply “be nice to people.””

Or else…

“The rules are so unclear.”

That’s the point though isn’t it? We’re bombarded by an ever expanding suite of new words, phrases and acronyms that serve to bamboozle rather than explain.

My contribution to the confusion would be to introduce the term ‘Alt-Left’, so as to discriminate between the cuddly wokesters and those who seek to instrumentalize the suffering of one group or another to further their own ends.

The disco dancing sections reminded me of David Brent in The Office.