Fragile Bird

4 minutes ago, Spockydog said:

It was my birthday the other day. My brother got me my first ever cordless drill (it's a beauty), a laser-beam measurer thingy (OMG WE LIVE IN THE FUTURE), and these socks, which are absolutely lovely. I am blessed.

 

Happy birthday, Spocky!

Some of you might remember that about a year ago I had mentioned seeing an episode of Digging for Britain where a team goes off to look at a bunch of sunken ships, but I couldn’t recall the date of the maritime disaster. They talked about a large fleet of slave trading ships sailing down to Africa where they went to trade and pick up slaves, but got delayed, then sailed across to the US colonies to drop off the slaves and to pick up trade goods, got seriously delayed again, and so instead of making the crossing back in September they hit the rough storms of November and a huge number sank. It was very frustrating to troll through various maritime topics on Wikipedia but not be able to figure out the event.

Well, I suspect I found the event by accident. I’ve been listening to the complete set of Hamish Macbeth murder mysteries and the author regularly refers to some of the wild weather of the highlands, at one point saying “like the great storm of 1703”. Out of curiosity I looked it up and I bet that was the Digging for Britain storm that sank all those ships. The storm is suspected to have been a mere, and I use mere advisedly, Category 2 hurricane that hit Great Britain in November with terrible loss of life and caused enormous damage. Ships sank all over the coast, with thousands of sailors losing their lives. An estimated 8,000 to 15,000 people died, but some say the number could have been as high as 30,000. And typical storm damage was done, but in a country unprepared for hurricanes. According to Wikipedia in London alone 2,000 chimneys collapsed, killing many people. The bishop and his wife in Wells died when the chimney collapsed on them while in bed. Queen Anne had to shelter in the basement of St. Jame’s palace because of structural damage done to the roof and chimneys. 4,000 oak trees came down in the New Forest alone, and thousands of people drowned in parts of the country that are prone to flooding. One ship was found 15 miles inland.

Funny thing is, I’ve read a lot of English novels over the years and I don’t think I’ve ever read a novel where this storm played a role in the plot. You’d think someone would have written a novel where such a huge disaster was at the very least mentioned in passing.

Anyone ever make a dish with rice, pork and apricots? I was reading a murder mystery and one of the characters talked about his dinner. He just said a “chop” slow cooked with rice and apricots. Sounded good.

I just looked up that story. The police regret the words, but the cop’s not a media expert. A person approaches a pro-Palestine rally wearing a yarmulke, what do you think his motivation was? Maybe he didn’t want to set himself on fire, but wanted to commit suicide in another manner. Ok, the officer perhaps should have said “I’m afraid you might provoke a negative reaction because of the what you are wearing”, he shouldn’t have been so blunt.

@Zorral my laugh at your post is a deeply cynical one.

7 hours ago, DMC said:

This reminds me when I was in high school, I think 16, we went on a family vacation to Kiawah, SC.  It was only my dad and I at the place we were staying at.  I was..using the restroom, and I looked down and saw the biggest spider I’ve ever seen - still to this day.

Now I’ve always been fine about killing critters.  But with this one, I got up, went to my dad, and was like “that’s all you man.”  He chuckled and was like OK, then went into the bathroom and literally was like “oh fuck!”  We still laugh about it to this day.

I used to go out with a guy who was a senior executive at a big mining company. He was visiting a mine in Indonesia, I think, or maybe Papua New Guinea, and the visitor quarters at the mine were grass huts on stilts. The walls were made of some kind of wood, bamboo maybe, that had bark on it and the wood had turned grey as wood will do. He was lying in bed reading a report late at night and caught something moving out of the corner of his eye, and grabbed the report and smashed it against the wall. There was a giant spider creepy crawling up the wall by the bed, and by giant, he said, he meant it was the size of dinner plate. If it had bit him it wouldn’t have killed him but he would have been very, very sick. The spider was the same grey as the wood and was more or less invisible against the wall.

He also had a story about being in Australia (after a visit to Papua New Guinea) meeting with company executives in Sydney. One of them had a dinner party at his house for the visitors. The house was not too far from downtown Sydney, and was up on stilts with the parking under the house, and had a nice verandah overlooking the large backyard. The couple had small children, and my friend commented to the wife that he was surprised there was no play area in the backyard, swings or a slide, like you’d see in Canada. Ah, she said, the problem was the pythons, they had lost a couple of dogs to them and they didn’t allow the kids to play in the yard.

I’m already nervous about spiders and snakes, thank you very much.

7 hours ago, Tears of Lys said:

I used to go out with this guy whose parents lived in a 28th-story penthouse.  He regaled me with stories of how he and his brother used to run and throw themselves against the glass in play.  

Uh-uh.  nope.  absolutely not.  no way.  

Years ago, maybe in the 1970s or 80s, there was a lawyer at a big law firm in downtown Toronto in one of the fancy bank towers. The banks in Canada do really well and they all built snazzy headquarters. The offices pretty well all have floor to ceiling windows. Someone visiting the lawyer asked if he wasn’t nervous about the window. I think the guy liked to lean his chair against it. “Oh no,” he said, “the windows are very safe, you can bounce yourself against them and it’s perfectly safe, I do it all the time!” Then he demonstrated to the visitor, and bounced his body against the window, and the window cracked and he fell 20 stories or whatever to his death. True story. I made sure never to lean against a window in an office tower after that.

Well, I guess that soldier who set himself on fire to protest US support for Israel has in fact influenced someone else, just not other US soldiers. 

14 minutes ago, Zorral said:

It was suggested already a couple weeks ago by people who taken upon themselves looking at this horror far more often, far more closely, and far more attentively than I do that this is what he was up to.

Yes, I saw your previous post a few weeks ago. I was just trying to come up with an alternative.

19 hours ago, Zorral said:

Look at the photo here of him leaving the courthouse today

Former President Donald Trump talks to reporters as he leaves court on the second day of his criminal trial at Manhattan Criminal Court on April 16, 2024 in New York City. (Mark Peterson-Pool/Getty Images)

-- he is losing weight.

https://www.salon.com/2024/04/18/hes-dropping-little-clues-the-troubling-message-we-are-missing-from-maga-rallies/

 

Maybe he has cancer?

This is really something very small but there is a post on Facebook about the fact the main actors for the Duncan and the Egg series that is going to be filmed have been cast, and Duncan is going to be played by a former footballer who has started an acting career by the name of Peter Claffey. He’s so new he doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page. I asked the question so how tall is he, since I couldn’t find the answer anywhere (about 6’5”) and I just saw my question got a “like” by…Sean Bean. I think it’s the real Sean Bean, but who knows for sure, his identity could have been appropriated. But I am inordinately pleased.

2 hours ago, Zorral said:

Thieves keep thieving.  First we as a whole plunder it from others.  Then we plunder it from ourselves.  That's how it works, amirite.

I think this is an very accurate statement, though to clarify it for some you might have to explain that “plunder it from others” means people in other countries and “plunder it from ourselves” means people in our own countries. You may have been too nuanced.

37 minutes ago, DMC said:

Does the JFC there stand for Jesus Fucking Christ?

Exactly what crossed my mind!

A story just popped up on Google saying that in Trump’s trial jury selection two corporate lawyers have been picked out of the 7 chosen so far. That could get really interesting. Traditionally lawyers are not chosen for juries.

5 hours ago, BigFatCoward said:

I can't think of a single thing that hitting a kid would improve the situation.  Using force to grab/restrain them when they are danger is absolutely sometimes necessary, but what behaviour would result in hitting someone?

I think there’ are such deep Protestant roots in the UK that the concept of “spare the rod, spoil the child” will never go away. It was certainly ingrained into a very Calvinist Ontario here in Canada. Blame Samuel Butler for adding the “spoil the child” idea to biblical proverbs that talked about parents who didn’t discipline their children were doing no favors.

Just out of curiosity I looked up the original poem by Butler:

”What medicine else can cure the fits

Of lovers when they lose their wits?

Love is a boy by poets styled

Then spare the rod and spoil the child”

The Bible verses that get quoted as justification for hitting children talk about discipline with both “rod and reprimand”.. Examples, “whoever spares the rod hates their children, but the one who loves their children is careful to discipline them”. And “a rod and a reprimand impart wisdom, but a child left undisciplined disgraces its mother”.

The problem is of course the fact that people can be brutal and lack common sense. We know that, sadly.

1 hour ago, Heartofice said:

Also, the smoking ban is surely a stupid idea in the first place? I hate smokers and would for everyone to stop, but aren't we already at a point where smoking is dying out anyway? It seems pretty rare to see someone actually smoke a cigarette these days. 

Just a point of clarification here - which smoking ban are you referring to? I looked up the law in the UK and that’s the first I’d seen about the “raise the legal age every year” law being proposed by the PM. Presumably you don’t want the 2007 law reversed?

I think the idea of raising the legal age for smoking every year is actually a pretty good idea. The argument against is the usual “it won’t work”.

On 4/14/2024 at 12:19 PM, Fez said:

I wouldn't be surprised if a few close US allies under our nuclear umbrella started looking into the feasibility of developing their own weapons after Trump made a whole lotta statements while President saying the US shouldn't defend our allies. But I doubt any of them actually have any yet, both because a nuclear weapons program takes a long time to spin up and because I think they would announce they have them as soon as they do.

Can you imagine how badly the US would lose its shit if Canada announced it was starting a bomb project? Or Mexico?

On 4/14/2024 at 12:25 PM, Zorral said:

 

In the meantime I keep thinking that the machete geocide in Rwanda that lasted approximately 100 DAYS killed more people than died in our War of the Rebellion.

This made me look up the population numbers, 2.5 M in the US in 1776, 13.78 M in Rwanda in 1994, and Rwanda was a targeted genocide. But yes, once a nation has genocide on their mind the slaughter can be fast and ruthless. 

11 hours ago, Mr. Chatywin et al. said:

My step-father returned home from being in the hospital for around two weeks if my math is right. He looks terrible. Home hospice is almost always the end. At least he seems happy to be here. We had an uncomfortable conversation about the stuff he thought I might want and what/how I should get things to my step-brother. These have not been fun times. 

Not fun but really important, and something you’ll regret in the future as a needless bit of stupidity or even cruelty if you don’t do it. This comes under the category of being the better person. Be generous, it’s in you.

2 hours ago, TrueMetis said:

How does a provincial statue set a limitation on a federal treaty?

The limitation period in the province where the matter arises is the limitation period that applies. The law does not put any limitation on the treaty itself, the court ruled that once the band realized they had a claim they had to make the claim within the limitation period.

eta: however, the judge used very strong language about the way the federal government acted, and that could go a long way to pushing the feds into making restitution.

4 hours ago, Maltaran said:

Big Tory donor and the chairman of JCB

I looked up his name for news about him “absconding” but there’s nothing that I can find except news of his resignation, and some stories about the investigations going on that are a couple of years old. Has he actually absconded?

2 hours ago, Spockydog said:

Let's see if this guy is pursued by the Gammon Press as vigourously as Angela Raynor.

 

 

What the actual hell is going on? Why would the debt be “nullified”? Who is this guy?

19 hours ago, A Horse Named Stranger said:

I assume this is the thread were we mourn the untimely passing of OJ.

RIP Juice

 

 

“Finally OJ can rest knowing his wife’s killer is dead”

The internet produces some great memes.

Where else does a person mention OJ Simpson died? 

Rest in hell.

1 hour ago, JGP said:

iirc, Canada had a pretty shitty legalization rollout. Fuzz had to shut down tons of illegal/unlicensed weed shops [some Provinces being marginally better than others]  

Hah! It was more about people wanting to jump the gun and open up before legislation was passed. People opened up shops while it was still illegal, and then bitterly complained when they got charged and shut down.

eta: it was like the attitude was “it’s going to be legal in a few months, why are you bugging us?”

This discussion about pot shops (we call them “dispensaries” here) made me look up the numbers in Toronto. There are 212, but it feels like there are shops on every block. There are at least five on the main road at the bottom of my block and another at the local mall. I guess I just live in the right neighborhood. There were recent stories in the local press (on-line blogs) about American tourists complimenting us on the prices and availability. Funnily enough, the police report there’s still a thriving underground market, that 80% of the pot sold in Canada is still the illegal stuff.