Likes dancing like nobodies watching, farting like nobody has a sense of smell, and if you can’t handle me at my worst, you don’t deserve to get in my underwear 😉

And no topless selfies please.

Thanks for the link Hels… You might feel that I’m a sociopath, but other people’s feelings mean nothing to me 😉

Glad this thread got back to the lighthearted banter that I’m sure Dez intended rather than falling into the self righteous abyss some seem to prefer. It shouldn’t need reiterating, but the majority of my posts have been *slightly* tongue in cheek. Yes, I’ve done a lot of Internet dating, but I’ve never been on a first date where a little part of me hasn’t hoped it’ll be for the last time.

And I’m cautiously optimistic about the latest: she gets me, I get her, we click… Maybe she’s a sociopath too!

Ps: of course single men know more about women than married men! How can someone who’s only intimate with one woman know as much as someone who’s intimate with a different woman every week?? 😉

I don’t think the first half is so wide of the mark – and applies to men too. Second part I’m not so sure about.

Taken out of context, it does look like a wild generalisation Nick, but the sentence was specifically in reference to those women that are very keen to get overly familiar overly quickly. So yes, quite right in that the 2nd half of the quote isn’t the case for every woman in the world!!

Right, off out to ride my bike, then home for some fine wines, Belgian chocolates, and some good ol’ fashioned lady lovin’

Ohhh look, ohhh the Girls have got involved

You see? That’s NLP that… 😉

Likes casual lesbianism, Rachel and Cinnamon Girl

I only open emails from 7s or above… Anyway, my internet dating days might be over! 🙂

It might come as a surprise to discover that not all women are the same. You know, like they might have individualities, characters, desires and everything!

To acknowledge this would make for a very dull thread…

Casanova

FCOL what a load of old tosh Shibby.

That’s my experience of women on internet dating sites. Of course, I’m sure there are women that embrace single life, buy sensible shoes, stop shaving their arm pits and dabble in casual lesbianism, but they tend not to go on match dot com.

15 years.

For the record, I didn’t call faustus a smartarse.

Likes beaker-baths, reading posts properly, and being sufficiently educated to not have to google what “ingrate” means.

Would like to meet similar but with big baps.

found it the most boring and generally pointless 30 minutes of my life!

I can imagine! Wow, 30 minutes to ride 10 miles?? That’s not even zone 3 pace!

When I did TTs on a regular road bike, I found it useful to hold the bars at the tops, right next to the stem and drop your wrists right down so your shoulders are as close to the bars as you can comfortably ride.

You get the same low position as riding on the drops but with the advantage of narrowing your frontal area.

And definitely +1 for riding there, and keep riding right up to your start time, then go full gas* as you’ll be warmed up and lungs working.

*Zone 5, well above threshold, you should be looking at 90-95% of max HR for a 10. It’s gonna hurt like hell, but if you’re not close to death when you cross the line, you’ve not dug deep enough.

I’m just wondering what I’m ungrateful for…

I don’t need to know what paper you read to know the kind of ingrate you have clearly expressed yourself to be…

As with the fairer sex, I find Guardian readers are equally predictable. They have a propensity for using nouns that they’ve perhaps read in the Guardian, or heard other smart-arses uttering, and they use them completely out of context in a bid to sound cerebral.

The sort of person that uses the term “soulmate” without irony and is attracted to people that read the Guardian probably isn’t any help to anyone. 🙄

Also NLP?

It’s basically fine-tuning the things you say and the way in which you say it in order to trigger specific behavioral responses.

Like my example earlier about the flirting comment. You basically encourage the other person to work for your attention/affection/approval…

NLP?

That’s a whole new thread! Let’s get Dez walking before he runs 😉

Some useful tips though

It’s all the same process, whatever your motivation for doing it. And to be honest, my experiences have been quite an eye opener into the female psyche.

The main thing I’ve learnt is that they’re far more predictable than most men think, and certainly far more predictable than they would like us to believe.

Whether you want to admit it or not, it’s all game-playing. Some guys might use their sense of humour, their lifestyle, their values to win women over, and really, that’s all I’ve ever done. But a bit of understanding about they angle they approach internet dating, plus a bit of NLP goes a very long way.

It’s just a matter of playing the game better than everyone else. 😉

“Dating” is not the same as “being in a relationship”. And I wouldn’t expect complete monogamy from someone I was messaging on a dating website.

I’ve dated more than one person at the same time, I’ve dated more than on person on the same day! And I’m sure I’ve dated people who have been conversing with others, and probably going on dates.

I think the nature of the internet dating beast leads to those questions, not “talking about feelings”.

PS, is your expression when typing as smug as it comes across? If so, that might be the reason for your lack of success Junky… 😉

I’ve had a procedure where my penis was carved by surgical laser into a fun sized but fully functioning replica of Luther Vandross

That’s weird, I had my penis surgically carved into a half-size replica of a fully functioning penis… Honest!

Really can’t see the point in PAs, apart from the fact that you need never lose your car keys ever again!

I find a lot are overly familiar, very quick to use pet names etc. Part of this is often down to the fact that they’ve possibly spent several years in a relationship and this is the norm to them.

It’s a double-edged sword though – the overwhelming majority of women I’ve dated for any length of time have been desperate to build a veneer of familiarity.

The predictability of it is almost amusing – first they try to establish if you’re dating others or if you’re still on the dating website (they’re VERY quick to tell you that they’ve let their membership lapse, or they’re so sick of being pestered by morons that they’ve deleted their account), then they’ll start on the “are we just dating, or are we boyfriend/girlfriend?” conversation. Next it’s dropping hints about the “L” word… I usually bail at this point.

But I suppose it’s quite understandable… For women, finding themselves single after a long term relationship puts them firmly out of their comfort zone. I guess they just want to get back to that circumstance as soon as they can.

Love shibs long list of dates then moans about serial daters – thats you that is

Admittedly I’ve used dating sites as an easy way of meeting women, but not just for sex. But there’s certainly no point dating a woman you have no chemistry with! And one thing I have learnt is that what might come across as chemistry when texting, rarely if ever translates to the real world. There’s no way to know if you click until you meet, and even then I wouldn’t form an opinion on a first date unless she was a complete no-go. In which case I’d just bed her 😉

Slow is for daters who want a relationship

Absolutely not. See above.

Edit: For the record, I’ve been dating the same woman for approaching 2 months now, from Match.

POF = Plenty of Freaks 😉

I never go for women with kids because I don’t have any, but if I remove the children filter, the standard of women jumps right up. So I wouldn’t be surprised at finding an absolute cracker on a free dating website.

Even with my picky criteria, I’ve dated a consultant surgeon, a BBC producer, a couple of solicitors, 2 vets… And all a minimum 7 out of 10 by my standards.

Thing is, POF is the first port of call for most new internet daters, because it’s free. The downside is that it’s full of serial daters that just leave a profile up permanently.

Sounds like you’re genuinely interested in her, so a bit of patience might be the order of the day given that she’s a single mum, but still get her met as soon as possible. Women love to portray a false image of what they’d *like* to be like – usually somewhere between Audrey Hepburn and Marilyn Monroe but without the monkey sex.

Right, after 4 years of regularly using dating websites, I can safely say I’ve seen every sort of woman the interweb can throw at us.

What you’ve got here Dez, is a text lover. And you’ve really not helped the situation. After a year or so, I realised that the only way to have any success on dating websites is to meet them ASAP. Firstly, this demonstrates that you’re a proactive, decisive person (a well-known leg-opener) and secondly, it stops you wasting hours of your time texting/messaging women with no chance of sex.

You need to develop a routine of messaging that gets them off the website, gets their phone number, gets them in a safe, well-lit bar with plenty of escapes, and gets them in bed. My record was 3 messages.

I’m not saying this one isn’t recoverable – it is, but it might take a bit of creative thinking. The problem is, she’s probably not good in social situations which is why she’s single, and why she’s so comfortable indulging in aimless text banter. But you can exploit this vulnerability… (we’ll cover that in lesson 2).

So, first job is to get her met. Get the conversation round to the sort of people you’ve been finding on the website (make up some hilarious stories to get her laughing) and moan about how POF is full of women that just want penfriends, rather than actual dates. That should get her working in the right direction… While you’re at it, tell her how everyone seems so uptight… “What ever happened to a bit of good old fashioned flirting??”… I guarantee this will make her far more suggestive, reducing the sex barrier before you even meet.

I should charge for this shit, it’s gold dust.

however they must be suffering as no one should lose a child.

I’m sure they are, but I think their PR machine would be far more successful if they were more willing to publicly accept how responsible they were instead of constantly apportioning blame elsewhere.

Yes, someone evil or sick did something terrible that night, but leaving a baby at the mercy of an evil world is unforgivable. I’d respect them a lot more if they accepted this.

The one on the left looks like Piers Morgan… I always suspected he was up to no good…

Just another opportunity for those repulsive people to parade themselves on prime-time TV bleating about how they weren’t to blame and make my piss boil.

Saw the pair of them this morning protesting that it was all the fault of the nasty, evil person that did this… Well there’s not doubting that this wouldn’t have happened if the nasty evil person hadn’t taken her, but IT WOULDN’T HAVE HAPPENED IF YOU’D NOT LEFT A BABY ALL ALONE IN A STRANGE COUNTRY!!!

Twunts.

No, but I do shout “Roadieeeeee” if I see someone pedalling a road bike while I’m in my car.

I shout “BR-R-R-R-R-R-RADLEEEEEY WIGGINSSSSSSS!” in a slightly Pakistani accent. My nephew (age 6) now does this also… So proud.

Feels the fear!

It was my dad’s chipper, he’s a tree surgeon so it’s a proper scary thing, not some DIY job.

He was telling me about a lad that got pulled in by a length of rope – he was standing in a loop… Not much left of his bottom half by the time he hit the cut-out bar!

I nearly did something similar a few weeks back when loading a tree through a chipper. A branch snagged the belt loop on my jeans and started dragging me in! 😯

Luckily the belt-loop snapped… Doesn’t bear thinking about what a mess that thing might have made!

Looks like it’s got a few layers of paint – nitromors might work but it can be slow going on old paints and you end up with a gooey mess.

There’s no easy way, if sanding works, sand it. Think of it as a character building exercise. 😉

If you watch the video, he climbs back out the front. The guy who was involved has commented on the YouTube link.

😆 at Njee!

This guy survived! Skip to 2 mins…

Jebus… Imagine being the one to ring his loved ones and explain that there’s absolutely nothing left to bury! 😯

A bit puzzled that people found it so uncomfortable to watch, but I guess everyone’s different!

I took a date… I found a lot of the sexual references made me squirm a bit! 😯

I’m glad others are reporting back with similar opinions – it’s a long time since I’ve seen a film that’s actually made me want to discuss it with others.

Surprised by Shibboleth’s reaction as I imagined him and Bruce Robertson to be very alike

Ironic really, as you remind me of Clifford Blades in so many ways Yunki… I might ring your missus later 😉

Bikebouy, well done for getting a spoiler in there! Maybe edit it for those who haven’t seen the film?

A very difficult watch, but strangely compelling. Certainly not a feel-good film but there’s no denying the skill of the actors and director to balance a knife-edge like that and create the most complicated characters so believable.

I’m glad I watched it, and I think the fact that I felt compelled to ask others what they thought is testimony to what a powerful film it is…

All of that. Timing is everything so you need to watch for the point where it starts to go off, I always reckoned 45 mins but must be wrong.

I was told to leave it the length of time it takes to have a brew and a fag! Obviously, it’s very dependent on ambient temp, but it suddenly goes from soft/buttery to something like the consistency of modeling clay – that’s when you start working it.

And +1 what Lobby Dosser says, scooping off the hawk onto the float is the hardest knack to master! Prepare to drop a LOT of plaster on your boots!

If she’s practicing on those bare brick walls, she’d need to render them first which is a whole new set of skills!

wwaswas’s advice might work for rendering, but not skimming. If it’s just an over-skim job, it’s not too difficult to get a good finish – the worst problem is that an off-the-shelf float will not be worn in (plasterers use new floats for rendering/roughing-on until the corners and edges are worn in.

If you’re going to have a go, use lots of PVA, watered down and applied with a decorating roller. Mix your Thistle with a paddle on a drill (very clean bucket and clean cold water – water in first and add plaster bit-by-bit). Make sure you have a large clean board to pour your mix onto (on some sort of table) so you can work quickly. Don’t overmix it and it should be looser than you’d think.

Start bottom left, get it on quickly, and then leave it for 15 mins or so. When it’s just started to go off, splash with lots of clean water and start smoothing it up. I find a big wall-paper paste brush is useful for splashing water and tickling up the edges.