Early Risers.

[Gwiwer]

28 minutes ago, iL Dottore said:

30 minutes ago, TheQ said:

after that I fancy a whisky.

Me too!

 

A German whisky from the Black Forest for me tonight!

Me three.  

 

I'll pour a Raasay after dinner.  It's too early to enjoy right now and the system is closer to dinner than it is to lunch.  I prefer a fuller stomach before tackling anything of that strength.  

[simontaylor484]

As @jamie92208 will tell you Pontefract was always shall we say interesting on a Friday/Saturday night. As a former garrison town there are plenty of pubs.

You used to be able to set your watch by the times certain people used to be in certain pubs.

There were a few "Wild west" type brawls where a fight would start in a corner then the whole pub would end up brawling. It was always handy to know where the fire exits were.

You could end up in bother if you just looked at someone.

 

 

[pH]

About smoking in offices:

 

I worked in an open office with 10-12 people in it, some of them smokers. One of the non-smokers had a notice on his desk saying (roughly, as I remember)

 

“I’m sure I enjoy sex more than you enjoy smoking. However, I don’t **** at your desk, so please don’t smoke at mine.”

[PhilJ W]

Afternoon all from Estuary-Land. I was assembling the ingredients for some bread pudding this afternoon until I found that the principle ingredient, a stale loaf of bread had gone mouldy. The only bread in the house is a fresh loaf that I need for tomorrows breakfast, Turdycurses. I'll be looking for some wholemeal bread in the reduced to clear when I visit Tess Coes tomorrow. Instead of the black treacle that my mum used to put in her bread puddings I am going to experiment using honey, I have some that has gone 'sugary' and I've got some more fresh honey to add to it.

3 hours ago, 45156 said:

Our memory is of weekly increase notices on out mortgage in about 1994 - culminating in a rate of just under 16% - and at the time, I had been made redundant from my job in pensions (largely for being a prophet of doom, and openly predicting that the pensions mis-selling scandal would result in a disaster). 

I remember that well, many of the workers of the council I worked for were taken in by that and being in the payroll department I saw it first hand and fortunately could see what a sh1tty deal it was. Most of the people affected eventually came back into the council pension scheme but they still lost out with regards to the interest  (at a high rate) on the money they paid in, the employers contribution and also on the length of pensionable service. Surprise, surprise this was thought up by the insurance companies and sold to the government of the day as a way of saving public money. If you think the banks are a bunch of thieving bar stewards they've got nothing on the insurance business.

1 hour ago, 45156 said:

And me, but I'm on my whisky day off, as I have a pretty bad headache.

 

Just got back from the pharmacy, and putting a letter into the Docs.

 

The parking in Ludlow went up from 50p an hour to 60p an hour short stay, and 30p an hour to 40p an hour long stay.  The locals are moaning about this - they actually don't know how lucky they are to have such cheap parking - compare to Lancaster -

https://www.lancaster.gov.uk/parking/car-park-charges

 

I'm so glad I no longer live there.

 

That is cheap parking, around here it's £1 an hour for short stay, under two hours, and 80p for long stay. What is more blue badge drivers have to pay as well. The parking is run by a private company and none of the ticket machines work, so they send you a notice demanding £80 which after a couple of weeks doubles if it isn't paid. Apparently these fines make more money than the ticket machines so they leave the machines not working. Here is the rub, only a local authority can enforce the fines and only if they operate the system themselves so you don't have to pay them a penny.  The company operating the car parking has some very dubious forebears, some of the directors had been involved with wheel clamping.

[jamie92208]

1 hour ago, simontaylor484 said:

As @jamie92208 will tell you Pontefract was always shall we say interesting on a Friday/Saturday night. As a former garrison town there are plenty of pubs.

You used to be able to set your watch by the times certain people used to be in certain pubs.

There were a few "Wild west" type brawls where a fight would start in a corner then the whole pub would end up brawling. It was always handy to know where the fire exits were.

You could end up in bother if you just looked at someone.

 

 

Yes Ponte was an interesting  town to work.  It could ertainly had it's sharecof pubs.  My main memory is that it's the only town that I workrd in where young women just squatted in the street to relieve themselves.  I did have a very interesting moment when a firm of bouncers tried to stop another firm working at one of the pubs.  About 30 bouncers went in and were threatening to take the joint apart.  I gathered what troops we had and a dog handler. We went in and no one would move.  I didn't even think about it and went to the boss, threw his pi t awzy and marched him out.  He was so stunned no one did anything.  All the underlings left like sheep. Afterwzrds I thought long and hard about what could have happened.  The guy later drew time for manslaughter and bribing a councillor.

 

Jamie

[DaveF]

2 hours ago, 45156 said:

 

 

The parking in Ludlow went up from 50p an hour to 60p an hour short stay, and 30p an hour to 40p an hour long stay.  The locals are moaning about this - they actually don't know how lucky they are to have such cheap parking - compare to Lancaster -

https://www.lancaster.gov.uk/parking/car-park-charges

 

 

 

Every so often I am reminded how fortunate I am to live in Northumberland where almost all shoppers' car parks are free.

 

David

[TheQ]

I see Alnwick car parks are now free.... But you need a £1 parking disk to use them...

[Ozexpatriate]

5 hours ago, PupCam said:

Oh that's so "Last Millennia"!     We had a "restaurant" (it said so on the side) 🙄

I used the term "canteen" for ERs, since it seems to be the more relatable. They are usually "cafeterias" in the US. "Break rooms" and "coffee bars" as appropriate for places not serving meals.

 

Some campuses do have actual restaurants. In addition to employee 'food court' type lunchrooms, Microsoft had a sit-down restaurant with table service at their HQ. It was nice. It was on a little street of amenities for employees - including an optician, hair dressers, credit union etc, next to the soccer/football pitch that was built on top of the underground parking lot.

 

Silicon Valley was mentioned yesterday. The flagship for amenities is probably Google. They had themed restaurants. In one building I had a meeting (I did not eat there) in a Japanese-themed restaurant serving a variety of Japanese food, including sushi made to order. If I recall correctly it had a Tetsuwan-Atomu (Astro Boy) manga theme layered on 'customary' Japanese styling.

 

The conference room where the meeting was held was a traditional Japanese dining private room - rice paper walls, seating on the floor (there was a footwell under the table) and no shoes. Other buildings had different themed restaurants.

[BoD]

3 hours ago, Gwiwer said:

Pop a compensator into the run 😉

Lady to uniformed gentleman on railway station:  My word sir, what a very long compensator you have.

[DaveF]

1 minute ago, TheQ said:

I see Alnwick car parks are now free.... But you need a £1 parking disk to use them...

 

But... they work everywhere else in the County that uses discs.  I believe you can also use discs from other parts of the country.  However a number of towns don't even need discs, you just turn up and park.  In my town some car parks allow 72 hours of free parking - even at the beach.

[New Haven Neil]

£2.20 an hour in the Big City of Douglas to park.  Robbery.  Free in Ramsey (the Bright Lights) but 2 hours only on a disc - free disc!

[PhilJ W]

Way back in the mid 1960's there were more jobs than people to fill them. There were a few people who were virtually unemployable. One such person  was a neighbour who was an alcoholic, after so long on the dole he would be sent to a job but after a couple of weeks he would lose the job due to his alcoholism. The employment office then found a job for him, in Ind Coopes Romford brewery! He apparently only lasted for one morning there. He was given a job in the bottling plant, checking the bottles of beer to see that they were full before they were capped. He was supposed to remove any underfilled bottles and put them to one side. Needless to say he soon started taking a swig from the open bottles passing in front of him. After less than an hour there was bottles everywhere and the bottling machine was jammed, they found him completely blotto under the machine. After that the brewery management ceased to use the employment office and done their own recruiting.

[PhilJ W]

I can't help noticing that there are more empty shops in those high streets where parking charges are high than those where they are low or none at all.

[monkeysarefun]

4 hours ago, Gwiwer said:

Australia must surely rank among the worst serial offenders.  Drinking vastly and excessively seems to be a national sport.

 

I'll admit I was expecting a decent showing from us in the stats too. Not that I've ever had any personal experience of drunken crowd violence, felt the least bit threatened  or noticed overly concerning behaviour, and I spent nearly every weekend in the 80's (before random breath testing curbed the worst of the over-indulgence) in various pubs in the city and suburbs seeing bands without a single issue. But the media is always telling us how much we like a drink, and after all we are a country who had a PM who made the  Guinness Book Of Records for fastest ever downing of a yard glass,  and a cricketer who managed a record breaking 52 cans on a flight from Singapore to London, so you'd have to reckon we'd be up there.

 

So I found a site that ranks  stats on Alcoholism  that match what  @iL Dottore listed in the top 10 - Sth Korea at 5 , USA in 7th and so checked us out. I knew from flavio's  post that we  were out of the top 10, but further down the page was a graph showing the top 50. "Here we go!" , I thought, "we'll be number 11!"  I scrolled down and quickly spotted the UK in 20th (and 8th if re-ordered by females) but as I got nearer to the bottom I realised we weren't there.

 

Fortunately under that was the complete country list so I scrolled down that. And scrolled . And scrolled. And scrolled. Finally, Australia makes an appearance  - in 124th position. Other than Italy and Spain, almost every other country under us is either a poor African one or strictly religious.

 

"hmm!" I thought. "This is listing Alcoholism. Maybe what counts as chronic alcoholism elsewhere is here called "a bit of a headache"", so I followed the link on that page to the Alcohol consumption by Country

 

Again, no dias position for us, just a pack of Euro p!sspots and Uganda, so it was down to the top 50 graph. Again, the UK popped up before us at number 20, and it took a bit more looking to find us way down there at number 35.

 

So I started thinking about our notorious drunken incidents, and as far as Sydney is concerned, it'd be Christmas time in the Eastern Suburbs beaches - Bondi, Bronte and Tamarama. They became so bad that they were declared alcohol-free in 2004.  But -  who usually goes there?  - Young  European travellers wanting that "Christmas at Bondi" experience. Australians are all at home around the pool  eating Christmas dinner and fighting with the relos, we dont want to hang out at the beach with a bunch of sun-burned drunks singing "Wonderwall".

Here's a quote from The Guardian back in the day when the ban was announced:  A British backpacker, Cathy Delaney, said the move would make her think twice about spending Christmas on the beach. "You come all this way around the world, and spending Christmas at Bondi is part of what everyone says you have to do here. It's not the same if you can't have just one drink."

 

Soo I dug back into history to find incidents of mob violence caused by drinking, but the biggest one that came to mind - The Cronulla Race Riots, began as mob violence then as the alcohol kicked in and the crowd got bored ended up as some kind of beach party, so rather than alcohol being the cause, it was the quell. . Similarly, our most famous criminals  - the Ned Kelly  Gang on the night before their confrontation with the army of Victorias Finest locked themselves inside a pub with hostages. Result was instead of a tense hostage situation there was a huge party, and in fact when the police arrived everyone was still wearing the garbage bins on their heads from the night before, which was a bit embarrassing.

 

The Daily Mail Australia here LOVES putting up  pictures of girls in skimpy gear throwing up in town centres on Friday nights, but other than Melbourne Cup Day, their stories mainly are imports from Manchester, Liverpool and other UK cities, we can't even do decent "Drunken Mayhem" stories here. 

 

So all in all, I'm not sure how we get the reputation, seems a bit undeserved in many respects.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited November 3, 2022 by monkeysarefun

[Ozexpatriate]

Noting comments on rainfall, we are forecast to have our first "atmospheric river"* of the season starting this evening.

 

* A relatively narrow** laminar flow of moisture from the North Pacific. (When their origin is subtropical they were called a "pineapple express" but "atmospheric river" is more en vogue these days.)

 

** In this case 350 miles wide.

 

Somewhat fortuitously, in addition to flowing east, this one is also moving south quite quickly, now in BC and will end up in California by Sunday. When they flow through a stable latitude they dump prodigious amounts of rain.

 

[Ozexpatriate]

8 minutes ago, monkeysarefun said:

So I found a site that ranks  stats on Alcoholism  that match what  @iL Dottore listed in the top 10 - Sth Korea at 5 , USA in 7th and so checked us out.

Is that not the same page that Flavio linked?

3 hours ago, iL Dottore said:

Actually, according to https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/alcoholism-by-country Australia's rate of alcoholism is 6.10% in males, 2.7% in females and 4.4% overall.

I had the same reaction based on what the definition or metrics of "alcoholism" were. Self-reported, clinically diagnosed, etc.

 

An alternative list by alcohol consumption, Australia is at 33 (according to Wikipedia) which is pretty much the same as the source you linked.

[monkeysarefun]

Just now, Ozexpatriate said:

Is that not the same page that Flavio linked?

 

 

Yes, I  assumed it was the same site, or at least used the same data given the positions of Sth Korea and the US so thats why I used it.

[simontaylor484]

38 minutes ago, jamie92208 said:

Yes Ponte was an interesting  town to work.  It could ertainly had it's sharecof pubs.  My main memory is that it's the only town that I workrd in where young women just squatted in the street to relieve themselves.  I did have a very interesting moment when a firm of bouncers tried to stop another firm working at one of the pubs.  About 30 bouncers went in and were threatening to take the joint apart.  I gathered what troops we had and a dog handler. We went in and no one would move.  I didn't even think about it and went to the boss, threw his pi t awzy and marched him out.  He was so stunned no one did anything.  All the underlings left like sheep. Afterwzrds I thought long and hard about what could have happened.  The guy later drew time for manslaughter and bribing a councillor.

 

Jamie

A number of times when I was in the gents in pubs women came in to the toilets and climbed onto the sinks and relieved themselves 

[BoD]

25 minutes ago, monkeysarefun said:

the UK popped up before us at number 20, and it took a bit more looking to find us way down there at number 35.

Wayhey. 
Something we can beat Australia at.

Stick that in your kangaroo’s pouch and smoke it.

[monkeysarefun]

1 minute ago, BoD said:

Wayhey. 
Something we can beat Australia at.

Stick that in your kangaroo’s pouch and smoke it.

Congratulations - Have a warm beer with bits floating in it on me!

[pH]

51 minutes ago, PhilJ W said:

There were a few people who were virtually unemployable. One such person  was a neighbour who was an alcoholic, after so long on the dole he would be sent to a job but after a couple of weeks he would lose the job due to his alcoholism.

I know someone who used to own a steel fabricating and erecting company. One of his best employees was a ‘binge and abstain’ alcoholic. Every so often, he would come to the owner and say “I’m going to be away for a while”. The owner would say “OK, let me know when you’re ready to come back.” He’d be gone for a few weeks (unpaid, of course), be seen out of his skull at various times and places around town, then come back and restart work where he’d left off and stay absolutely sober - until the next time.

[NGT6 1315]

30 minutes ago, monkeysarefun said:

Congratulations - Have a warm beer with bits floating in it on me!

„That‘s not a knoife. THAT‘S a knoife!“ 🤣

 

 

[Gwiwer]

1 hour ago, BoD said:

Wayhey. 
Something we can beat Australia at.

Stick that in your kangaroo’s pouch and smoke it.

For some reason I cannot rate this as "Funny".  It will only allow me to "Like".  Anything else results in "There was a problem rating this content" followed by a 502 "Community Temporarily Unavailable" message.  

 

@AY Mod???

[Dave Hunt]

In view of the internecine squabbling in the corridors of power at the Ministry of Cake, to whom do I have to submit my application for a licence to make LDC with lemon curd filling. It seems that the addition of the filling could affect the LDC's categorisation as standard cake and I have no wish to attract the attentions of cake police so could I ask for guidance from the men from the ministry?

 

Dave  

[AY Mod]

9 minutes ago, Gwiwer said:

@AY Mod???

 

You've broken the internet Rick!

 

Seems ok for me, would you know if you've had a browser update? If so, which browser? Try clearing any RMweb cookies and history and login again.