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Joined
2 yr. ago

Go on go on go on go on go on

  • When I lived in Edinburgh's Old Town in the 90s I had a couple of young guisers come to the door, not trick or treating, but "a penny for the guy"*. I gave them a pound each, they were thrilled.

    *The guy is Guy Fawkes, "remember remember the fifth of November".

  • I do a lot of water sports in the UK and we use VHF radios. Certain frequencies are used by marinas and the like, and nearby boats will be tuned into them. Then there is a frequency used for emergency calls - the coastguard listens on that and answers, and will move your call to another frequency for more details, leaving the mayday one open again.

    We mainly use VHF for boat-to-boat comms, or boat-to-shore. The local range is decent - a few miles from our base, depending on atmospheric conditions, obstacles etc. I honestly have no idea if you could use VHF radios between cars though. It's not private for a start - everyone can hear you - and once someone is yammering on the marina frequency no-one else can transmit. So it's just brief messages with protocols.

  • My friends and neighbours and I all use a variety of messaging services and apps like Spond to organise get-togethers, sporting events, working bees etc etc. I'm in a ridiculous number of WhatsApp groups, all very active, and I see most people in them irl regularly. Without the internet I don't know how we'd cope. It's hard enough herding cats in a group chat, imagine the number of phone calls we'd be making!

  • I hate the SMS ones, because I don't have a good phone signal in my home, so I have to ruin around trying to get a couple of bars so I can get the effing code. My banking app just uses a fingerprint.

  • Swimming works for me. I joined a gym at a hotel that has a pool, reasonable price and usually fairly few people. I like to swim lengths, thinking of nothing at all, for half an hour to an hour. Good for general fitness, stamina.

  • I thought it was interesting that she was ok with all the neighbourhood surveillance until it was used against her.

  • Kiwi fruit 🥝 - nature's scrubbing brush. One per day is all you need.

  • I make a lot of jam and am very careful to sterilise the jars beforehand - wash thoroughly, heat in the oven, dry with clean cloth. Lids with that seal strip are trickier, so after washing and drying, I line them up, pour white vinegar into each, and leave them half an hour. Dry off with paper towels. That way I never get mould on the seal.

    I'm guessing you didn't do any of that? The pickles are possibly all right, but... it's a risk I wouldn't take. And I'm still getting through a batch of spicy plum sauce I made in 2015! Never had any mould on it.

  • I've never had a Domino's pizza and never will - they're spending so much on TV adverts their food is probably shit.

  • Thanks! You're right, it doesn't make sense. But Norway played it smart with their oil wealth, didn't they? Tiny country, and there they are lending money to the US.

  • Who actually owns this debt? Who is getting the interest payments? It seems like every country runs on some kind of deficit - where is all this money coming from?

  • The best thing about digital photography is that you can keep trying your shot with different settings for exposure, aperture etc. it's a great way to learn what works best in what situation.

  • Her whole family and their aristocratic social circle spoke like that, she grew up speaking like that. She's not putting it on, that's who she was. The growing pressure for royalty to be less aloof forced a gradual move to more "normal" speech from about the 70s. At the same time, broadcasters were starting to hire people with (gasp) regional accents. Previously anyone aspiring to be a newsreader etc had to speak RP, "the queen's English".

  • Then add in all the many Scots accents and dialects, Scots Gaelic, Welsh and Welsh-accented English. Hardly anyone speaks RP (received pronunciation, ie posh) any more. Even the royals have toned it down. The late queen was really plummy back in the 50s. https://youtu.be/Ga-UcoJzsHg

  • This is the movie Yesterday, where a failed musician gets knocked out and wakes up in a world where the Beatles never existed. A few other things too, but mainly the Beatles. Spoiler: he becomes a mega star.