Back in my day, we had to hand-draw our memes in the back of school textbooks, then wait until next time we had a lesson in there to see if anyone had seen it.

I have to admit I love these ladder related jokes - they work on so many different levels :D

Britons of a certain age refer to this as the “Trigger’s Broom Paradox”, after a character from a comedy TV Series “Only Fools and Horses”.

Trigger, who worked as a street sweeper, got an award from the City Council for maintaining the same sweeping brush for twenty years (though the broom has had 17 new heads and 14 new handles).

Trigger’s Broom (Youtube Link)

According to the best school playground scientists of the time, opening a packet of crisps upside down (i.e. so the branding/writing is upside down, and you open the bottom of the packet, at the top) actually “made you gay”.

It wasn’t just gay if you did it, but it would literally cause a spontaneous eruption of gayness in whoever did it - who would be permanently gay from that point onwards.

In the 1990s in the UK, it was gay to wear a backpack using both shoulder straps (as opposed to using one strap over one shoulder, which was the heterosexual way to carry things to school).

I genuinely didn’t realise that! It looked like they were missing, and just had the little nubs underneath.

Would you perhaps like to imagine they were missing, if only for the sake of my previous comment? :)

How often do you write the word “wads”? I can see a potential problem.

Or Hocus Pocus, by Focus (youtube link)

✅️ Menacing scream at audience
✅️ As loud as possible
✅️ Crazy eyes
✅️ Flute

All three of ours play fetch, but only with specific objects. They’re all brothers about 2½ years old.

The tabby cat plays fetch with fluffy toy balls with feathers on them, the grey cat plays fetch with spare cat collars and the little black cat plays fetch with menthol sweet wrappers.

Also used to make Mummy Brown Paint (wikipedia link)

Great, I’ll look in to that, thank you - and I hope you do write such a book one day :)

This is fascinating stuff. Is there anywhere where more of this kind of thing is written down?

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.

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.

Me “Hi, is that, umm… Phones, number four, uhhhh?”

Phones4u “Haha, yes, but It’s pronounced ‘Phones For You’”

Me “Oh, it’s it a wrong number? I’ve got it written down here, it’s a number four, not a word ‘for’ f-o-r, and it’s not the word ‘you’, but just a letter U on its own, which is pronounced ‘uh’”

Phones4u “yes, that’s how we write it”

Me “Why? Why didn’t you do it properly? It’s just like that argument with the 90s boyband Fiveive all over again.”

Etc etc

I thought the pull-string light switch inside the bathroom was the standard in the UK?

I’ve only seen switches outside bathrooms in the last 5 years, in recent “having the bathroom re-done” cases.

It might be an age of house or regional thing though.

… “étoile de mer”, which would roughly translate as “star of the sea” or “sea star” - the same as the Spanish “estrella de mar”, Portuguese “estrela do mar” or Romanian “stea de mare”.

I miss lovely, earthy, warm, friendly chocolatey Brownbuntu.

I always felt purplebuntu was a bit vile.

As far as I’m aware, in English, the punctuation goes outside the quotes, unless it’s part of the original quote.

In American, the punctuation goes inside the quotes, even if it’s not part of the sentence being quoted.

I’m unsure of the habits of other English-speaking countries.