Today I Read (and Learned) ...

Noah

Well-Known Forumite
Paul Robinson. Crime & Chaos in Victorian Penkridge. Penk Publishing. 2017 -


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Withnail

Well-Known Forumite
They said that the roads were so poor that they had no alternative but to use the pavement...

Plus ça change

Plus c'est la même chose
 

Withnail

Well-Known Forumite
Whatever the length of the arrow... it's construction was a skilled affair, requiring... the feathers to stabilize the arrows in flight. Three pinion feathers per arrow were required and generally came from a goose. As a goose only had six feathers that were suitable, three on each wing, which grew annually, and as many hundreds of thousands of arrows were ordered during the wars, the goose population in the kingdom must have been considerable.

In England, contracts for very large numbers of bows and arrows were placed. In 1341, when the king had returned from France and was gearing up for another foray there, 7,700 bows and 12,800 sheaves of arrows were purchased and stored in the Tower of London. A sheaf was twenty-four arrows, so the astonishing total of 307,200 arrows, with the feathers of 153,600 geese, was still only three minutes of shooting for the 10,000 archers that Edward was intending to take to France.
 

Gramaisc

Forum O. G.
...that there is a thing called a Brazilian Lift, which is a sort of buttock enhancement procedure, apparently.

I only know this because, at a post-funeral buffet, the woman sitting next to me asked "That girl over there, the one that worked in Wilko's - do you know her? Has she got a Brazilian?"

My initial reluctance to offer an opinion was based on my then understanding of the meaning of the term - so the question was repeated...
 

tek-monkey

wanna see my snake?
Not exactly read but certainly learned.....

Today I called the electrician that signed off the place we're moving my OHs shop into, as I was wary of the electrics. Didn't get the actual electrician but the woman I talked to said she knew the property. I was reassured that the junction boxes down the left side are fed from the consumer unit upstairs. My tester had just died so I was flying blind, but something made me panic. I don't know why, I just did. I got the tester to at least vaguely flash if a wire was live even though the alarm was dead and the light was feint, it flashed. I went back to a known live, it did the same. I went to a known dead, it was green. I turned off the other fuse box, I then got no readings anywhere. After doing what I needed to I now know that she was wrong.

So trust your instincts, not an electrician that says this is perfectly normal and fine in a retail environment:

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Noah

Well-Known Forumite
Today I read that there is a mural in Dublin Airport recording the history of the terminal building. It includes the information "Over 72,000 cubic metres of concrete was used during the construction. The equivalent of 127 million pints of Guinness." That's a lot of tankers running from the brewery.
 

Gramaisc

Forum O. G.
Today I read that there is a mural in Dublin Airport recording the history of the terminal building. It includes the information "Over 72,000 cubic metres of concrete was used during the construction. The equivalent of 127 million pints of Guinness." That's a lot of tankers running from the brewery.
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There is a tendency in Ireland to use understandable units of measure for non day-to-day items - when Frank Kelly (Father Ted) had a discussion about his tumour with the oncology consultant, it was described as a particularly large one - "Oh, how large?" - "About the size of a bag of chips".


For a while, they had (a copy of) the first Aer Lingus airliner hanging on wires inside the main entrance.

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Noah

Well-Known Forumite
At first glance I thought that was a Dragon Rapide but it is a Dragon isn't it? Once scrounged a flight on a Rapide from Duxford, was a volunteer there for a while and you got the odd treat. Idiot pilot decided to do a bombing run on Stansted Airport and barrelled down the runway at a height of about 6 feet. That was in the days when Stansted was freight only and didn't operate on Sundays but ...
 

Gramaisc

Forum O. G.
Yeah, it's a DH84, rather than a DH89 - the original was sold just before WW2 and lost in the fracas that followed. The one above is another plane that was painted up and re-registered.
 

Sir BoD

Well-Known Forumite
BBC News reporting on the UKs two oldest men celebrating their 110th birhday.

Quote from one of the men, ""Most of the trouble in the world is caused by people taking themselves too seriously."

Amen to that.
 

Noah

Well-Known Forumite
Current Archaeology's Odd Socs page. This month the Queensbury Tunnel Society. They are restoring the 1.4 mile Queensbury railway tunnel on the former line between Bradford & Halifax, which in places is 377 ft (115m) beneath the hill. The tunnel has a gentle gradient of 1:100, nothing compared to the formidably steep hills on the route above ground "hence you are very likely unlikely to encounter ordinary cyclists ( as distinct from Lycra-clad masochists) on those roads."
 

Gramaisc

Forum O. G.
Nothing new under the sun?

From the Rodney and Otamatea Times, Waitemata and Kaipara Gazette 14 August 1912, page 7, available on a New Zealand Government website -
( https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/n...mes-waitemata-and-kaipara-gazette/1912/8/14/7 )

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Svante Arrhenius is generally credited with the specific identification of the fossil fuel production of CO₂ causing 'global warming' in 1896. Other people before him, Fourier (1824) and Tyndall (1861), had proposed that the atmosphere could be altered in the same sort of way by various gasses and water vapour.

I can remember it being mentioned (as rather more than a 'theory') in school science classes in the 1960s.
 

Noah

Well-Known Forumite
The New Scientist has been running a thread on childhood misconceptions on its humour page. Apparently Francis Crick, of DNA fame believed that men had one fewer ribs than women until he went to university* at University College, London.

Someone has offered an anatomical correction "The story of Eve's creation is more amusing than people realise. Somewhere along the line one translator was a bit too squeamish ** to mention the actual bone involved and turned it into a rib. It was originally the baculum, or penis bone, found in most mammals but not humans."

Correcting it could make bible readings & Sunday School classes a bit more interesting, and would "Spare Rib" have been as successful if it had been called "Penis Bone"

* even although he had ceased to believe in religion long before that. Indeed his response as a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, to the suggestion that the college should build a chapel for the use & comfort of students was to propose, and offer to fund, the building of a brothel for the use & comfort of students

** or prudish
 

Withnail

Well-Known Forumite
No. It is in the original article and a quote from the people who are restoring the tunnel as a cycle way.
And not in any way disparaging - the misunderstanding was all mine.

A 'my bad' apology due to both you and your source.
 

Noah

Well-Known Forumite
And not in any way disparaging - the misunderstanding was all mine.
A 'my bad' apology due to both you and your source.

I'm not entirely sure you were completely wrong. The group seem very insistant that they wish to encourage "ordinary" cyclists who go out for a ride to look at the countryside, have family picnics etc as opposed to those who race round the roads. So I think the "lycra-clad masochists" was intended to be disparaging. Or maybe I'm reading it wrongly.
 
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