Ronnie

The earliest crush that I can recall was this young lady:

That's Penny, Inspector Gadget's highly intelligent niece.

When I was a little bit older, I was taken by Colonel Wilma Deering from Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, portrayed by Erin Gray.

It took a bit of getting used to that this was from the seventies: everybody always looked terrible from what I'd seen of that decade on TV.

Not her, though, and to this day, I think of Wilma Deering as flawlessly attractive, and I'm massively envious of this dildo she's got her eye on.

1 hour ago, westlondonmist said:

Everybody no matter age or nationality knows/knew who he was. America went nuts when he went there, getting commercial deals and getting 78,000 people at one of his matches.

I think it's a great testament to how well known he was that a sports writer (Rick Reilly) can relay an anecdote on various news programmes (promoting his brilliant book Commander in Cheat) that Trump's golf caddies nicknamed him Pelé on account of how often he kicks the ball, in full confidence that the audience will understand the reference.

18 minutes ago, air_raid said:

In the sweltering heat of Italia 90 he got hacked down twice by two different players and dusted himself off to put away two pens.

I suppose that's reminiscent of the previous QF in that, as Kane is reported to do, he decided before the match where a penalty will go and then sticks to it. The system breaks down when you get a second penalty, so I recall him explaining once that his solution was to blast it as hard as he could down the middle and hope the goalkeeper moved. Definitely a better plan than launching the ball into orbit!

59 minutes ago, air_raid said:

Although he did like a game against Poland or Turkey

Don't sleep on Malaysia! https://www.the-afc.com/en/more/news/asian_classics_england’s_lineker_recalls_that_night_against_malaysia_in_kuala_lumpur.html

I remember his answer after the game to the question of which of his four goals was his favourite: "The first. You can't score any more until you've got the first." I loved the logic of that and apply it to this day, for example, congratulating somebody when they're struggling to give up smoking and have just made it to "only" two weeks; "Can't get to three until you've got to two."

2 minutes ago, SuperBacon said:

It won't start because hes not black. Saka, Sancho etc were abused when they missed their penalties because they are black. Kane won't be abused because of his skin colour.

Funnily enough, that's the the exact point he was making. The abuse started immediately for those three; Steve posted the morning following the QF noting that, of course, there had been none for the player with less melanin. He could suffer racist abuse; there are non-white England fans. It's just that they're not racist! 

I find myself cheering on Morocco, always liking an underdog. No goals conceded yet; that's a good sign. We've got connections to Croatia in this house, so that's usually our team anyway. I used to live in France so tend to find myself liking them, though not so much this time: that speedy one who looks like a model of a TMNT seems a pretty classless fella, and Messi has been coming across like that to me, too, so I'm not as in interested in seeing a repeat of 86 as I might have been.

It'll be Argentina--France then.

8 hours ago, JNLister said:

Don't remember them being DQed but WWF Magazine did a bit where they were accused of illegal doubleteaming:

It may very well have been that. I can't be sure of the result, only that a lot was made of the double-teaming taking more than 5 seconds. Perhaps it was the heel commentator complaining.

Eh, double post, so I'll add something else to tie in to how magical those times were.

My eldest nephew spent a few weekends with us when he was younger. One of our regular activities was watching bits from old PPVs and matches from a Hogan DVD set. It was a bit selfish because I was making this child watch what I wanted to: the match with the Evil Twin; anything with the Twin Towers, and so on.

He was still awake at 11-ish one night when he should've been asleep, so I popped my head around the door to get him to bed. He didn't argue but wanted to show me what he'd discovered on the internet first. "He's going to have searched 'boobies', isn't he?", I thought to myself. Not at all: he was on YouTube and had searched the term "The Million Dollar Man", unearthing tonnes of material he'd been cycling through whilst he should've been asleep!

I saw him a month ago. He's now 15, and at least 8 inches taller than me. He seems a bit old before his time, talking about how rugby (he's a player) is too soft these days and wrestling's not as good as it used to be. I thought I'd better check which era he was referring to, since you can imagine his generation not enjoying today what they grew up with: it was WWF 1988-92, of course!

On 11/25/2022 at 2:15 PM, JNLister said:

the contrasting receiver equipment of Sky’s circular dish and BSB’s flattened “Squarial”, the latter designed to appear less vulgar to middle class homeowners

30+ years later, the joke I heard queueing for lunch has just come back to me:

- What do you call that small box on the back of a SKY dish?
- A council house.

Those night-time programmes around 1988 were my introduction to American wrestling, too. So much more exciting than that Big Daddy rubbish that we used to watch!

It turns out that my dad used to be quite the fan in his childhood, and he brought a scrapbook I'd known nothing about to our house a few months ago, full of notes and autographs. I'm going to assume that he had somehow come across "Wrestling" in a TV listing around 1988/89, and decided to record it. One day he told me he had something to show me: the Rockers despatching opponents with their signature tandem offence, with the slow-mo recap explaining that the referee was correct to disqualify them (I think) for taking more than five seconds after the tag. And there was Lord Alfred Hayes talking about this astonishing Demolition, who sounded truly unbeatable. I went to school imaginging this Bad News Brown whom Hayes had referenced: I pictured him as a villain from the Wild West.

I don't think I saw too many other episodes (and it's fair to say that those memories above might not have been from the same one) but I knew that the American wrestling was great, and within a year or two several cousins and a couple of uncles were often watching the PPVs on (rented?) VCRs at my grandparents'.

Getting SKY in late 1991 was the dream; there always seemed to be some WWF programming on, and it was the time when Bret Hart was on every episode defending the IC title. I loved him beating the Barbarian by playing possum and then rolling him into a Small Package. That became my go-to finish when playing wrestling with my brothers.

Magical times!

3 hours ago, Chris B said:

I mean more generally. Just curious how you figured out what happened and how it got solved - I'm guessing, if similar effects have happened on other forums, that made it easier to solve.

It's a known problem. I was speaking with a friend about it a few hours ago and he hit the nail on the head before I'd even seen Moo's reponses:

Quote

This sounds like the other site is using a CDN that is actually caching the base pages.  

With a CDN...  if the caching rules are not setup correctly...  if I come to the site and visit a page logged in as me, it stores that page...  INCLUDING all the content that I see on the page.  The next person that comes along that connects to the same CDN server gets served the same page instead of going back to the origin. 

This is why if you do use a CDN, you must either not cache base pages OR configure it to ignore cache for logged in users.  🙂

The army team Honvéd provided six of Hungary's Golden Team for the 1954 final: Gyula Grosics, Gyula Lóránt, József Bozsik, Zoltán Czibor, Sándor Kocsis, and, of course, Ferenc Puskás.

1 hour ago, Cousin Jim Bob said:

Andrew Neil was openly laughing at how pathetic he was. 

He triggered Alex Jones magnificently with a judicious "Oi, shut it!", too!

11 hours ago, PunkStep said:

Obviously we all know that a Tory shouldn't lead the country anyway, but having FOUR consecutive PMs get the push (or 'walk', if you'd rather) is an absolute mess.

It was presented as an amazing thing that the Queen knew 15 prime ministers during her 70-year reign. Any seven-year-old will soon have been alive for five!

2 hours ago, garynysmon said:

Foley's had his Twitter account hacked and is being held up for money.

He's had it back since yesterday:

4 hours ago, Keith Houchen said:

I think that title's tied up forevermore by Lord Lerwick. Difficult to see how anyone's ever going to be more northern than somebody from Shetland. A forgivable oversight on Sunak's part, my picking out a long-forgotten aristocrat from the nineteenth century to get one over on him? Hardly: it's Norman Lamont.

Thinking of him has just compelled me to look up one of his predecessors and ... somehow Nigel Lawson has made it to 90. I suppose there's hope for all of us if he didn't get felled by a heart attack thirty years ago, before he dropped all that weight.

51 minutes ago, Louch said:

Dunn will be expensive to remove, actual employee on high 6 figures with 30 years ish service. He’d be daft to walk 

You're applying civilised employment laws where they don't belong. Connecticut is an "at-will" state, meaning that an employer can dismiss somebody because they feel like it, as long as it's not on grounds of race, disability, refusal to break the law on the employer's behalf, etc.

Hope you make a pretty penny from this, @Devon Malcolm:

(Available from Redbubble.)

Somebody forgot to tell their online team what the Mail-approved reality is, the bellends:

7 hours ago, Ronnie said:

I find myself hoping against hope that Heaven exists so that I can be glad that the person who invented air conditioning is getting his just deserts. A hero, I tell you!

Fuck's sake, jinxed myself. It's 01:33 and I've had to get up because the air conditioning isn't working in this sort of shed we're in. The phones aren't charging from the power outlets on that side of the room anymore so I think a fuse has gone. Magnificent.

I find myself hoping against hope that Heaven exists so that I can be glad that the person who invented air conditioning is getting his just deserts. A hero, I tell you!

15 minutes ago, choccygirl said:

That’s all well and good until you consider that in some cases they are choosing for women to die if they continue with a pregnancy.

I purposefully didn't mention ectopic pregnancies and similar threats to the mother's life precisely because I can see some (even if not all) of the most fervent opponents agreeing, if presented with such a scenario, that things aren't perhaps quite as cut and dried as they would otherwise state. Those unfortunate situations don't detract from the main point, though, that those individuals are against abortion on principle because it is, to them, murder of a defenceless human being, even if their position wouldn't prove to be so entrenched if somebody they knew's life were threatened by a zygote implanting outside the womb.

10 minutes ago, Chris B said:

That assumes taking him on good faith, which I don't.

Why? He's from the South of the most evangelically extreme country in the Western world. The emotive and counterfactual is entirely what many of them believe. And given that they do tend to be thoroughly convinced that a zygote is a human being, I can, like @Tommy!, fully understand their framing that nothing justifies the murder of a defenceless baby, even in the extreme case that it was conceived without the consent of the person carrying it.

Their initial beliefs are wrong, of course, but they're theirs, nonetheless, and are what underwrite their views. It's far too simplistic just to write it off as men trying to tell women what to do with their bodies, as the default response can often seem to be. Once you start off convinced that that tiny ball of parasitic cells is actually a baby, terminating it becomes as unpalatable as ending its life a week after birth is universally accepted as being. None of us believe that having carried a baby grants one the privilege to murder it; they just apply that logic to prior to the birth, too. That view will never change and this argument therefore never end for as long as fact and reason aren't the basis of beliefs. Making the argument about it being individuals' rights to decide whether to terminate a pregnancy won't resolve anything; you've somehow got to convince these people that the entity developing within the host isn't, at least in the early stages, a human being. 

I've had to get up at stupid o'clock, and the shipping forecast has come on the radio. I understand all of the words but can't make any sense of them in the order in which this bloke is reading them out. 

RONNIE OUT.

10 hours ago, Ronnie said:

And we find out that a new character introduced in Lost Light as "she" used to be "he" but changed it because "she" just felt right.

I'm going to need to re-read the entire thing again. Just rummaging through them now has brought it all back: the humour, the multi-layered mysteries which pay off over the course of years of careful reading, the intricacies of the writing ... the fact that James Roberts somehow makes us care about no-personality never-weres such as the awful Whirl toy, which looked like an oversized GoBot:

or faceless filler like one of Blaster's twin cassettes, Rewind:

The whole series (originally More than Meets the Eye, then renamed as Lost Light) is a masterpiece. I don't know when I'm going to find the time to re-read it all but that's a problem for another day. In the meantime, it's well worth spending the £20 just to get this lot (8 volumes of MTMTE, 4 of LL). I've just bought them despite having the trade versions, the hardback ones as part of the rip-off Hachette Partworks Definitive G1 Collection, and the single digital issues I bought at the time, risking some funny looks because it became the highlight of the month to justify a trip to the pub to read it over a few ales. And I'm saying this as somebody who just can't read comics as an adult!

4 hours ago, BigJag said:

TFN Transformers convention in Birmingham tomorrow.

You appear to have posted in the future: