Ronnie

Very classy from Donnarumma. His save won the tournament for his team but it came at the expense of a 19-year-old. I really like how he had the decency not to celebrate, as though acknowledging that this was a zero-sum game, and being mindful of the other person.

I'm glad that England didn't win but I'd rather it not have been via penalties, with those poor young men now shouldering what their manager did 25 years ago.

1 hour ago, SpiritOfTheForest said:

I think I, and everybody who isn't English, is hoping Ukraine can do similar tomorrow. 

Some of us who are English are hoping for that too. But I lose at everything (referendums, elections, life) so I'm not holding out much hope, especially with the semi and final being home matches.

I suppose the classic example is the original Appetite for Destruction cover:

For some reason, a few retailers wouldn't carry it.

England winning doesn't mean we haven't got something to celebrate in our Croatia-supporting household: our super genius, Pebbles, has turned 10 today, so got a bowl of massive prawns as a treat. You'll have to take it on trust that this is a happy face:

Here she is in her younger days:

and with big sister Heidi:

And since I didn't mention her sister's tenth birthday in this thread last year, here's Heidi as the world's cutest kitten:

Oh no, that's sad. It always gets to me that our four-legged family members have lives so much shorter than ours. 

Well, today's been a memorable day.

I've spent it wearing the shirt which Leicester happened to be wearing. It wasn't a coincidence that I happened to be wearing a Leicester jersey but I didn't know they'd be wearing that particular top today. My celebrating might come across as a tad mercenary: I don't actively follow football, and don't support any particular club. But I'm from Leicester, and my entire family, bar me, are supporters. My grandfather and most of my uncles were stewards, and my brother, who started working with them at 16, is the kit man. Yes, he has a Premiership winners' medal. He's also the source of my replica kit: he sent me the whole lot, plus some boots, so that I would look the part when playing football to try to lose some weight. Unfortunately, being a fat cunt, I contrived to give myself a stress fracture in the shin, so my return was short-lived. Come to think of it, I worked for Leicester too, from 18 to 22. So it's a family thing.

Beyond that, though, there's a bigger reason for my emotional investment today: my brother invited us to a personal tour at the King Power Stadium in 2016. Well, how was I supposed to know it would result in a family photo around the Premiership trophy? Nobody told me anything, so I turned up looking scruffy even by my usual tramp-chic standards: faded joggers which had shrunk in the wash and were halfway up my shins, and lank hair, hanging around my jowls like that fella off the Hamlet advert whose combover surrendered to gravity. Since I don't follow football, I didn't know until a week or so ago that Leicester were in the final, and so my hopes got up relatively late in the day: perhaps we could retake that photo and bin the old one! After all, two new niblings have arrived since then, and all the blokes have since had the snip, so the extended family is larger and now complete. Yes, the old photo is out of date: here would lie my salvation. I'm not naive: I'll still need a unicyle to support my sprawling bellies, but at least this time I can wash my hair and wear some proper clothes. 3 out of 10 is better than the previous negative number.

Well, Leicester won today. Success! So I decided to head to the pub, wearing my Leicester shirt, to celebrate my own Great Escape. There's a pleasant family pub about a 10-minute walk away, and a shithole just around the corner. I thought I'd play it safe and head to the friendly one. Alas, it was closed, so a U-turn resulted, and I soon occupied a table outside the rough one. It's the sort where, from Monday onwards, you'll be wiping your feet on the way out. By tradition, I order two pints when I arrive in a pub: I know the first one will disappear in a few minutes, and it saves having to order again in a hurry. They arrived relatively promptly, and then WHOOSH! -- a pint glass flies within inches of my head at high velocity, and my back is soaked to the skin. I shit myself for a second, thinking it's some Chelsea fan who is understandably aggrieved about the VAR decision. I turn around to plead my case: "I agree! And I don't actually support Leicester!" Fortunately, it wasn't aimed at me: some feral, his ratlike features twisted venomously, had taken umbrage with some people in the street. Feeling disrespected by them, he'd thrown what appeared to be a full pint in their direction as hard as he could in a statement of ill intent. I happened to be sitting directly between the two parties, as my soaked Leicester jersey and trousers attested. I'm a philosophical man: I count myself lucky that he was so inebriated because otherwise he'd never have accomplished the physics-defying task of somehow missing my oversized head from a foot behind it.

At this point, the solution seemed pretty clear: drink up the remaining nearly two pints, and head on my way, hoping that I don't get a four-knuckle facelift when I get back for apparently pissing myself. (I'm sure the pint that I ended up swimming in was Carling, so this misperception was entirely feasible.) And then the venue complicated things by bringing a third pint to the table by way of apology, delaying my escape by a further five minutes.

But all's well that ends well. I'm now safely at home, and Ronette, who hates the Hellhole Bar, had no difficulty believing the story. And I'm going to look less of a tramp in the family photo, so that's a result.

It's been a memorable day.

On 3/11/2021 at 12:02 PM, deathrey said:

Have any of you raised your kids bilingual? I really really want to raise my kid bilingual but I am so inconsistent with it, I feel like I'm going to fail miserably. When I'm in autopilot I always end up speaking English. I can speak Punjabi just as well as I speak English, I really want my kid to be the same. My parents only spoke to me in Punjabi and I learnt English through TV/friends/nursery when I was around 3. It was easier for my parents as only my dad spoke English and Punjabi is his default language.

I don't have kids but I know plenty of people who raise theirs bilingually, and it's an area I'm a little bit familiar with. Young children are like sponges, primed for language acquisition, and they can comfortably absorb several at the same time. They don't require the same degree of effort and exposure that older children and adults do, so you don't need to worry about consistently using Punjabi. If you've got access to Punjabi radio or television, that helps provide some immersion, and your father could make a point of using his own native language in conversation.

Don't expect the child to be actively bilingual, though: some simply choose not to reply in a language even if one of their parents has only ever used another one with them. I know a few cases like that where I've been put in the awkward spot of speaking to a child in English, asked by the parent to switch, and then had the poor child carry on in English with me.

On 3/21/2021 at 10:35 AM, JNLister said:

The greatest moment in WWF UK PPV history: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/596294.stm

As amazing as that is, what's really caught me out is that 20 years ago a 64-year-old would be described as "elderly"! She wouldn't even qualify for her pension today.

On 3/11/2021 at 11:19 AM, chokeout said:

On American names I still don't understand how they got to pronouncing Craig as Creg and Graham as Gram

I get why they'd struggle with Graham; the British pronunciation isn't obvious. Those two vowels are pronounced differently to each other, and the 'h' isn't pronounced in either of the ways we typically encounter it. If you've never encountered the name in anything other than writing, then you're going to choose an equivalent to Abraham or Abram. We can see which way they went.

I'm not at all sure of Craig, although what you're calling American pronunciation isn't consistent throughout the USA. (I think Geordies probably pronounce the name differently to what you'd consider the English version too!) I suppose it's not too different from our deriving crag from it; the US just largely opted for a different vowel. 

On 3/11/2021 at 11:39 AM, Carbomb said:

The one that I find interesting, and not sure which I prefer, is how we pronounce "Bernard" as "BURR-nud", and they pronounce it more like the French, "bur-NAARD".

Although the US pronunication does catch me out, there is sense in their choice: they might be an English-speaking country but they're a melting pot. When French Bernards and Maurices moved over there, they and the others in their community knew how to pronounce their names. From day one, the stresses in those names would've been established, with a d-sound added at the end because of the influence of the spelling of 'Bernard', and the incoming Bernhards, Bernardos, etc americanising their names. In our case, we made a French name sound more British. Among other things, I suspect a cause is people encountering the name in writing ('St. Bernard') and having to work out the pronunciation before it became a name given to English people: sort of the reverse of people encountering Niamh audibly and then naming a daughter Nieve/Neve, etc.

On 3/11/2021 at 1:36 PM, Carbomb said:

The way they say "erb" is the one that mystifies: a lot of American spelling and pronunciation seems to follow a trend of being based more directly on Latin and Classical Greek, rather than on the French like British English. But they decide to go with French pronunciation for that one word?

They didn't. They kept the pronunciation that the settlers had when they arrived, just as they did with hono(u)r, hour, etc. We're the ones who changed our own pronunciation, adding an aspirated 'h' where there wasn't one before, as we've also done with words like hotel, historic. (That's why you may occasionally come across 'an hotel' or 'an historic', particularly in older academic texts. Don't be one of those occasional plonkers who try to sound smart on the radio by retaining both 'an' and the aspirated 'h'; they seem to think there's some rule that 'historic takes "an" not "a", you know' rather than the standard pronunication norms that we use without thinking hundreds of times a day applying: the people who wrote 'an historic' didn't pronounce an 'h' on the word is all that was happening.)

On 3/11/2021 at 1:47 PM, Carbomb said:

Edinburgh as "Edinburo", but Glasgow as "GlasGAU".

I know your point here was the stress placement rather than jumping on the fact that the entire pronunciation is markedly different from the British norms but it brings to my mind how hypocritical Brits can unintentionally be when they complain that the US has its own established pronunciation for these cities rather than following the local one: do you know any Brit who uses the American pronunciation of Los Angeles? I don't. I can let people off for not replicating the American vowel quality in the Los part, but ending Angeles with an equivalent to 'is' rather than 'ease' would be easy. And yet none of us do it, whilst complaining that the Americans base their pronunciation of Birmingham and Glasgow on the spelling rather than how we pronounce it. At least they can say they never encounter the native pronunciation; we can't realistically claim never to have heard Americans say Los Angeles!

On 3/11/2021 at 7:52 PM, neil said:

It is spelt different tho - which itself is a story that just speaks to the English deciding to modify a word and then say everyone else is wrong.

Cadmium, beryllium, sodium, helium, potassium, lythium ... the ending -ium is well established, particularly when naming metals within the past couple of centuries. The British did modify the word to fit this pattern, it's true ... but it was a very rapid change, coming a year after Sir Humphrey Davy, who named it alumium in 1808, changed it to the form which Americans know in 1811. The French and Germans (two of the three languages, alongside English, in which around 90% of scientific papers were written by the end of the 19th century) also use aluminium, so it's not really the case that the British decided that everybody else is wrong. They just very promptly harmonised the new name proposed by a (British) scientist, whereas the Americans imported it unchanged.

On 3/11/2021 at 9:46 PM, Steve Justice said:

And "twot". 

As much as I dislike the pronunciation (it's so less satisfying an utterance in US English), this is another case of them maintaining the original pronunciation whilst ours has diverged, with the combination of spelling and comparative rarity over there convincing us that they've taken a British-English favourite and mangled it. The spelling argument doesn't help, I'm afraid: we have no difficulty with was, want, watch, swan, swap, etc. On top of that, twot used to co-exist with twat. We just changed the pronunciation ourselves ... and we were absolutely correct to do so: would Danny Dyer referring to David Cameron as a twat have elicited anything like the venom otherwise? Of course not!

1 hour ago, Bettencourt said:

The advice above works great from @Your Fight Sitenot so much @Guy Bifkin

The downside of the stylesheet change is that it will apply to any other sites using the same software if you happen to use them. It's not important in this case because the sidebar is only used here in that one role but in other sites, you might lose some (unimportant) features. I'm glad it works for you ... if I didn't use other similar sites, I think I'd probably adopt the same approach myself

2 hours ago, Bettencourt said:

Does anyone know if there is a way for users to remove the stats table from the right via the settings by any chance?

It's a setting in the Admin Control Panel and applied globally, unfortunately.

20 hours ago, Bellenda Carlisle said:

It's way too bright, I actually don't like looking at it. The only thing I wanted (other than downvotes) was "preview post" on mobile which still doesn't seem to be there.

It's been there for ages, NotSteve.

9 hours ago, SuperBacon said:

Yes, I'd use something like imgbb.com and then just C&P the 'BBCode Full Linked' tab and it would just embed the image?

Ah. That's the problem, then: BBCode hasn't been supported in the software since 2015. Some legacy code still worked, but BBCode is deprecated as of this update, so none of it will work from now on. Unfortunately, that means the workaround for spoilers will no longer work either.

(That shouldn't be a problem since it takes all of 2 minutes for the admin to add the inbuilt spoiler button to the editor's toolbar but, y'know...)

27 minutes ago, SuperBacon said:

How do you post images now? The old way doesn't work for me.

What was your previous technique? Did you paste the URL into the editor, which then embedded the image?

46 minutes ago, Cod Eye said:

I've been hoping for a dark mode or dark theme for a long, long time. I'd be happy to chuck some more money in if the dark themes @Ronniementioned cost more...

There are free ones, running up to $30. The admin can create them relatively easily too using some inbuilt tools.

8 hours ago, Chest Rockwell said:

I haven't properly explored it yet but the first thing I did was check to see if there was s Dark Mode and there isn't, which is a damn shame.

There is ... but only in the Admin Control Panel. Overhauling the front to allow for light and dark versions of the default theme was too large a job for the dev team to tackle in a minor release. The accepted solution is to install one of the third-party dark themes, and allow users to switch between that and a lighter alternative.

Just look at the state of PS! Complete with bumbag as part of his ensemble!

Facebook has kindly reminded me that this is what my girls looked like exactly two years ago. And they haven't changed at all since.

Me aside, there are some good-lookers in this household.

Imagine not even being able to pretend to empathise having been reset several times by the on-air coach:

Or maybe she can (Burley says that she knows Coffey is a compassionate woman) but it's been drilled into them that any show of humanity towards refugess and asylum seekers would do even more harm than coming across like this does, which is a depressing thought on the state of the country.

On 8/14/2020 at 7:22 PM, Ronnie said:

Somewhere in my office is a Masterpiece Megatron. For some reason, I can't find him, although two Jar Jar Binxes (Ronette's, not mine) are on display and I can't escape them.

I still can't find him, although Facebook has just reminded me that I'm not mad and definitely do have him. I might have to have a word with my nephew on suspicion of theft, but that cute three-year-old now is now 13 and a couple of hairs away from six feet, so I'll let him off.

(That toy is impossible to transform. It takes at least 30 minutes with the help of a YouTube tutorial, and even then it's 50:50 whether you'll get there.)

3 minutes ago, Chest Rockwell said:

Well. If they're going to refer themselves as that then there just inviting ridicule....

I think it's like the French being "frogs" to the English, or the English being "prawns" (I love that one!) to the Spanish, rather than a name they've given to themselves. It's from their saying "yow am" instead of "you are".

I remember stopping in my tracks after a visitor from the Black Country had popped by a local pub and was in conversation with the barman. You know when you can get just about every word in a sentence and have no trouble with the meaning, but there's just one bit where you cannot, no matter how hard you try, make out? It took a couple of minutes of eavesdropping to register that what should've clearly been "she is" was "'er am".

The crown jewel is Combiner Wars Devastator. Next down heightwise is the original but he's got a bunch of CrazyDevy upgrades which have added quite a bit of height because of the waist and thighs. On the right is a low-quality knock-off version of the original from the World's Smallest Transformers range. The final one is a model from the Super Collection Figure line.

As you might have guessed, I quite like Devastator

Facebook has kindly reminded me that I acquired my monster Devastator three years ago. He's a thing of beauty!

I really should find time to reassemble him. The Constructicons have been on guard duty in my office since not long after I got him.

15 hours ago, gmoney said:

The Lifetime ISA is a pretty fantastic for retirement, provided of course that you don't end up needing that money early. 

For clarity because other people won't know this: although the Lifetime ISA is a tool for creating a retirement pot, you don't have to wait until the legal retirement age to access it. Once you hit 60, you can withdraw the money without breaching the terms.

There's little to be said for moving money about each year too. That's a fiddly process. In my case, it will involve new apps and log-ins on my phone, etc.

Assuming he's able to put aside the maximum £4000 a year, hallicks will get a bonus of £1000 to bring him to £5000. What's 1% of that? £50. He'd be getting around £20 anyway. If he's saving for a house deposit, then I presume he'll want to be spending his money within the next couple of years. We're not talking long-term compounding of anything extra he can obtain now. Is all the fuss of moving in year two worth it for £30 more than he'd have got anyway? Ultimately, it's an insignificant amount in view of what he'll have to be saving and what he'll need for a deposit.