JonM

Did 160 miles running in 7 days, mostly off-road, carrying my stuff in a small backpack. Feel surprisingly OK afterwards, no injuries.

Gray Viane is still playing semi-pro RL in Sydney.

ETA for my next t-shirt is autumn 2024, based on my current rate of ~40 runs per year. Not sure my new parkrun is more sociable. Cambridge has a nice cafe which encourages people to stick around at the end and chat - made quite a lot of friends there. My new one is 3 laps of fields, with no facilities, so nothing to build the social aspect.

Nah, I love the fact that I've had a second place finish (and am quite often in the top 10) at my new local (small on numbers) parkrun. At Cambridge, I'd be doing well to be in the top 100 finishers.

When I quit my job after twenty-odd years, to do some fun stuff for a year or two, I had to fill out an "exit survey". One of the questions was "How could the induction process have been improved." My "induction" was basically being shown how to use the fax machine and given a datasheet to read. Today, it consists of several days worth of mandatory online training, IT and HR drop-in sessions, a 2-day offsite event... Anyway, the fax machine was invented by a Scotsman, Alexander Bain, who got a patent in the 1840s. Germany used them in WWI to send maps and photos.

The same kind of thinking can be used to show being tall is linked with lower life expectancy.

Yep, which is why Copa's advice works. 37C for us yesterday, but it's the humidity that makes it so unpleasant. Still managed to get a reasonable amount of gardening done, but mostly in the shade and plenty of drinks breaks.

Recent weeks have not been kind to Julian Assange?

Just watched the 1988 3rd test, with the Lions beating Australia in Sydney. One notable thing (apart from what a miserable person Jack Gibson was) is that it's like a home game for GB. Very hard to imagine 10k+ GB fans at a game on the tour this year.

It's been standard practice on websites since the web began in the early/mid 1990s - amazed you've never seen it before.

The Oxford English Dictionary credits T S Eliot with the first use of the word ###### in print. I.e. that smelly substance which is deposited by male cattle.

True, it seems - and the same thing happened in French. Numpire, napron and nadder went in the other direction. Flutterby turning into Butterfly seems not to be true though.

Makes sense, as sweet oranges came from China originally. Naranja in Spanish, Orange in French, Oren in Welsh. Quick look on Wikipedia which says that the word orange comes originally from Tamil, reaching Europe via Sanskrit, Persian & Arabic. And languages from different families round the Balkans (Turkish, Greek, Bulgarian, Albanian) call them by words that mean "Portugese" because merchants from there were the ones who brought them.

My wife went to university in Amsterdam for a year. The only Dutch she knows is Goede Dag and Sinaasappelsap, which she knows because she thought it was funny that an orange is a sin aas apple.

Duolingo mostly seems to teach the old system in the context of telling time. And yer basic mutations are mostly different for each different number. Soft mutation for un, but for feminine nouns only, aspirate mutation after tri, nasal mutation for the words for day or year after pum or wyth etc. etc. Still makes Dutch look consistent and logical ?

If it's anything like the cats in our garden, they'd all be sat staring silently for hours trying to psych each other out.

Cough. Am I right in remembering that you studied Welsh? A language which has different words for two, three and four (but not any other numbers) depending on gender? A language which has a mix of base-10, base-15 and base-20 counting systems? Where some numbers change the first consonant of the word that follows, in ways which are different for 1, 2, 3, and 6 the same for 5, 7 and 8, but 4, 9 and 10 don't have any effect? E.g. Un gath ar bymtheg ar hugain (one cat on fifteen on twenty) = thirty six cats

Parking at both Ealing & Skolars is way easier than many northern grounds. Don't remember the details, but weren't Haringey Council looking to offload New River a few years back? A site like that where you can never, ever build housing, or where the council retains ownership but you have a long-term lease might be a lot more affordable.

This was one of the main reasons why I decided to stop working for a couple of years - really enjoyed the work, but started to resent this kind of travel. The first few times you go to Japan, or India or wherever, it's interesting, but it's mostly exactly as you describe. I remember one of my former colleagues saying that he'd got to the point where if there was a volcano exploding outside the hotel window, he probably wouldn't bother to open the curtains to have a look

They have to sand them down and wrap string round the handle and paint them. Once you've demonstrated that they snap in two if you hit something hard, they tend to stick to waving them about rather than hitting each other. No worse than playing with sticks really. In all the years I've being helping, all of the worst accidents have come from cricket or football. You would think cooking stuff over the fire or climbing trees or whatever are more dangerous, but no. We did have a near miss with a snake once.

Excellent. One of our leaders used to turn up with a lathe and generator and the like. You want 25 curved pirate's swords carved out of wood, a set of wooden shields, or some wooden boats to assemble? No problem.... I reckon I might need a word with him about pizzas.

You obviously run your cub camps better than us. I find I eat constantly (fried breakfast, big meals, lots of cake in between) but the running round after children all day and doing all the activities takes it out of me. Certainly never gained weight from it.

I have a Franco biography - "Congo Colossus: The Life and Legacy of Franco & OK Jazz" - very interesting read. Did a couple of trips to Paris specifically to buy Soukous records in the late eighties.

I think he moved to Australia a few years ago.

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/picture/2016/jun/30/david-squires-on-australian-rugby-leagues-super-league-war https://www.theguardian.com/sport/picture/2016/may/12/david-squires-on-the-kangaroos-first-tour-to-great-britain-in-1908 (In fairness, his job title is something like "football cartoonist")