On a similar note, with an “absolutely” and a word ending in “ed”, you get words which mean “very inebriated/stoned”
Common
Less common
Okay, this pretty much helps, but now I don’t know what a VMA or an SNL is.
I’m going to go with “Viking Marauder Awards”, a yearly event where people re-enact the sacking of the Lindesfarne Monastery etc, via the medium of song and dance (and pyrotechnics).
and “Sitting Near Larry”, a weekly TV programme where a bloke called Larry sits down somewhere, and then semi-famous people come and sit near him and perform things. Larry has never heard of any of them, so gives them well-meaning but slightly patronising advice. Larry is just off-screen in the image shown above.
Blackmail recordings of things that they think would destroy their lives, almost definitely - and sadly, quite a large chunk of that is very likely to be paedophilia related.
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.
Perhaps a warning rather then a genuine murder attempt?
Though the list of suspects must be “Any politician, celebrity or person who has been in the news and done something wrong, stupid or hypocritical since the 1980s”.
Because if you don’t support Israel’s far-right government, the British right-wing press will call you “antisemetic” over everything you do for the next five years.
Our silver cat is a huge fan of tummy tickles.
He specifically requests them, and he’s certainly gone over ten minutes without any hint of wanting to stop, he just “supermans” his arms out one at a time, and sometimes drools a bit.
Cat tax picture:
Sorry, I might have misremembered the exact process (this was probably three or four years ago), though no need for the nasty aggressive attitude (though my apologies if I offended you somehow).
Maybe it was version upgrades (e.g 18.04 to 20.04) instead of updates, or clean installs/new installs/reinstalls? I expect it was some of one and some of another.
At the time I used to (casually) maintain a bunch of Ubuntu computers for a few community projects, small organisations and older people who live nearby. I don’t remember the specifics, I just remember the phone calls of “the printer isn’t working” “Linux has broken my USB pen” etc, and the fix being “remove the snap version and install the deb version”. It caused a lot of problems.
If you were running a previous version of Ubuntu, where you had deb packages which worked, over the course of a few updates, they replaced half of your programs with snaps (without telling you), which were unable to see additional hard drives, USB pens, printers, scanners or cameras, couldn’t use plug-ins, couldn’t use 3rd party templates or presets, and didn’t respect any system settings for fonts/text size, icon placement and so on.
Snaps were fine for “aisleriot solitaire” or “calculator” (assuming you didn’t mind a 5 minute loading time) or other things which didn’t need to interact with any file or system or device, but for actual programs for people trying to do work? Bag of shite.
Now, I imagine some years later they must have fixed some of this rubbish, and I read recently they might have finally done something about permissions, but no, they didn’t ask anyone before they swapped working programs for completely broken snaps. They forced it on their existing users, and some of us bear grudges.
I think it meant to say “Scrounger Guy Hands realises legislation loophole, which allowed him to steal billions of pounds of unearned money off the British Government and the British people, will be closed, leaving his company with a tiny fraction less of immoral profit, whilst still making billions in profit”
I totally agree, but it might be a pretty hard-to-argue Arts Council bid.
“The Darkness Out There” by Penelope Lively.
In short, a “nice old lady” tells a couple of young kids about what they did to a young German who survived a plane crash over Britain during WW2.
I think it was there for the “the nice old lady was actually nasty and cruel and the evil nazi was actually just a scared, fairly innocent boy”.
From where I lived, just the lager and cider together was snakebite, and with blackcurrant it was a “snakebite and black” - but I think there was a lot of regional variety (in the UK, at least).
I have heard lager/cider/blackcurrant called a snakebite before though (I remember it causing a disagreement in the pub) - but I’ve also heard it called a “diesel” (which elsewhere was something mixed with guinness). I’m pretty sure you sometimes got different things in different pubs in the same town.
I suppose pre-internet, we were just relying on the drunk people ordering things to decide what they wanted to call stuff (“what was that purple mixed drink called that made me throw up on my own shoes?”).
Mix rice up with tomato sauce, melt a bit of mozzarella cheese in, some slices of pepperoni in it, sprinkle in some basil and oregano… check behind you that nobody can see you commit culinary crimes… delicious.
To (controversially) go one step further, all unsweetened carbohydrate bases are interchangeable.
You can put pasta topping on a pizza, you can put pizza topping on rice, you can put toastie fillings on a potato waffle and it always ends up nice.
Pubs in the UK used to (or still do?) have blackcurrant and lime cordial for this.
“Lager and Lime”, “Lager and Blackcurrant” and “Cider and Blackcurrant” were pretty common 20-30 years ago. A shot of cordial (concentrated juice), then filled up with lager beer.
There was also orange cordial behind the bar, but nobody ever drank “Lager and orange”. I believe it was some form of crime.
How about “Lone Skum”?
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.
Sadly, it’s been mildly drifting that way since the 1990s - though the drifting has sped up quite a bit during most of the Tory Governments. Not sure if Brexit specifically sped things up again, but it wouldn’t surprise me.
This is fascinating stuff. Is there anywhere where more of this kind of thing is written down?