I genuinely didn’t realise that! It looked like they were missing, and just had the little nubs underneath.

Would you perhaps like to imagine they were missing, if only for the sake of my previous comment? :)

How often do you write the word “wads”? I can see a potential problem.

All three of ours play fetch, but only with specific objects. They’re all brothers about 2½ years old.

The tabby cat plays fetch with fluffy toy balls with feathers on them, the grey cat plays fetch with spare cat collars and the little black cat plays fetch with menthol sweet wrappers.

I think you’re going to need some Blackadder to go along with your Monty Python.

Start with the second series though, as the first series is a little weaker (the characters and style are a bit different), and might put you off.

Hahaha. Oops. That one was automatic/accidental, but I’m not going to change it :)

As mentioned above/below, perhaps it should have been wikipædia :)

Twitter is actually 1982’s classic erotic Atari 2600 game "Beat 'em and eat 'em.

There’s Vladimir Putin at the top of the building, firing his pixellated ejaculate over the side and the player controls both Elon Musk and Donald Trump, running left and right with their mouths open to collect it.

article on videogamegeek wikipaedia article

I’m under the impression that pretty much all railway maps are based on, or developed from, the style of London Underground (also known as “The Tube”) maps from the 1930s onwards - so they all look kind of similar, because the designs all grew and developed from the same starting point.

Great, I’ll look in to that, thank you - and I hope you do write such a book one day :)

This is fascinating stuff. Is there anywhere where more of this kind of thing is written down?

On a similar note, with an “absolutely” and a word ending in “ed”, you get words which mean “very inebriated/stoned”

Common

• absolutely battered
• absolutely blathered
• absolutely pissed
• absolutely wankered
• absolutely trolleyed
• absolutely shitfaced
• absolutely twatted

Less common

• absolutely potatoed
• absolutely cultured
• absolutely traffic coned
• absolutely fishcaked
• absolutely Belgianed
• absolutely bin-bagged
• absolutely cabbaged
• absolutely Tobleroned

I suddenly picked up “allergies*” in my late 30s - couldn’t work out what they were, other than antihistamines (cetirizine or loratidine) made them “not as bad”, and I also needed to avoid certain things in particular (breathing in dust, aerosols, perfumes, other chemical fumes, car fumes, cigarette fumes, wood dust and drinking alcohol).

Turned out to be Nasal Polyps. I was due for surgery to remove them in 2020, but then Covid happened and I’ve been on a waiting list since. Surgery may completely remove the problem, or at least lessen it - but they could grow back within five years.

Basically every day is like I’ve got cold or sometimes flu. Sometimes I feel like I’m drowning in phlegm. If I take antihistamines, it’s pretty mild or controllable, as long as I can reasonably avoid those triggers. Sometimes I have to drink lemsip in the morning (powdered hot drink of paracetamol, lemon flavour & decongestant). It’s there every day, permanently, but how severe it is varies between “slightly inconvenient” and “too unwell to work”.

Antihistamines are essential for me to function at all, and make a huge difference - though I feel they’ve become less effective in the last year or so. Thankfully they’re very cheap over the counter (~£1.30 for 30 days’ worth). I also use a saltwater nasal spray sometimes, and I sometimes eat a lot of menthol sweets. I have to be careful with decongestants to avoid “rebound congestion” where your nose adjusts to life with decongestants, then becomes twice as blocked up if you stop.

If I drink alcohol or breathe perfume etc, my sinuses block up within half an hour, I can get an asthmatic response, and I get crippling arthritic pain in my hands and joints. Sometimes perfume and other sprays can cause severe, possibly dangerous breathing problems. I have an asthma inhaler for these emergencies, and always have to carry it with me, in case someone sprays perfume in an enclosed space (which might cause me to die).

If I keep reasonable control over these things, I can live pretty “normally”. If I actually get a cold, it’s like I’ve got a “double cold”, and it can make me too ill to go to work.

When it’s bad, it’s a pretty miserable existence to be honest, but in the larger scale of things it’s not a serious or life-threatening illness, so you feel guilty for complaining.

When it’s not so bad, I can normally ignore it for most of the day - and I have a pretty active job and am otherwise fairly healthy. It’s worst in the morning/night when I’m horizontal.

Your case outlined in the original post sounds particularly upsetting and you have my sympathies. You’re not being a baby.

*technically it’s an intolerance or hypersensitivity, and not truly an allergy, though it behaves in much the same way, and symptoms can be controlled in much the same way.

It’s a bit weird, isn’t it?

Technically, the navigational tool is “a compass” and the geometric draw-a-circle tool is “a pair of compasses” (I don’t know why) - but in general use, people just call both of them “a compass”.

We’ve had hundreds of years to rename one of them, but for some reason haven’t bothered.

You can use the box to collect cats in.

I didn’t realise this option existed - and it’s an interesting one, perhaps giving the ease-of-use of Mate/Cinnamon/Gnome 2, without sticking with the older code.

Ah, okay - so the “A” is pronounced like the letter “A”, with the “feelay” bit like when McDonalds used to do “filet o’fish”?

It reads more like a Donald Trump speech

How’s it meant to be pronounced? I’ve only ever seen it written down.

Chick feeler? Chick filler? Chick fill urgh Chick fill Ah

I just don’t understand what they’re trying to call it. Unless it is “filler”, my best guess is something like “fillet”, though I can’t make the letters match up with the words.

My nose/sinus/throat is all very sensitive to perfumes and aerosols these days, and even if it’s not strong enough to close my throat up and choke me, it still tends to make me feel sick. I’ve not used any spray and rarely any smelly stuff for over a decade.

Most soaps and some shower gels are fine though, so there’s no problem with starting a day “clean”.

On the morning train, you can normally smell people who use deodorant instead of washing. It’s quite hard to describe - air freshener in a festival toilet? Artificial sweeteners on a stilton cheese? Anyway, if their perfume isn’t strong enough to physically harm me, I don’t care.

I used spray deodorants as a teenager, and unscented roll-ons for many years after - but after stopping using it, I found, like the couple you mentioned, that I didn’t sweat as much, and the sweat that was there didn’t smell as bad. Oddly enough, anecdotal evidence suggests my natural smell increased my attractiveness quite significantly. Of course, all of these may have just been coincidental factor of age/hormones/circumstances etc though.

I was a bit paranoid for some years, and always asked/checked with trusted people “do I smell?”. I found I can smell myself when I do.

My work is sometimes quite physically demanding, so during the ~two months a year when it’s potentially warm (Northern UK), you can get a bit sweaty - but so is everyone else. If you really feel the need, a quick armpit wash in a sink at lunchtime, or a “festival shower” with a wet-wipe would sort that out.

Anyway, so the rough answer is “There is less body odour. You get used to what’s there. Most of it smells quite pleasant, sometimes even to the extent of it being animalistically magnetically attractive”

Yeah, you just have to wait it out for a few years. Can’t be long before it moves back to new variants of straight, loose, baggy, bootcut and flared and that sort of thing etc. I’m stocking up next time.

I would probably be the same, had I been born 5 years earlier or later, and hit a different part of the skintight/baggy cycle.