They work out quite expensive against even the better quality shop-bought puddings but they are well worth it. Delia's recipe is an absolute belter. The earlier they're made the better. Stored in a cool, dark place they'll comfortably last a year or so.

Delia's recipe for mincemeat is pretty good too. Lasts for ever (well, almost).

Continued overuse of the words "Silver Bullet" during Covid.

Pop-a-pill culture is strong in the USofA

Round here it would last about ten minutes.

politician are some really annoying!! Hate them now a days

As a tubist I can truthfully say all bassoonists are wankers.

People who give 'One star' reviews on items they purchased due to their own Stupidity/ Inability to read instructions/ Inability to slot tab A into B to build the thing.

Went to buy a holdall in the Adidas site sale this morning and the bag I was after had many 'One star' reviews all because it was 'Much smaller than it looked on the website' and 'It was that small when I got it I couldn't get anything much in it'

The bag was clearly labelled as 'Extra Small' in the title and had the dimensions in cm under the picture :wallbash:

Plus a thousand more...

Sadly I fear England will be speaking American English over the next generation or two. It's creeping in already.

Much the same with 'One Star' reviews of hotels on Trip Advisor.

People focus on one small issue, disregarding all other perfectly acceptable aspects of the hotel.

It's why I always read the 3 star reviews as no one with an axe to grind or vested interest in the property would ever give a middling 3 star review.

Fat ugly young women plastered in tattoos who make themselves look worse by dying their hair blue or some other colour. Sad old man here

Apart from William Shatner's bassoonist who is a legend.

I have never got the tattoo thing. Or piercing,

Hair colour is fine as long as it's between your natural and silvery grey as a bloke or anything you like as a 'lady'....... although blue rinse is equally a mystery (unless it's to match their tats and piercings I guess..... doh!). Yep I am in the sad category.

I would throw 'colouring your hair a jet black colour' into the pit while I am it. It rarely looks like a good idea does it. I am only jealous.

Absolutely!

The Kilner on the right is Delia's mincemeat from 2018 (a little dry now but still tastes wonderful), the one in the middle is Gordon Ramsay's Pear and Saffron chutney (absolutely phenomenal) which is over three years old and the jar on the left has an orangey type chutney that I don't even remember making! :)

https://i.ibb.co/K50K89K/Chutneys.jpg

No it’s not.

If it’s that good why have you taken two years to eat it?

Not hungry?:)

Humphry Davy first called the metal “alumium”, then “aluminum”.

Also, a lot of yankee doodle dandy spellings are far more sensible than the nonsense what we got over here.

And Noah Webster had a political reason to change many more familiar English spellings. It was all going to be part of the new America.

Whatever, dude.

Yeah, but “color” and “flavor” are far more sensible than the English spellings.

I have never noticed a correlation between playing this or any other instrument and supporting Manchester United.

Thats because you wouldn't see that many, what with you being busy taking fares.

"Living rent free in your head"

It appears to be everywhere on social media now and used as a default riposte whenever someone says anything vaguely disapproving about a celebrity (usually a footballer).

I suppose you could say that the people who use the phrase "X lives rent free in your head" are living rent free in my head.

And if I might add...how boring are these people who drone on about fantasy premier league. It even regularly infiltrates match commentaries on the radio these days. I'm not interested in all your picks and stats, I don't care that you've selected Salah as a midfielder and made him captain. It's the sort of thing I might have followed as a 12 year old, less so now that I'm approaching 50.

I find it really difficult to translate statistics into an understanding of what happened in a football match. xG and all that. Quite apart from losing any sense of atmosphere you just can't tell the whole story with numbers unless you use so many of them that you can't then see the wood for the trees. Seems to be the province of US sports journalists and presumably clubs' performance analysts but then the latter of course are a specialised profession and use sophisticated IT.

Can we add "nuanced" to the contemporary Covid list too? I've taken it to mean "this data is cobblers"

Bit niche, I accept that but people that use massive size fonts in Excel. Rather than the workings of a chartered accountant it makes people look like they've produced the spreadsheet whilst in the "special" class at school

Other people's spreadsheets in general, I reckon. All that time wasted trying to guess what they were thinking when they put it together. And no, 17 different colours won't help.

I used to feel like that until I worked with partially sighted people and ended up feeling a right tool. Besides which you can always use zoom or change the font size.

On spreadsheets, the most annoying thing is me. I have over time made some really impressive, very complex modelling sheets that work perfectly but when I go back to them later I can't for the life of me remember how they work and how to change them. I 'KNOW' that should annotate them carefully so it's really obvious but I start and never quite finish that bit. It's a royal pain in ****. I have a quite brilliant (modesty huh) power monitoring sheet for gas, electricity and solar panels that has a zillion charts showing trends and average costs over time and vs external temperature but have no idea how it works now and gradually bits don't work now. I don't have the patience to work it out. Work ones were always OK but at home, not so much.....

Those leather sandals which show the wearers horrible toes much favoured by old men (not me). Even worse when worn with socks but at least that deals with the toes issue I suppose.

Never failed to annoy me that Microsoft couldn't make compatible software. Spreadsheets and graphs copied from Excel to Powerpoint or Word always look different and amateur.

Inheriting responsibility for other people's spreadsheets / databases / tools is one of the thing I really dislike about my current job. We used to have a very good technical analyst who designed and built some very good tools, but when he left he wasn't replaced, and now when one of them stops working properly it's down to me to try to fix it, while not having a clue what it's supposed to do because it's for a different bit of the business!

Absolutely - I had a guy working with me once doing the heavy lifting on spreadsheets after agreeing the approach and outputs we needed but when he left I had to rebuild them all because it was a proper rag tag thing that he hadn't documented or followed any sort of structure and yet looked great at the top level. Waste of time and money - mine :(

Leaves.

Agreed, i'm the one with cataracts and glasses like the bottom of milk bottles though :D

At what age is it that old f*ckers get the notion that dressing entirely in beige is the way forward?

Go and ask a data architect what he thinks of Microsoft Excel. It's horrible, impossible to document your construction properly, and poison as far as any kind of data governance is concerned. Lots of business do things like getting users to enter data onto a spreadsheet then have the spreadsheets uploaded to online processing systems, data warehouses and marts, business intelligence engines and integration platforms and the results are always a nightmare. It has no place in a strategic enterprise data architecture.

Had to buy some milk on the way to work so popped into Aldi, it was about five to eight in the morning. Aldi was open and people were shopping but the tills were closed, I didn't realise but they are not allowed to sell anything until 8am.
There was about 7 men and women all retired standing at the till all moaning about how they could'nt be served until 8, these people have all day and yet they still chose to go out early and go to a shop where they know they cannot be served until 8, WHY???

And it's only just beginning ...

I wouldn't mind so much if I actually had time to deal with it all, but there's not enough hours in the day to do my main job, let alone all the extra stuff that keeps appearing. At some point I've got to test all my excel & access tools to ensure they'll all work when we upgrade to Win 10 & Office 365, God knows when I'm supposed to find the time to do that before the October deadline :wallbash:

We are surrounded by Sycamore trees, and all this year they have been "Sick", constantly leaves are dying and falling on our property. So this year autumn pretty much started in spring.

A bit like Dr. Who, the bloody things keep regenerating, rather than just dying the one time.

Don't get me started on the pine needles from the neighbours fir tree.

Lies, damn lies and statistics :D

You can prove anything with statistics so they say but I haven't seen many statistics that prove that Benteke isn't shite.

Are you online shopping at something like New Chic?

At your age you have to decide if you are buying clothes to..

1) wear only in the house

2) just pop down the local shops

3) be seen in by friends and family


HTH

They get up early, like at 5 am. Fear of dying in their sleep gives them impetus.

At 11am they can snooze in their armchair with morning TV and tea and biscuits.

Wearing beige clothes and comfy slippers...ask Stella...he will confirm.

I think I’m around the same age as Stella but I certainly don’t recognise your categories. I’ll happily wear the same shit for all three of your options.

The last funeral i attended, I wore shorts and flip flops.

Was it for a fish?

Actually it was the funeral of a river keeper.

Close I guess. :)

Ive seen plenty that prove you're a spaff sack.

Exactly. I think Peter H is possibly heading for the bath chair prematurely. Poor sod.

I think your beige onesy will arrive before my bathchair.

I guess you weren't that close with the dead chap?

Badly lip-synced adverts.

Presumably the ac-tor sounds more like Katie Price than Katie Windsor.

The fact that airports are stuffed with luxury shops; handbags, clothes, jewelry, watches, sunglasses, perfume, etc. Just coz people are getting on a plane, it doesn't make them into James sodding Bond.

Twats that will only listen to old house and garage and won’t even give new house and techno a listen. Like never trying a new food again or never shagging a new bird for the rest of your life because you’ve shagged one back in the 90’s that was fit. Idiotic stance on things.

They’re generally European hence the rubbishness.

ouch...

Petrol leaf blower.

Life changing.

Petrol leaf blowers

Noisy ******* things. What's wrong with a rake?

The funny thing is that when you go into one you find out that they're all stacked high with cheap shite being sold at inflated prices on the basis that you think you aren't paying any tax and therefore that it's "cheaper".

I like an excuse to buy a litre of booze when I would normally only get 70 cl though.

:D :hi:

I had a rechargeable battery cordless one made by Black & Decker for a few years. It was horrible... it ran out of power in 2 or 3 minutes. Very frustrating. Got me a new battery pack and that two was no better.

I heard good things about the Ryobi brand so treated myself during the lockdown.

Love it! Last at least 20 minutes, and it doesn't start to peter out, but goes full blast until the end when it just cuts out.

Reasonably quiet too.

I'm in the CT court of getting annoyed at petrol leaf blowers, mainly used by the landscapers around here... usually at 7:00am!

Trump has a job for you cleaning up the California forests!

I can sympathise, but (noise included) it is like having a 747 Jet engine attached to your arm. I stand in the middle of garden like a God ordering the leaves to **** off over the fence to bother the neighbour.

Glorious. Especially in the nude.

You give new meaning to the term "Blow Job"! :eek:

Its a step up from giving yourself pretend love bites with your mums hoover.

Highly unlikely.

I suspect people going on holiday are in happy happy mode and more likely to make an expensive impulse purchase. Start of the credit card splurge a trip away usually causes.

Plus you have 'guilty' businessmen buying something to appease the wife. Guilty for playing away or just feeling guilty for being away.

Kin mid September and subtle Christmas TV advertising is creeping in.

I saw Xmas chocolate in the supermarket this week.

I thought M&S were taking the piss with having Halloween stuff out in September.

Morrison's TV ad Quality Street, Celebrations seen already.

Trick or Treat is surely going to struggle under current and future restrictions. What a shame.

He was one of my best friends as it happens.

He’d have have enjoyed the fact that I respectfully wore a pair of black flip flops.

Give it another 19 years and, for some bizarre reason, it just happens.

It’s weird.

Although older than hulkster I'm still listening to some new choons, but almost all of them could have been made 20-30 years ago.

edit - from his post in Stav's Grass thread, it appears that young Little Matt is prematurely agèd.

People who quote extremely long posts, particularly when they are just showing their agreement with it, or replying to one specific point in it.

We need to free ourselves from this endless annual, meaningless commercial rubbish. Just do what's right all year.

i.e. anyone who quotes SOUTHGATE EAGLE's streams of unconsciousness.

Fair comment, but so was I at your age.

Like I said, it’s weird, I cannot recall exactly why either.

Three word slogans from the government. The latest 'Short Sharp Lock'

Why not, 'Speak in sentences'

The U.K. population (and the world as a whole) likes a three word slogan from its politicians.

Yes we can
Take back control
Eductation, Education, Education
Get Brexit Done
Kinder, Küche, Kirche

So three word slogan. Rinse. Repeat as many times as is humanly possible.

Everyone remembers Blair’s education, education, education. Very few people remember Major’s response (which was objectively funny, but wasn’t a three word slogan).

Thatcher Milk Snatcher

Cameron, May, Boris

Bring back morals.

Mad Cow's Disease

Poll Tax Riots

Three Day Week

Blair's Broken Promises

Egg Faced Major

Thatcher fecks Unions

Cycle to work (well, get on your bike)

Murdoch takes control

Nationalised Industries Privatised

Unemployment Benefit Office

Green Shield Stamps (not political)

I R A

Westminster County Council

Rivers Of Blood

We’re on our way to Arbeit macht frei.

Vorsprung durch technik.

Suck my .... ?

Sadly it’s because as a nation we have the attention span of a ..... yawn.

Because they can't.

Don’t tell Syd.

Every little helps.
Crystal Palace nil.

I had a ryobi cordless drill. After a year the batteries weren't holding their charges. Not a happy bunny. Have a de walt cordless brushless drill. It's very good.

Never understood how T or T caught on here, wasn't around when my wife and I were were kids.

Further don't understand the concept in this day and age when you tell kids not to take sweets of strangers. We were told that as kids.

When you see what happened to Madeleine mccann, why as a parent would you let your kids go knocking on strangers doors.

I do see some responsible parents accompany their kids, I guess that's not too bad.

What ever happened to Penny for the Guy?

In bygone days my response to a young person requesting such a donation was to reject the plea adding that I was the guy who was in need of a penny.

Well, you should be on top of the bonfire, whoever you are today.

Indeed. The three-part list is always taught in speechwriting courses. Must be some deep psycholinguistic reason why this is effective at making a point, presumably to do with the brain's short-term memory capacity but three seems to be a magic number. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_three_(writing)

"Friends! Romans! Countrymen! Lend me your ears."

Also relates to the structure of a speech or story (beginning, middle, end), music (exposition, development, recapitulation), visual art (rule of thirds), and mnemonics (mirror, signal, manoeuvre).

The 'rule of three' is a rudimentary technique in Engerlish.