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sebzilla posted:It's p-p-p-p-p-p-p-p-pancake day Not leap years, it's because Easter (and so Lent and Shrove Tuesday) is on a weird half lunar, half civil schedule because of arguments about how to date the death of Jesus.
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Mar 1, 2022 08:09
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NotJustANumber99 posted:I've definitely had Yorkshire pudding wraps somewhere Surely that's just a crepe?
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Mar 1, 2022 20:53
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OwlFancier posted:It's violence is what it is. it's just egg on toast where someone's stolen most of the toast.
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Mar 1, 2022 22:00
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ijyt posted:Shame high proof alcohol doesn't get yellow stickered, could have made a decent last-ditch molotov. Despite what The Young Ones told us, vodka doesn't actually make a viable molotov - 40%abv alcohol burns cool (the water evaporating with the alcohol takes the heat away pretty effectively) and quickly, so the heat just doesn't transfer to the thing you're lobbing it at. Don't take this as license to just coat yourself with it and set light to yourself though, although I suppose Richard Pryor got a couple of good minutes of standup out of it. Also if you're at the point you're making molotovs, price isn't your issue, surely?
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Mar 1, 2022 22:16
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feedmegin posted:What about Wray and Nephew rum as readily if expensively available in East London? Funny you should mention that, because overproof rum (I *think* Bacardi 151) is what Pryor used. But again, if price is the issue there are literally hundreds of litres of much more suitable material sitting in metal boxes protected by nothing more than a thin metal catch on the street outside your house.
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Mar 1, 2022 23:44
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Jaeluni Asjil posted:We always called those a 'Texas one eye'. Which is very offensive to those of us who know that as a sexual activity.
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Mar 1, 2022 23:45
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JeremoudCorbynejad posted:^^ yes, and I was responding to that hypothetical (of Russia shooting down a NATO plane over Ukraine) Whisper it, but a nuclear war is probably much *more* "winnable" than during the Cold War. Delivery systems are much more accurate and far, far, far more survivable, command and control networks much more vulnerable, and in fact although you're right that instant retaliation is much less likely than it would have been if poo poo had gone more sideways in 62 or 83 this probably makes things far more dangerous because it makes the Buck Turgidsons on both sides think an outright coup de main attack could actually work, with "limited" losses - maybe only the dozens of millions. This, and the deeply scary fact that we have people in positions of power (including in the loving NEC) that somehow seem to think that a "limited" use for nukes exists, IMO puts us at *greater* risk of annihilation than we were when Threads was transmitted. MAD was, well, mad but it was at least an easily-grasped and very convincing reason not to push things too hard. It's when people start talking about how it actually means there's no risk at all of nuclear war (and so let's really take the piss) that we start talking about seconds instead of minutes to midnight.
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Mar 2, 2022 00:00
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WhatEvil posted:I've gotta be honest I thought there would be some discussion about this. Goons are Having Opinions about food, you've got no chance mate.
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Mar 2, 2022 00:46
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I know the football-related jokes will sail over the heads of many posters ITT but push through them for the second-to-last panel in this week's Squires cartoon in the Graun:
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Mar 2, 2022 10:28
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jiggerypokery posted:A no-fly-zone is a limited war. I mean it in the sense of "These are the rules we NATO will engage with. Only Airpower, only within the borders of Ukraine. We won't hit anything outside of Ukraine, including Russian air bases. Withdraw your poo poo or we will have a hot war under these terms" You're describing the military equivalent of "I'm just going to start waving my arms and walking towards you and if you get hit it's your own fault". We wouldn't accept that behaviour from a child, why the gently caress are we talking about it being an acceptable option for a multinational, nuclear-armed, military alliance?
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Mar 2, 2022 12:19
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jiggerypokery posted:Western Europe is already sending arms, equipment and volunteers. By this logic, there is zero difference between the situation we were in Monday last week, a "no-fly-zone" and total apocalyptic war. If you can't tell the difference between sending weapons for Ukraine to use and an American pilot shooting down a Russian pilot then I really don't know what to tell you.
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Mar 2, 2022 12:24
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jiggerypokery posted:And if you can't tell the difference between using an American pilot to shoot down a Russian pilot in Ukraine and sending nukes followed by columns of tanks into Moscow/Brussels then I strongly recommend not following goings on over the next couple of weeks because it's going to be loving terrifying. Are you genuinely trying to claim sending actual NATO forces in to Ukraine to fight Russian forces - because that's what a no-fly zone *is* - somehow isn't a colossal escalation of the situation?
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Mar 2, 2022 13:05
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josh04 posted:You just need to understand that for a lot of people, World War 2 extended roughly up until the Afghanistan war. You can make the argument (and many have) that in fact the Franco-Prussian War never actually ended, it just snowballed. The effects of the aftermath were one of the main causes of WW1, the effects of the aftermath of that led to WW2, which led to the Cold War, etc. What I'm saying is if all of the nations of the world decided to get rid of their nuclear weapons by detonating them in the Saar so nobody could have it, we might actually get world peace at last.
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Mar 2, 2022 13:30
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jiggerypokery posted:No, I am trying to claim it is a colossal escalation of the situation and I believe that with each passing day as situation in Ukraine turns from an apparently heroic and effective resistance into Alepo 2.0 it's more and more likely to actually happen. Again I am not saying that is what should happen. I am saying that I don't think "no-fly-zone" talk is going to stay just rhetoric for very long. Okay, I misunderstood your point, my mistake.
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Mar 2, 2022 13:31
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Pistol_Pete posted:Naah. Sanctions never work - they impoverish ordinary people in the countries that they're targeted at but do little or nothing to destabilize regimes or encourage internal rebellion. Places like North Korea and Iran have been sanctioned for decades to no discernable effect; conversely, I can't think of a single situation where sanctions actually achieved their aim of changing a country's behaviour. I'd argue Russia is different from (most) other places where sanctions have been tried because the money-men that keep Putin in power are much more vulnerable to them - there's a considerably shorter and more direct route to apply pressure on him than there was on Hussein etc. However, to reinforce your point, at the moment the sanctions that have been applied have not been on these men or their wealth, but on institutions where the pain is felt more at the lower end of the scale. Part of this is because of course Lebedev, Abramovich, et. al. are good chums of the ruling class so we can't hurt them too much, can we, but I'd not be surprised at all if another factor is that there's a lot of people who *really* don't want that can of worms opened and it being demonstrated just how easily you can appropriate the funds of the hyper-rich (and just how little it would hurt the non-hyper-rich if you did so).
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Mar 2, 2022 13:47
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kecske posted:I can totally see Raab or Patel pushing to reimplement the draft 'just in case' National Service was ended at the absolute insistence of the armed forces themselves and they've only ever got more opposed to it. It's not like we've even got enough kit to keep our current lot supplied (or warehouses full of Lee-Enfields left over from WW1 to hand out like we did in 1939), and modern warfare just doesn't need warm bodies holding guns any more. At least one, extremely powerful, argument used against going to a Swiss-style citizen's militia model (one proposal for the continuation of National Service but on a smaller scale) where after 2 years you're discharged but can be called back immediately in the event of war is that by the 60s any possible scenario for invasion of the British Isles would come *after* the country had been turned into a faintly-glowing dust cloud drifting over the North Sea, and that definitely still applies now to a more general conscription - any war we're going to get involved in that would require millions of troops will be WW3 and we'd all be dead before they'd even had a chance to polish their boots. goddamnedtwisto fucked around with this message at 17:31 on Mar 2, 2022 |
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Mar 2, 2022 17:27
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OwlFancier posted:I also really cannot see why I would take up arms for a country that frankly, hates me and has offered me nothing but contempt from the moment I was born. You surely have to see the difference between being conscripted to go "liberate" a foreign land that has accidentally found itself on top of some valuable resource that should actually belong to Her Maj, and defending against such a "liberation"? If the French had just come marching up the Channel Tunnel and were currently shelling Canterbury, I'd (after getting my family safely off to my sister's mountain redoubt just outside Stratford-on-Avon) be signing up with the 9th Cockney Very Irregulars and heading off to a last stand at the Blackwall Tunnel. Not for Queen, flag, or even Tubby Issacs' Jellied Eels, but to protect my family, friends, even that neighbour who keeps flicking dogends into my garden. It might even be that I'd be sympathetic to the French reason for the invasion (possibly the abomination that passes for a "croissant" in most supermarkets in this country) but at the point where there are people with guns heading towards people I care about, I'm putting myself in their way. (This sounds rather more chest-beating than it did in my head, but I think the point stands. Nationalism is just a way the ruling classes have attempted to subvert the natural instinct to protect your loved ones by extending that love to a line on a map, it doesn't invalidate that love)
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Mar 2, 2022 18:16
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OwlFancier posted:I don't really know that I would be protecting them from anything, the government is already killing them by inches, and thanks to their hostility I have few of them left, I'm afraid it's going to take more than "we will kill you slower" to offset the joy of watching it all go up in flames. I hope this doesn't sound patronising but that is an extremely unhealthy worldview and I seriously suggest you try and get some help with it.
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Mar 2, 2022 18:31
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feedmegin posted:A quick Google suggests that if we have this to worry about then the French have mastered (heh) TARDIS technology. Like all cockneys it lives on in Clacton (his granddaughter and her family have a cafe out there that does still sell jellied eels) TBH I was baffled about how long the stall stayed in business - I don't think I ever saw anyone actually buying anything there. There was definitely a potential for a sitcom in the dynamic with the Turkish bloke who owned the burger van opposite though, and it's possible Ms. Isaacs kept the stall open just to spite him.
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Mar 3, 2022 10:44
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Guavanaut posted:Wasn't Lockerbie also mostly Iran and Syria, but Libyan centrality of involvement was hyped up for political purposes, or is it some kind of rotating atrocity where the central planners are always whoever we currently don't like? We'll never know, because there's so many overlapping layers of bullshit. About the only thing we can say for absolute certain is the only person in the world definitely not involved was the bloke who they put in prison in Scotland for it, offered up as a scapegoat by Gadaffi in the attempt to normalise relations with the West which ended up *so* well for him (and definitely wasn't the reason why Asad and the rest abandoned any attempt at such normalisation).
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Mar 3, 2022 18:14
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Jaeluni Asjil posted:I heard a lot of Egyptians saying that about themselves after the revolution as to why Mubarak / army / CC should be in charge. There's definitely a "we are bad people who need a strong man to control us to stop us being very bad" vibe there. I don't know where this notion comes from. It's the basic fascist urge - it's not that I, personally, need a strong government in nice clean uniforms to repress *me*, but something has to be done about those disrespectful youths and their haircuts, which are definitely the reason why I'm not as happy as I was 10 years ago.
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Mar 3, 2022 18:48
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https://twitter.com/siennamarla/status/1499472481786159104 Probably just a little bit of expectation management because they were polling >50%, I don't think the seat's in danger, but weird how bad weather is suddenly an issue, surely they've got loads of volunteers up there to get out the vote?
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Mar 4, 2022 00:12
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Dabir posted:To be fair the weather here has been pretty foul. Not raining that hard, just generally a miserable vibe It wasn't exactly tropical on December 12th 2019. (I even avoided the obvious Birmingham/miserable vibe joke!)
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Mar 4, 2022 00:39
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Mega Comrade posted:My parents still have a faint Welsh accent but when they get on the phone to a relative you can almost plot the (time on call / accent strength) on a chart. You could use my Cornish mum's accent like a GPS. In London it was a sort of generic Home Counties with just the occasional soft consonant (she insisted on calling the dairy product "budder", when of course we all know it's pronounced "bu'er" with a glottal stop) but as you headed down the A30 it got more and more Wurzel-y until when we crossed the Tamar and every single syllable was just "arr".
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Mar 4, 2022 10:25
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Mega Comrade posted:Do Londoners even have RP? Isn't it more a home counties thing? The whole point of RP is that it's specifically non-regional. It's the way that pronunciation was taught in public schools to completely over-ride any regional accent, and people spoke like that from Dover to Northumbria if they were of that social class. If it comes to it there's still pockets of people speaking effectively RP all over the Commonwealth and even in isolated pockets in the US too, for the same reason. There's also *at least* 5 major "London" accents (and RP isn't one of them), and just off the top of my head I can think of 6 different "Home Counties" accents although they're all flattening into variants of Estuary English now. People assume RP is associated with London and the Home Counties because that's where the biggest concentration of people who went to public school are, but like I say it's not really tied to any particular region and definitely isn't dominant anywhere other than *maybe* SW1A. goddamnedtwisto fucked around with this message at 12:21 on Mar 4, 2022 |
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Mar 4, 2022 12:15
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feedmegin posted:The poshest-accented person I've ever known (well, dated, anyway) was from Zimbabwe and her dad was something high up in their government, so she went to Zimbabwean Eton. Kind of charmingly old-fashioned English, too. I absolutely love that sort of "posh" Commonwealth accent, although part of that might just be long-remembered schadenfreude at my mate being shouted at by his Nigerian mum for talking like us Cockney guttersnipes. (Said mum also turned out to be one of the most virulently anti-immigration people I've ever met, because assimilation can go way too far)
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Mar 4, 2022 13:16
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Jaeluni Asjil posted:Very few native Brits speak RP. I think London is basically Norf Lahndan, innit, Saaarf Lanan, Estuary.  s in Cockney (Poplar sub-dialect with some Stepney and Wapping vowels plus occasional Cornish consonants)So although they've flattened out a *lot* recently, there's still at least two distinct Cockney accents (east and south London), plus a West London accent that's closer to Estuary English but would definitely be considered a Cockney sub-dialect if they weren't cursed by living in West London. There's also Estuary English and Mockney (N&W and S&E outer suburbs and Home Counties, although the latter is being subsumed by the former), plus the two North London accents (Jewish and Irish basically, although both spoken by way more than those ethnic groups). This of course excludes the generic "posh London" accent which is basically RP with some dropped aitches, and over the last 30 years a massive rise in Black London and Bangla London accents (and it's a weirdly sharp divider, one of my neighbours is the son of Jamaican immigrants and talks in a broader Cockney accent than I do, his sons despite being mixed-race and living on the IoD their whole lives sound like they're from Brixton), although those are less defined and distinct, and there's obviously massive groups of international accents that have their own life. I'm also (sadly) excluding the fact that there used to be almost as many accents as streets in east and south London, but it is still sometimes possible to hear the Mars Attacks-style honking of a Bethnal Green accent or the weird too-much-caffeine jitter of the Canning Town/Silvertown accent.
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Mar 4, 2022 14:29
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Ghost Leviathan posted:I'd love to hear about the English mannerisms of the character who doesn't even have spoken lines. Gromit does entire soliloquies with his eyebrows, and I'm fairly sure they motion-captured Patricia Routledge to get them right.
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Mar 5, 2022 10:56
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Ghost Leviathan posted:I felt like I was sounding sarcastic when I didn't mean to, because Grommit is a masterpiece of a character who says so much without talking. You should have posted a picture of your eyebrows - or a ridge of plasticine shaped a bit like an eyebrow - to help me read the meaning of your post better. (Seriously, how *can* they transmit so much information with just one bit of plasticine? Nick Park and the rest of the animators should get some sort of collective Best Actor Oscar on his behalf, it makes Bob Hoskins at the end of Long Good Friday look like a Moai) Sloth Life posted:An icon Again, they should use the bits of Keeping Up Appearances when she's on the phone as teaching exercises for actors. It's actually annoying that Roy Clarke never trusted her and her eyebrows enough to completely dispense with the "Repeating what the person on the other end of the line has just said" schtick, because you could practically lip-read the conversation just from her expression.
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Mar 5, 2022 14:14
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https://twitter.com/alixmortimer/status/1499743258125213696
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Mar 5, 2022 22:38
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Guavanaut posted:Somerset House looks more like a place of government than the gaudy mess with the clock does, that looks better suited for an experimental arts collective. It was actually built speculatively as government buildings because the Palace of Westminster and the temporary buildings thrown up after the Whitehall Palace burned down were woefully inadequate. One of the later wings was even built specifically to be able to host Parliament (somewhat suspiciously started a couple of years before the old Palace of Westminster burned down). I don't think there's any government offices left there which is a shame because you felt so *official* visiting there for a last-minute passport or a copy of your birth certificate. And don't be dissing Victorian Gothic, Neoclassical government buildings are for fascists. If they're going to abandon the Palace of Westminster while it's being propped up then they need to compulsorily purchase the Great Midland Hotel to ensure there is Continuity Of Twiddly Bits.
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Mar 5, 2022 23:35
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Jaeluni Asjil posted:Apropos nothing: if I have a double-socket sized backbox in my kitchen, am I able to infer the existence of wiring behind it so I can call the electrician and get him to fit a double socket in there without too much problem (ie not needing him to hack off the tiling and thread wires through the ceiling or wherever)? Impossible to say without opening it up. It may actually be carrying the 30A circuit for your cooker and originally held the isolator switch for it (they used to be a legal requirement but *seem* not to be now, at least most modern homes I've seen don't seem to have them). If so then a sparks won't install another circuit in there even if there's room to do so.
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Mar 5, 2022 23:39
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What kind of loving idiot tries to build large-scale solar on an island notable for a) being closer to the arctic circle than the equator, so the sun only gets above 45 degrees for a few hours even in summer and only being above the horizon for less than 8 hours in winter, when electric demand is highest, and b) having total overcast almost 50% of the time? This has to be some sort of grab for subsidies or a Producers-style "Can't possibly make a profit" investor scam. e: Met Office says East Anglia gets 57 hours of sunshine in January. *Has* to be a scam, there's literally no way they can make money on this. goddamnedtwisto fucked around with this message at 10:31 on Mar 6, 2022 |
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Mar 6, 2022 10:23
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jiggerypokery posted:Solar works just fine in the UK. It runs off light, not heat and actually gets less efficient in higher temperatures. I don't know how big of a deal overcast weather is - i assume it can't be ideal but it's made up at least somewhat by preventing them getting too hot I'm aware of that, but no matter how good the panels are, they can't generate anything if the sun's literally below the horizon like it is for >70% of the time in winter this far from the equator. It also suffers from the same winter high problem as wind - the coldest days (and hence highest demand for electricity) in the British Isles are when a high pressure system stalls over us resulting in extremely thick overcast and absolutely no wind, a situation that can last for up to a week. There's no advantage in going for PV solar over wind power *anywhere* in the British Isles because the only locations that do get higher-than-average clear or partial-overcast days (basically the east coast and the south-west peninsula) also get extremely reliable winds (and like I say, days they don't tend to be either in summer, when demand is much lower, or in a winter high, when PV is massively less efficient). We need to be working on decarbonising the power sources we need to fill in those gaps, with nuclear, hydroelectric, and geothermal where appropriate (pretty much Cornwall and bits of Northumbria and Scotland), and massively improving grid storage (pumped hydro and other gravity storage, not massive banks of lithium batteries, gently caress off out of here Tesla).
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Mar 6, 2022 10:57
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Lungboy posted:Tidal seems to be permanently beset by problems. There's a hub off Cornwall that they've been trying to hook stuff to for a decade and it's still not generating anything afaik. Large-scale tidal is probably dead. I mean you can understand the appeal when you're looking at millions of tons of water moving at speed in a completely predictable way but once you actually try and extract that energy you end up with everything covered in barnacles and also massive environmental impact (including silting up of the barrages) because you're loving up those flows. Wave power *might* be more practical, especially the schemes that keep the actual generating kit out of the water (the combination tidal-defence schemes, that use a reinforced concrete box with a wind turbine mounted horizontally in the top that gets moved by the air movement caused by waves coming in and out, are particularly efficient and easy to maintain), but you quickly run into the same problem of them being reliant on wind.
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Mar 6, 2022 11:52
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jiggerypokery posted:I don't know how much they run off them, but they work at night too.  Even a full moon gives considerably less than 1 lux of illumination, you'd need a football pitch of PV panels to even charge a phone. In practice internal resistance means PV panels just don't produce any power at all at such low levels.
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Mar 6, 2022 12:22
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Failed Imagineer posted:You've staked a big claim here on "PV panels don't work in Northern Europe" but this reply is pretty thin, bordering on the obtuse They extremely sloppily phrased their post, making the apparent claim their parents solar panels worked at night, and then clarified it. Also I've not claimed they *don't* work, just the work they do is pointless because their highest output almost by definition comes at the times when demand is lowest and vice versa, and as we have a finite amount of space and resources to devote to decarbonising the economy that *large scale* projects should concentrate on power sources that work much better in our conditions and in ways of filling in the gaps left by those conditions. If someone wants to install PV on their roof and it works for them fair play to them. It's still no more of a solution to the energy problems of the country as a whole than a rain butt is a solution to drought.
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Mar 6, 2022 13:21
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Borrovan posted:I'd have thought that solar plants would be a good idea even if not economical because eggs/baskets It'd be better to expend money and energy on things that are either completely consistent (nukes, geothermal) or inconsistent but on an opposite cycle to wind (hydro), and most of all on grid-scale storage (pumped hydro, etc). Like we *could* replace every single road vehicle in the country with hybrids and BEVs and make a massive dent in our carbon emissions, but that money would be much, much better spent on electric trains and buses for a much bigger drop in both direct emissions and also the emissions involved in creating the vehicles.
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Mar 6, 2022 13:32
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Pantsmaster Bill posted:This is ignoring that there are huge parts of the UK that cannot host wind turbines, for a variety of reasons (too close to houses, too close to airfields, etc). Solar is an alternative in those areas, even if it isn’t as efficient as in other areas of the world, because the alternative in those places is nothing. So do nothing in those places. We don't actually need every single square metre of the country doing *something* to generate electricity, and solar panels aren't free (and *definitely* aren't free of environmental costs). Like I say if people want to do domestic-scale PV I've no problem with that, but I'm talking about a solution to keeping the lights on for the country as a whole, and the fact that we can squeeze some solar panels onto the roofs of the hangars at Heathrow is irrelevant to that conversation because for the amount that costs, both financial and environmental, we *as a country* could build, say, a massive accumulator in an old coal mine, which would be of much more use in keeping the lights on. Not that we should fall into the old Tory trap of "You can only have one thing or the other", but we have limited resources (and limited time) so we have to ensure that what we use them for works holistically. Plaster the entire country with turbines and solar panels without bothering about storage and the lights will still be going out every winter (and 99% of that capacity will be switched off in summer) - we need renewables that work when wind (and solar) don't, and we need minimally-lossy (and cheap!) storage to cover the gaps in between. goddamnedtwisto fucked around with this message at 14:47 on Mar 6, 2022 |
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Mar 6, 2022 14:45
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JeremoudCorbynejad posted:Trees grow in the UK, we could just use them for solar power and burn them They did actually try that at Drax, it's a massive failure (not least because they were importing wood from Canada to fire it).
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Mar 6, 2022 14:47
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