I lived with a guy in my final year at uni who we all called Weird Rob. Because, well, he was just f****n’ weird. When I met my now-wife later in life, it turned out she also knew Rob, and with no other mutual friends or acquaintances, her and her mates also knew him as Weird Rob. Weird.

Steady on aP, he only said he’s not keen on old paintings, not old stuff in general. A bit like me. Old buildings/architecture? Love it. Old technology? Brilliant. Archaeology? Almost chose archaeology to study at uni. Old languages? Fascinating. Old paintings? Meh. :wink:

OP: do some googling to see if anyone can recommend a guided tour of a museum. We had an art student guide us round the Vatican (free tour but we gave him a huge tip), it was really fascinating learning about how the various styles of art came and went, the politics around who commissioned pics, who was in them, the symbolism hidden in the backgrounds etc. If we’d just gone round ourselves, even with the listeny-headphone-thingies, it would have been dull. Looking back on my visits to the Louvre, having someone explain things to you would’ve been way better than just wandering round looking at stuff.

Radiohead, Coldplay, U2 all cause me to switch off/over the radio if they come on. Whiney, navel-gazing guff, the first two, and U2 are just dull. I think it was Enfield and Whitehouse who did a sketch about all their songs sounding the same about 20 years ago, and nothing’s changed.

Cheers for the replies, hadn’t thought about coverage. Assumed it was all good for most places these days.

Peterfile – cheers for the offer. She’ll be staying with her brother so I’ll ask him what the O2 coverage is like near his place first.

Cool, good to know. Thanks all.

Ring a few local preschools/kindergartens, see if they want them. The one my son goes to (not in the UK, not sure if that makes a difference) has a carpentry bench with random blocks of scrap wood, hammers, screwdrivers, saws etc. They have pots of different sized tacks, nails, screws, the kids love making ‘stuff’ with them. They are always keen for donations of wood scraps and screws/nails etc.

Even if you give them an unsorted bucket, the kids can sort them. Sorting them into types and sizes is great for fine motor skills, risk management (avoiding the pointy ends), cognitive development and so on.

Well, it’s a legitimate word, but I’d expect there to be a note after the definition to the effect of ‘offensive/derogatory’ etc. and perhaps that it’s a contraction of spastic.

Same as if any other offensive term came up in the random word-of-the-day picker thingymawotsit.

Has anyone suggested a bespoke scythe yet? With a Damascus blade and a shaft of English oak inlaid with small merino-horn images of a mountain-biking sheep.

I grew up in leafy Cheshire (not the posh bit though. Near Crewe), mum’s from the Dales, dad’s a Geordie. I always considered myself northern but thought I was fairly accent-less until I heard my own voice recorded. I sound like a southerner doing a bad impression of Geoffrey Boycott.

I did a session at the fancy new velodrome near where I live, as part of a team Friday outing at work. It was great, even though I hate road riding. As you say, to be allowed to go on the track unsupervised, you’ll need to get qualified, and you can do this through a couple of what are essentially lessons. It wasn’t many, from memory, and if you are reasonably competent on a bike you should fly through them.

I’d be surprised if the velodrome doesn’t hold beginner/give-it-a-go sessions on a fairly regular basis, with a closed track and an instructor. You’d be amongst other track novices, so no worries about holding folk up/getting in the way.

Once you can hold a line you can then go out and train on your own, if people want to get past they can overtake. There may be certain times of day that are set aside for newer riders. Best bet is to have a chat with someone at the velodrome, if they think you’re going to become a long-term customer they should be willing to give you some time and talk you through stuff.

There Will Be Blood wasn’t the worst film ever by any stretch, but it was a hell of a lot more boring than I expected.

This.
Too many long, moody silences and angsty looks. Still enjoyed it, but it wasn’t as good as it could have been.

I’m considering it because cleaning is shit, I have better things to do with my time off tbh as should everyone!

This was our main motivation.

Our cleaner is the sister of someone my wife works with, so we figure it’d be tricky for her to disappear off the face of the earth if it turns out she wanted to rob us blind. But she hasn’t in the last couple of years, so we think we’re safe. Other than that, a personal recommendation is about the best you can do, or an agency that would provide some some sort of insurance.

We have a cleaner, she’s great. We generally keep a clean-ish house, but she comes once a week and does the annoying stuff: hoovers the house top-to-bottom, cleans the bathrooms and kitchen, mops the floors, dusts. Cleans the dead flies from the window-sills, that sort of stuff.

She’s an artist in real life, cleans to top up the income between commissions. Lives in a cool house, almost a magnificent shed, up in the hills outside town. Has a big covered deck with a sunken, fully plumbed-in bath. We give her fruit & veg from our garden, the odd bottle of home brew, she leaves us home-made chutney, kasundi and other interesting stuff.

We pay $20 an hour, which is about GBP10.

My understanding is that no, they don’t. The logic being that the pedestrian is crossing the side road, and the car is driving on the same side road. The pedestrian has to give way to the car, as per any road. But when the ped is crossing the side road and the car is on the main road, the ped has priority if they have started crossing before the car has started its manoeuvre (i.e. before it indicates).

I recall being taught that if the car is already indicating, the pedestrian should wait/give way. Not sure on the legality of that last bit, possibly just a common sense thing.

Veritasium
Vsauce
Numberphile
Grant Thompson – The King of Random
Tested
FliteTest
SmarterEveryDay
SonicDad

kcr – Member
If you have a laptop or Chromebook with HDMI out, install the Hola Chrome plugin, then you can play films from Netflix worldwide. That unlocks some good stuff that you can’t get from the UK service.

Worth doing a quick google on Hola before using it, seems they have been / are continuing to be a bit naughty in how they operate, and there are some potential security issues with it. (I’ve been using it for ages, but have recently stopped – more because I couldn’t get it to work properly with my android devices. I pay for a VPN service now which is works with all my devices and doesn’t have the security issues)

Back on topic:

Vikings
Orphan Black
Breaking Bad
House of Cards (US version, haven’t tried the original)
Sons of Anarchy
Brooklyn 99
The IT Crowd

Fargo, Better Call Saul and 24 are next up after I finish Sons of Anarchy.
Watched the first of Bloodline after hearing good things about it… must be a slow starter. I’ll give it a couple more episodes before I give up on it though.

I recently bought a Stihl MS170 on the basis of a similar thread on here a few months ago. I’ve only used it for maybe 15 hours but it’s been faultless so far. Starts easily even on cold mornings (it’s winter in this half of the world), 14″ bar so in theory can handle 2’+ diameter logs but I’d probably use my big saw for stuff that big. Hasn’t struggled for power, I recently chopped up some lumps of blue gum, the awkward bits where big branches split off from the trunk. It’s well-seasoned and is like granite. Wasn’t hot-knife-though-butter cutting, but managed fine. Worth a look.

We hired a car through Avis on a recent trip to ‘Straya. Picked up the car at Cairns airport, used it for a week, no problems. As we were loading the car to head back to the airport (an hour away from where we were staying) I noticed one of the tyres was soft. Quick look, found a screw in the tread. Changed the wheel, put the damaged one in the boot. If it had been any other time I’d have rung the hire company, asked what to do about getting it fixed (not keen to continue driving without a spare) but as we were on our way back to the hire desk at the airport anyway, I figured I’d leave it and just tell them at the desk.

The woman at the desk was downright rude. Insisted that the tyre might have gone down because we’d damaged it hitting a kerb or something, and that there could be suspension damage as a result. Refused to come out to the car park and see the screw in the tyre. They charged us A$400 to cover this potential damage, on the promise that it’d be paid back in a day or two once their mechanics had checked it over. There wasn’t a whole lot we could do as we were about to jump on a flight out of the country. Took us several weeks of chasing up/complaining to get the money back. To be fair the customer service guy on the phone was very helpful, chased things up ‘offline’ and called me back when he said he would, but the whole situation shouldn’t have happened in the first place.

Also be aware that if you let them roam the garden they will dig up all your flower beds and crap everywhere.

This. With ours, not so much the flower beds (we don’t have much in the way of flowers but have a few big veggie beds, none have been damaged) but ye gods they each produce about half their own body weight in poo every day! Generally not an issue except when they do it on the deck or verandah, we have to hose it down once a week.

One of ours will now jump on my knee if I’m sitting in the garden – only cos she wants food, not cos she likes me

Back in the summer when we ate outside and bbq’d most days, ours would always jump onto the table and try to eat off the plates. Considering that most of the time they wouldn’t let us within a metre or so of them, we’d struggle to push them away from food. Garlic bread especially, it was like crack for chickens! One one occasion my wife had one approaching from each side on the table and one jumped on her shoulder from behind, all trying to get the garlic bread from her hand. She had to chiuck it on the floor to get them off her :D

We’ve got two Orpingtons (had three until one got a prolapsed oviduct while trying to squeeze out her first egg :( … don’t google that if you are about to eat, by the way 8O ) and they are very low maintenance. They have a wee coop like this:

I’ve put that next to a 3m by 4m run with a small connecting tunnel, and then we let them free range in the garden all day. They head back to the coop on their own at night, and we just shut the door for their protection.

Maintenance-wise, we put wood shavings on the floor of the coop, once a week (or fortnight) I scoop out the shavings from under the perches and chuck in on the compost. Could get away with doing this less often, many just chuck down fresh shavings and it composts, you just need to clean it out properly every few months.

That’s about it. We top up their feeder when it gets low (layer pellets) but they mainly eat what they find out in the garden, so don’t get through many pellets. We replace the water weekly, or more often if it looks less than clean, but there’s a stream through the garden so they mostly drink from there.

Only one of ours is laying as they got to the right age just as winter was kicking in. We’re expecting the other to start in the spring. We get about five eggs a week from the one that’s laying, which we expect to increase slightly in spring too.

Not even local news, the front page headline the other day, in what is effectively the only national paper in New Zealand, was Twin’s heartbreak: crash kills sister returning from funeral. A story that a woman was upset that her sister had died. Really? You don’t say. How the frick is that a national story, let alone headline news? Could it possibly be to do with how they look…?

The only headlines in my local rag are either road accidents or news about local house prices going up, or dropping, or demand for new houses, or house rices staying the same.

After the inaugural Huka Challenge at Taupo, NZ, my race number got pulled out of the hat and I won an all-expenses-paid trip for two to Thailand :-)

Top prize was a $50,000 Holden Commodore, won by some 14-year-old whose dad would have been a very happy bloke for the couple of years until the lad was old enough to drive it!

Off topic… a group of us once went to a pub in the small Hertfordshire village of Wheathampstead for a Sunday roast. Six hours later we were drinking champagne by the bottle in Tiger Tiger in Leicester Square.

The aquaduct in Segovia is pretty cool. It’s built entirely without mortar, apparently.

I once saw a big ginger cat stalking two pukekos in our garden. When they noticed it they turned and chased it. They’re great gangly things when they’re running and flapping their wings, gave the cat a proper fright!

These:

Worked for me. I’m not even in the UK, but my ebay and paypal accounts are from when I used to live there. I didn’t get an email, just saw the PSA on here. Put the code in at checkout, it applied a discount, payment went through although there was a weird message after confirming through paypal (when I’d normally expect a page that says transaction completed or similar). Something about transaction not confirmed, please check your account later.

My bank account has been debited for the correct (discounted) amount though.

andyfla…

Molgrips… maybe I’m not old enough to have had an existential crisis yet. I do often lie on the lawn at night and stare at the stars and wonder what the hell it’s all about (life, that is). But in a distinctly curious/awed-by-the-pale-blue-dot sort of way, rather than feeling like I don’t belong. It’s positively life-affirming.

As for getting old and lonely and wanting to feel loved, to belong – I can understand getting that from being part of a social group (perhaps a church) but not from just suddenly believing in a god which only exists if you believe in it. Maybe for many the church is the only social group available?

Cheers for the responses.

Mefty, you may have helped me answer one of the questions – I suspect the difference between ‘being religious’ and ‘going to church’ (or belonging to the social group associated with that religion) is the key. If I somehow went to sleep tonight and woke up tomorrow believing in a god, I probably wouldn’t actually go to the relevant church/temple at all. I’m not really into social gatherings (I am, in my darling wife’s words, a social retard). So peer pressure to do the right thing probably wouldn’t be much of an issue. But then again the peer pressure argument is equally valid for secular groups who do charity work. If you’re religious and the sort of person who feels compelled to help the needy, and if tomorrow it was proved beyond contest that there is no god, that a god – any god – could not possibly exist, you’d still do good stuff just because it’s the right thing to do. I struggle with the idea that religion somehow encourages more charitable work. Peer pressure through social groups, yes. But specifically because that social group is religious? I’m not convinced.

That reads, “me”, “me”, “me” which might be why you don’t get religion. IMHO its about making peace with the fact that “me” isn’t the most important thing in the world.

Fair comment. However I am completely at peace with the fact that I am utterly insignificant in the grand scheme of things.

I guess it’s more a response to those who claim religion is a positive force in the world. I’m just an average bloke, and I can’t see how being religious would make me a better person. And since most people are also average Joes, the same applies. There’s no moral value inherent in religious teachings that isn’t also equally present in a secular lifestyle (both good and bad). As for religious charities being bigger than atheistic ones, a larger proportion of the population is religious, and so you’d expect religious charities to be bigger.

If you can ignore the occasional (and perhaps inevitable) descent into name-calling, I always find this subject/debate fascinating. I’m an atheist, but would probably describe myself as an agnostic one. I definitely don’t believe in any organised religion*, and while the various “God did it” explanations are all riddled with holes, I don’t totally discount there being an all-powerful being (of sorts). I would, however, require proof of existence before believing it exists, which kind of defeats the point. I guess it’s more a case of me thinking that there’s an almost infinitely small chance that there’s some alien being out there who perhaps caused the big bang, or sparked life on earth billions of years ago. Maybe. If it’s true, I have faith 8) that science will find the answer :D. I clearly read too much Erich von Daniken as a kid…

Some questions that I’ve always wondered about:

1) What proportion of religious folk have found religion after becoming an adult? I.e., without having received religious instruction as a child. I’d bet it’s not many. I suspect that it’s surprisingly difficult to get a free-thinking adult with a moderate education to believe in god. Whereas if you take a child and tell them they are religious, it’ll become part of their lives without them even realising it. It’ll be hard to ever find out, as very few people will have grown up without being exposed to religion.

2) What would be the benefit to the world, of me becoming religious? If I found god (of any denomination) today, how would the world benefit? I’ve given it a lot of thought over the years, and have drawn a blank. The reverse also applies, if all believers somehow just stopped believing in god and all the rituals that go with it, and carried on their normal lives, would the world be any worse off? Apart from the collapse of any businesses that rely on religion, I think not. The follow-up to that is “well, what’s the point of religion then?”.

3) The real version of the previous question is “what’s in it for me? How would/could believing in god benefit me personally?” And again, I’ve drawn a blank. I can’t think of a situation, no matter how dire, where believing in god would be beneficial.

*I’d go as far as to say they are complete sloblock

It’s a vile car-crash of a place.

Having said that, I loved my visit there (two nights at the Bellagio, about 36 hours there in total). It’s so awful it has to be seen to be believed, it’s so much bigger/weirder/screwed-up/jaw-droppingly-bonkers than you imagine.

I’d recommend it to anyone (one-off, flying visit only, mind) just as a voyeuristic spectacle.

Our house roof has a pitch of 52 degrees and has a standard flashing. You can get ones with a built-in angle, which say it’s ok up to 65 degrees – your roof looks to be about that where the flue would go through, like this.

Quadcopters with Nerf guns attached – dogfight!

The petrol mix had been sitting in the bottle (about half full) since last August so could it be that?

This. Petrol on its own could well be dodgy after that long (the ethanol in it absorbs water), but if it’s mixed then it’ll likely be useless. Try fresh fuel first, and hope that running it with the old fuel hasn’t gummed up the carb jets.

Fewer pies.

Only slightly joking. Without wanting to start yet another calories in vs calories out debate, cutting out a few easy calories in will easily outweigh a bit of token exercise. Use an online calculator to work out how many calories she’ll burn in 30 mins on the cross trainer, and how many are in a latte and a muffin. It’s depressing.

Doing the exercise will be beneficial in many other ways though, so probably good to encourage it while the motivation’s there. Regular exercise is an excellent habit to get into.

We’ve got three Orpingtons, got them on New Year’s Eve at 8-ish weeks old. So in theory they should be about ready to start laying any time now. But, we’ve just moved them into a permanent coop and run, so they may be a bit stressed by the move.

They free-range all day and until recently always made their own way back to the coop to roost at dusk. All we had to do was go and close the door. In the last few weeks it’s started getting dark early and they have started roosting by the house (on top of our garden chairs which are stacked in a corner of the deck). I think it’s because it’s sheltered and well-lit by the inside lights. Bloody annoying though, as we had to go out every night and carry them back to their coop!

So, they’re now locked in the coop (with a big run) until they re-learn to roost in the coop. We’ll let them out after a week or so to see how they do.

Bump, because I meant to post first time round and forgot…

The other day I was biking home in a cycle lane on a road with two traffic lanes in each direction. The cycle lane is pretty narrow, as are the traffic lanes, so if a bus or something else big passes you, it’s chuffing scary – especially as there’s usually a strong-ish headwind on that section so sometimes it’s tricky to hear things approaching from behind.

Anyway, I noticed a big articulated lorry slow behind me, wait until lane 2 was clear, then pull out to pass me. That’s the second time it’s happened recently. I know it’s heading to a supermarket up the road, I might have to make a detour to catch up and say thanks if it happens again.

Also, every commute into work is ace, as I take my 3-year-old to daycare on the way. When we get to the off-road bit he hops off my bike and rides his bike along a nice little gravel path along the edge of the estuary. No traffic, lots of wildlife, great company :D

Yeah, 6’2″ and 80kg here… if I buy jeans the correct length they assume I’m morbidly obese. I just emigrated to a part of the world where I can wear shorts all year round :)

Wife and The Boy in the Karangahake Gorge. Took bikes on the train, then a 2km pootle along the rail trail to a waterfall – paddling, scrambling about on the rocks – pootle back to the station for lunch, train ride home. Top day out :D

Donald, that is ace.

Agreed, very impressive. Any idea how all those interlocking bits are cut? It all looks too precise to be hand-cut (shows off complete ignorance of carpentry…)