Ronnie

I'd like to see a Remain Alliance candidate in Uxbridge and Ruislip. The Tory candidate barely scraped 50% in the previous two elections and everyone knows he's a cunt now, so it'd be sweet if they sent him packing.

9 hours ago, DCW said:

Do ye reckon the Tories would win a GE?

I think it's a fair risk. I imagine that the English shires will continue to vote for a clear Leave party, especially if their candidate is a newly installed Brexiteer replacing an ousted Remainer. I suppose there's a chance of a Tory vote being split with The Brexit Party but I don't think the realities of what leaving the EU are (with or without a deal), the lies of the Leave campaign (the bus; the being found guilty of breaking electoral law, which would've resulted in the referendum being declared void if, ironically, it weren't of the non-binding variety), and the behaviour of this new government (headed by a known liar; proroguing Parliament in the run-up to the deadline; threatening to deselect MPs who don't vote the correct way even if the local association endorses them) won't change very much. They'll still bleat on about taking back control and allow their prejudice-confirmation services to tell them all about these saboteur MPs and treachorous judges. It's depressing.

3 hours ago, BomberPat said:

Asterix in multiple languages is fantastic, just to see the different ways they approach the pun naming conventions.

Sometimes it's impossible. I've found that you can't beat the French originals.

I think my favourite instance of personal curiosity is always how they handle the Brit in Asterix in Britain. I love that the French one always starts his sentences with Je dis (I say) etc.

I'm not such a fan of the earlier books. The series really picks up when Obelix develops a personality. I think he ends up being more important to the stories than Asterix. I'd love to translate at least one of them myself; it's not out of the realms of possibility either

(It's just dawned on me how weird it is that I can say 'wild boar' in a dozen languages. Add that to the list of most unimpressive superpowers.)

On 8/31/2019 at 12:05 PM, BigJag said:

Yep. Same here. 4 books at a time from the library. All Asterix stories.

I love Asterix and collect them. I've got all of the French ones plus pick up others as and when I spot them on my travels.

I make a point of getting the first one in the series in any language I've studied. These are some of the ones I've read:

I've got a few more put to one side for whenever I get around to dipping into that particular language.

In preparation for a trip to Romania I did the usual formal studying but Santa Claus, knowing how I operate, also provided me with a few practice materials:

We'll see how good of a job it's done within the next few days. We're currently in Bulgaria and I've popped into a couple of bookshops already with an eye on you-know-what!

(The comic books are great, although I'm bored of reading the first one. The cartoons are rubbish though. I've never made it through one.)

1 hour ago, Factotum said:

This is about Britain descending into a one party dictatorship.

I think it's probably a different game that he and his team are playing. They must know that Parliament won't allow this so I think that that's what they're counting on, in the belief that a general election resulting from a no-confidence vote would see moderate, rebellious Tories losing their seats, maybe to Brexit Party candidates. That would certainly make life easier for him and his cabal. I suspect that Heidi Allen, Anna Soubry and co would lose their seats to whichever Conservative candidates stand too.

1 hour ago, DEF said:

Anyone know why it goes down?

There was an error message on display whilst it was down indicating server-side problems. It might be that the server isn't correctly configured but whatever the cause is, the fix should be quick if an admin were regularly using the site or contactable. Do the mods have a contact address for Moo to make him aware when the site is offline?

1 hour ago, gmoney said:

Who the hell says "Papa" who isn't Latino? 

Posh people. The Royals refer to their fathers like that, pronounced totally differently, of course. 

(Google offers the pronunciation. You can switch between British and American for contrast.)

7 hours ago, Carbomb said:

Yeah, just checked his Wiki. It's very odd, though, because I've heard the Leicester accent quite a few times, and he didn't sound like it. And there were a few "twists" to some of the phonemes he enunciated that I got used to hearing from TAFKA Spud.

I'm from Leicester and have just watched a clip of him. I agree with you. If he's a Leicester lad, then he's shed the distinctive features and replaced them with ones typical of elsewhere. His pronunciation of 'yesterday' sounds very West Midlands to me, for example.

I don't think it's much of a mystery. If you stop pronouncing a word in your native accent, your new pronunciation is going to sound like someone else's. Back when my Leicester accent was disappearing in different stages, people used to ask me whether I was an Aussie, presumably because my accent had become impossible to place and a couple of words had adjusted to sound like they were spoken by a Bruce. (I never developed the annoying Australian Question Intonation, though? The one that makes every statement sound like a question?)

Given the timeframe, I suspect it's these badboys, which were around at the time:

In fact, let's give that a yes, because their own site states:

Quote

1990s
FROM WRESTLING TO THE OLYMPICS
The brand sponsors Rick "The Dog Faced Gremlin" Steiner of the World Championship Wrestling who wore bright red knee high ROOS. Various athletes from motor racing, tennis and aerobics also become brand ambassadors. At the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, the US running team all compete in KangaROOS footwear.

I knew @Chris B from before I posted here and have met with him a few times since joining. At his 30th (where it became clear he hadn't been born but cloned from his father), I met @Carbomb, who was a lovely fella.

Beyond that, there's nobody. I've driven through Llangollen a couple of times in the recent past and thought I might pick a random pub to see whether @PowerButchi was there. Then it seemed a bit stalkery (and early in the day), so I knocked it on the head. @wandshogun09 and @air_raid aren't a million miles away and if there were an occasion to meet up, I'm sure we'd all get on great. But that would involve me leaving the house, which is a bit of a no-no.

Given that you say she's mentioned it to you herself, I'd say you're fine if you run it by her the way you've worded it there. You're getting married in a bit; there shouldn't be a reason that you can't have an honest talk, especially because you're asking her opinion rather than just dropping it on her. What's the worst that will happen? That she doesn't agree? In that case, you're still where you are now.

At the very least, if it transpires that you have to stay full time because she's the one intending to reduce her hours once the baby appears, it'd be handy for you to know that now.

That idiot Peter Griffin lookalike was on Newsnight last night referring to Jean-Claude Juncker as 'Herr Juncker in the bunker', no doubt how the current crop refer to him among themselves.

It's awful. 'The bunker' (Führerbunker) is the location of the last stand of the Nazis, the place where Hitler and Goebbels killed themselves. The things that this slithery gobshite comes out with are the embodiment of the tabloidisation of politics. Want to get the people angry? Stoke up some anti-German feeling!

To cap it all off ... Jean-Claude Juncker isn't even German. He's from Luxembourg. Fuck's sake.

The flashing woke me up. I left the bedroom and BOOM momentarily thought the storm was somehow inside the house, so loud was the rainfall. It barely improved once I'd shut the windows. It was beautiful to observe, so many flashes across the sky with barely any of them eliciting any thunder.

2 hours ago, Chris B said:

RVD has had the same gimmick and look since... what, 1995?

The undercut's been getting steadily higher every year. Give him a couple of years and he'll have a Mohican.

2 hours ago, Chris B said:

RVD has had the same gimmick and look since... what, 1995?

The undercut's been getting steadily higher every year. Give him a couple of years and he'll have a Mohican.

52 minutes ago, Carbomb said:

or wear a wig and risk ridicule

I'm amazed that you of all people missed the chance for 'wigicule' there!

I'm still just about holding on to a full head, thanks to my daily finasteride tablet. I sometimes feel I'm losing and will end up gradually with a skullet but I saw a photo from when I was 23 the other day (I'm 40 now) and the thinning at the front doesn't seem to have changed a great deal from what it was then. Which is great because my oversized head just wouldn't be able to pull off the shaved look.

6 minutes ago, Devon Malcolm said:

That's neither an Americanism nor new slang though, it's just people being thick.

Not necessarily. There's a school of thought that it's originally a sarcastic Yiddish phrase, delivered in full appreciation that the speaker means the opposite of what the words are saying, as with its similarly delivered neighbour 'I should be so lucky'. We call people thick for it because they're clearly not speaking logically but we do the same thing when we say things like 'You've got to love how Boris Johnson responds to questions directly, haven't you?' and so on.

On topic: Bookmarks jutting out of a book. My missus does this every time she hands me a book to put into my backpack if we're getting a train and always laughs at me for poking its head down.

8 hours ago, Wretch said:

Kicked my Da square in his bollocks when I was a kid.

Snap. "I know what to do if a stranger tries to get me, Daddy." At my direction he assumed a villainous stance and then WHOOMP my foot travelling as hard and fast as I could propel it dropped him. "Don't tell him off, it's good that he knows", my mother told him whilst he was groaning in the foetal position.

7 hours ago, Michael_3165 said:

It's not meant to be cool. It's supposed to be a throw back 

Although it does look cool too. Love a good mullet!

7 hours ago, Seratonin said:

Yes, if not for anything else the incredible racism in the lightweight match. Can't make it up.

Is that the one where Brian Christopher cackles as a guest commentator that he loves "seeing slant-eye in pain"?

Oh, cripes ... seeing as he was born on my seventh birthday, I suppose it would be politic to say "my brother"!

(He couldn't complain really though about my tactlessness. When his wife told him she was finally pregnant after years of trying and IVF treatment, he told her "It's just like when we (Leicester City) won the league!". And when they did win the league, he declared it "The best day of my life" on Facebook, almost a year to the day after they married!)

This cute little fella is an ex-girlfriend's little brother on his fourth birthday, possibly the only kid in South West France to have his own personalised Leicester City top:

The family lives in a tiny village (population: 324) about 60 miles away from Toulouse, where I earned a bit of money as an English teacher.

That young kid was born addicted to heroin and had been fostered by my girlfriend's family at a very young age. They adopted him when he was three. His brother was born into the same sad situation.

One day, a gentleman in one of my classes stayed behind as everybody was leaving. "You were saying in the last class that your girlfriend's brother is adopted and that his name is Fayçal. My son's adopted too." And then he told me the son's name. "What was his surname?" I asked, having just heard him give the first name of Fayçal's brother. "Zouaghi."

That was confirmation that we were speaking about the same children! He gave me his contact details and my girlfriend's family gave him a call. They decided that when the boys were old enough, they would let them know that they have a brother and pass on the contact details if they wanted to meet. Amazing coincidence.

And I've now realised that the little man must be 21-22 so is old enough to be online. Found him on Facebook! Let's see if he remembers me!

Although we barely speak (we're not in conflict, just really antisocial), we had a conversation once about places we'd always wanted to go to. Mine involved log cabins, snow, pines and so forth, the tundra, something like the area straddling the USA and Canada. I couldn't think how to articulate it so said Lapland, which was a neat way of summarising the image I had in a single word. That Christmas Day, I opened series of presents, which started out as weird contraptions such as spiky boot grips so you don't slip over on hard snow. Two days later, I was boarding an aeroplane en route to Lapland.

BBCode like that was deprecated when this version of the software came out in 2015. Some still works for legacy purposes but it's not actively supported and the effects of using it aren't always consistent.

There's a button for adding spoilers but unfortunately it doesn't appear to have been added to the toolbars on this site.

46 minutes ago, SuperBacon said:

I woke up at 7 and between then and now I’ve had 7 poos (and fitted in the school run).

Eh, that's nothing. I have more than that before I get out of bed in the morning.

4 hours ago, AVM said:

If you guys have any general advice, it'd be extremely welcome.

It sounds as though you don't need any, mate. We'll done!