You may also struggle to get it on prescription.

Beer :D

I found that cold drinks work very well at reducing the immediate symptoms, probably to do with cooling the sinuses from the inside and reducing inflammation. Experimentation also leads me to conclude that carbonated drinks seem to have a slightly better effect than still drinks.

The obvious problem is that it’s hard to drink any sort of quantity of cold drinks, over a long time period, with the exception of one particular kind…

May not sit well with employers and family though :|

I’ll have a go. Bet I end up with N. Ireland…

I had it done a month ago. Pretty easy op, apart form the weirdness of chit-chatting about Saturday kids’ soccer with a guy who’s wielding surgical snips around your plums. Oh, and the fact that the nurse assisting him was a stunner, which made lying there with everything on display a bit more awkward :oops:

The op was painless, save for the initial tiny prick – stop sniggering at the back! – when the local went in, but there were moments of weird discomfort as thing were being yanked around.

Afterwards there were a couple of days of walking gingerly, felt like I’d been kicked hard in the nuts. Generally ok but an ache when doing things like walking barefoot on hard floors, every heelstrike sent a tiny jolt which ached. That wore off pretty quickly, by day four I was walking around normally, played table tennis during the lunch break at work. Did start to ache a bit by the end of the day though. Nothing that a couple of paracetamol couldn’t fix.

I was back on the bike commuting to work by day nine (only 5km each way), with hindsight I reckon I’d have been ok by about day six or seven, but had lifts sorted so took advantage.

And as someone pointed out above, if you normally wear boxer shorts, buy something snug that will hold everything in place (and wear them for the op), movement is your enemy those first few days, and you definitely don’t want them swinging about.

This one features a real plane…

My google-fu is failing me, but there’s a video somewhere of an Airbus Beluga doing a slow pass, essentially hovering, then the pilot gives it full beans and it does an almost vertical take-off. It’s designed to carry huge payloads, and it’s empty for the airshow, but bloody impressive none the less.

The one time I tried it, in fine weather, I got about as far as Footflaps’ second photo, at which point I had to lie down and cling on to the grass as I was convinced I was going to fall at any second. Even lying down on my front I thought my rucksack (20L daysack) was going to unbalance me and drag me down the slope. My wife had to take it off me so I could attempt to crawl back to safety and have a cry… not my proudest day!

Would like to try it again though, as my vertigo/fear of heights seems to have vanished in recent years.

Check out Marisco for a classy night out 8O

I have some of these Merrells:

Very comfy, light, and gore-tex lined so good for wet days, and don’t need to be worn with red socks.

I recently got some Philips wireless headphones from Argos, they’re pretty nifty for the price. You’ll need a bluetooth enabled device to send from – any phone and most laptops these days, or get a bluetooth transmitter for ten quid off ebay.

NZ Post do a re-shipping service for this sort of thing. If you’re out on the West Island I’m not sure if the local post service does the same…

It’s quite small, considering the size of the base. Looks suspiciously like a Transit van…

Leaving the door open while on the loo. Every. Bloody. Time. She’s always completely taken aback if I happen to walk past, or if I start to head into the bathroom myself (before realising she’s already in there pinching a loaf) “Sorry, I didn’t think you’d be coming in here” she’ll mumble. She seems genuinely surprised to find me in my own house…

Also, attempting to set a personal best for how many clothes items she can fit in a washing machine or tumble dryer every time she uses them. She cannot grasp the idea that both machines need the clothes to be able to move around in the drum, not be wedged in in a solid mass.

Take Nobody’s Word For It

That buddy seat is where the man who wipes Flashy’s butt sits

I believe that padded bit is actually the lid to the storage box where the lightly-scented swans’ necks are kept.

(best to lay down some napkins first if it’s a biggie – easier for the stewardess to take away if it’s well wrapped)

Quite. A little courtesy goes a long way. This is the sort of thing that’ll get you that free upgrade to sit next to Flashy.

Likewise the idiots in the paper shop who want a copy of the Sun and a box of matches and want to pay with a card.

As above, swiping a paywave/paypass card is much quicker than cash, unless you have counted out the correct change beforehand – in which case you have bigger issues…

There is nothing too obscure for the hive mind to have expert knowledge of!

You should check out the Numberphile channel on Youtube. Pron for number-nerds.*

*including me :-)

Despite my comments earlier, I’m glad we have a net and would always have one for young kids if for no other reason than the net can be used like an extra wrap-around tramp, for bouncing off.

ROSPA say children under 6 shouldn’t use them but what do they know ….?

We bought our son one for his first birthday (with a net). He toddled straight over to it, shimmied up the ladder and managed to pull the zip open, and started running and ‘bouncing’ (not getting any air at that age). He’d been on the daycare one since about ten months, usually as the youngest of two or three kids aged up to three. By the time he was three (still the youngest at the daycare) he was practising rugby tackles with seven-year olds on it!*

As above, the only injuries I know of from the daycare, friends with tramps and our own, are when there’s more than one kid on, and one accidentally gets a smack in the chops or a clash of heads, tongues/lips bitten etc.

Ours is one of the best investments we’ve made, our eldest has spent hundreds of hours on it, gets tons of exercise from it. Got to weigh up overall health benefits against the possible (and probably tiny) risk of occasional injury.

*in true STW fashion, I therefore know better than ROSPA, based on my one bit of anecdotal evidence :wink:

unknown – Member
At the risk of engaging someone so obviously willfully missing the point…

This, but…

teamhurtmore – Member
The GCSE RE paper is structured towards how each of the different religions address contemporary issues that are relevant to modern society. In contrast at A level you can choose to focus more on one religion of your choice albeit it with the address emphasis on applied ethics and philosophy. At the end of it, pupils have highly developed analytic skills that they can apply to everyday situations – mini THM surprised his headmaster by quoting Kant at him to prove why the HMs decision to suspend some but not all of a group was unethical!!

All from studying so-called fairy tales.

At the risk of repeating myself… ok, so specifically repeating myself:

Yes. What you have described is exactly what I described as my experience of RE (local comp, early 90’s) i.e. being taught about religion. Not just one religion, all the main ones, what they believe in, main holidays, similarities, differences, key historical events and so on and so forth. Essentially just general knowledge, about the world’s religions. Not – and this is what I am increasingly convinced you are deliberately ignoring -, teaching kids that god loves them, that the baby jesus gets sad if you think naughty things, and that this god is the one true god and anyone who believes in another god is wrong (and will burn in hell for all eternity etc etc). None of that. That last bit, that’s instilling religious belief. Teaching faith. Not Religious Education, a.k.a. the RE of my youth and your kids’ too by the sound of it. Different subjects entirely.

Alternatively you a superb, David Taylforth-esque troll, in which case well played, sir, well played. :D

(could I just take a moment to clarify that I’m a big fat athiest, I just don’t have a problem with educating my children in the fairy tales of a variety of cultures)

This seems to be a recurring misunderstanding on this thread… I’m also an atheist (but not the athi-est atheist :wink: ) and very much want my kids to be educated about the fairy tales of various cultures. However, I don’t want them to be instructed in those fairy stories, i.e. taught that they should believe them.
I did R.E. at school, it was an hour a week at mid-secondary school age, teaching us about religion, but not teaching us (i.e. proselytising, for want of a less inflammatory term) religion. One is an integral part of understanding the world and how the human race got to where it is (good and bad), the other is completely inappropriate for kids. I think it’s inappropriate for adults too, to be fair, but at least adults have mostly developed some critical faculties and can make an informed decision. We tell our kids to listen to their teachers, and that they can believe what their teachers say, it doesn’t seem right to me to then have teachers teaching divisive and often unsubstantiated opinions as facts (I am aware of the potential hypocrisy here, e.g. history lessons where we learn from the victor’s point of view etc.)

I’m off to flagellate myself with birch twigs

I trust they’ll be hand-picked, naturally-seasoned twigs from your own artisanally-curated birch coppice?

Pretty much what they said ^. You can’t apply adult logic to a five-year-old.

We used to have three chickens. My son (aged four) picked the white one to be ‘his’ chicken. Fed it, petted it, had paddies when we wouldn’t let him sleep in the coop with them at night… His chicken then died (prolapsed oviduct, don’t google it) and we broke the news to him gently. Without missing a beat he said “That’s ok, we can just get a new one.” Heartless git!

Slightly more on-topic, he swallowed a marble when he was two. We told him the story of having to go through his nappies to check to see if/when it had come out. Unfortunately he now thinks that swallowing random stuff is risk-free, as “we can just look at my poos until we find it.”

At that age their notion of consequences, or cause and effect, will be vastly different to yours.

Is this one you?

Mellifluous

New Zealand, the North Island thereof.

Can’t seem to link the in-line version, but this is worth a watch too.

Hmmm, that article seems suspiciously similar to one penned by Sam Harris a while ago… I’ll try to dig it out.

Here it is and it seems whole chunks of it have been lifted verbatim by the lazy Matt.

mudmonster – Member
Just heard on the radio that the commuters on the tube gave a totally different story about the course of events. Why did the police have to lie about it?

As others have pointed out, witnesses are not always particularly accurate. A former colleague of mine is in charge of monitoring all the traffic signals in our town, along with all the traffic cameras attached to them. When a pedestrian was struck by a car and killed at a signal-controlled crossing, the police contacted him for the CCTV footage. Two eye-witnesses, completely independently, gave police the same version of events: the pedestrian had been waiting at the crossing, got the green man, started crossing, got hit by the car which had run the red light.

The video showed that the pedestrian had approached the crossing, pressed the button, immediately started crossing (against the red man and without waiting), the car (on a green light) then hit him when he stepped in front of it.

Two independent witnesses, two entirely wrong versions of what happened.

That Sam Smith whiney pathetic bore-fest. I first saw it on Graham Norton*, it was bloody awful live. One of the other guests made some joke about Metallica doing it, but I reckon James Hetfield could sing that way, way better than Smith.

*guilty as charged.

Not me but a friend. She did a gap year before going to uni, spent several months in Nepal living in a remote village on the side of some mountain, teaching English at the local school. Fast forward a couple of years, she’s at a UK university but doing a placement year in Toulouse, France, teaching English to Air France pilots (I was in Toulouse doing a placement at Airbus). In our local bar one evening, this random dude walks up to her and says hi. Cue big hugs etc, turns out he was one of her star pupils from that Nepali school, he’d got a scholarship to study in Europe, and had ended up at the university in Toulouse, and then happened to end up in the same pub as my friend. Spooky weird.

My wife and I were backpacking round the Philippines many years ago, and on one particularly touristy (i.e. picturesque) island, she wanted to stay in some flimsy palm-frond huts right on the beach, which she’d read about in Lonely Planet. They looked idyllic but they were pricey and we were on a budget, so I insisted we stay in a dull but cheap concrete cube of a hotel. A couple of days later we got hit by a typhoon. The devastation was unreal. Debris everywhere. Lots of people missing. All the sand on the beach had been washed/blown away, to be deposited on every surface of everything that was left. Our hotel was a mess but still standing. The beach huts had ceased to exist, along with everything in them. :(

The model I have just built and calibrated has 97% GEH<2.5 8)

joshvegas – Member
150435.5

The bigger question is surely how that stuck in you head?
This. I got through about 30 seconds, skipped forward a bit to see if it picked up, concluded that it didn’t. :?

Probably about two. My wife pretty much never drinks spirits, I’ll usually have a bottle of nice gin on the go, but probably only have one of an evening, once in a while. Usually have a bottle of vodka and one of kahlua handy too, for the odd white Russian.

On the other hand, I built myself a kegerator and usually have two or three beers on tap at any one time 8)

redthunder – Member
How do you look after a ferret ?

Spent.

We had ‘I Love You Baby’ by Andy Williams.

My wife had Frankie Valli’s original version of that at our wedding. Me, I had “Can’t take my eyes off you”, also by Frankie Valli.

Over ten years later and she still doesn’t know the name of our first dance song :D

I had similar issues with a Weeride, I replaced it with a Yepp Mini. It’s steerer mounted rather than top tube, and I found it sat slightly higher than the weeride, and is narrower. Infinitely better IMO, but appreciate that it’s down to my particular mix of bike and lankiness :-)