Nice People Thread No. 15, a Cyber Summer

Pyxis

chris_m wrote: »

The only time I've tried driving in London I was going from Alton to Duxford, just south of Cambridge. As it was early on a Sunday morning we decided to go straight through London. We did OK coming off the A3M as far as (IIRC) Waterloo Bridge. At the end of the bridge we saw a sign for the M11 at the base of a building so we followed it. That was the last blasted sign we saw until, having gone through several housing estates and a very orthodox Jewish area (judging by the attire) we spotted an overhead gantry sign the other side of another housing estate so found a way through to it and finally got onto the M11. I reckon we had been going in the right direction but one or two roads east of the one we should have been on. We came back using the M11, M25 and A3M

Actually, there was an advantage to having got lost and, hence delayed. It meant that we got to the airshow just before everything started, which meant we were very close to the car park exit - extremely handy when the show finished and tens of thousands of people were all trying to get out at once

My favourite early morning straight through London route was M3/A3/Putney Bridge/Embankment/Docklands /A13/A406/M11, and the same in reverse.

Didn't save much time, cf with M25, but used a lot less petrol for the same length of time.

silvercar

GDB2222 wrote: »

So upset!

I came home early and found Alexa in a threesome with the toaster and the kettle.

How good is Alexa? Apparently hive works with Alexa but I haven't tried it.

zagubov

Masomnia wrote: »

I don't know how anyone navigated London, particularly buses, before Citymapper.

Absolutely everybody had a Streetfinder atlas or an A to Z. You could live in most towns for a long time before you'd considering buying a street atlas, but most people in London seemed to have bowed to the challenge and bought one. It was about as necessary as a phone book. Of which there were many. :eek:

It's more like living in a totally built-up country than a city.

Pyxis

zagubov wrote: »

Absolutely everybody had a Streetfinder atlas or an A to Z. You could live in most towns for a long time before you'd considering buying a street atlas, but most people in London seemed to have bowed to the challenge and bought one. It was about as necessary as a phone book. Of which there were many. :eek:

It's more like living in a totally built-up country than a city.

You're right. You had an A-Z street map book, a tube map and a bus map, and with those, it was easy!

The only snag was not appreciating that the tube map wasn't to scale or even showing relative positions of stations, so there might be a time when you spent longer navigating the tube, when you could just have left the underground and walked around the corner to your destination! :rotfl:

vivatifosi

zagubov wrote: »

Absolutely everybody had a Streetfinder atlas or an A to Z. You could live in most towns for a long time before you'd considering buying a street atlas, but most people in London seemed to have bowed to the challenge and bought one. It was about as necessary as a phone book. Of which there were many. :eek:

It's more like living in a totally built-up country than a city.

Ah, the phone directories... A-D, E-K, L-R and S-Z.

Different time and place, but it's also how the Wizard of Oz got its name, when L Frank Baum looked over and saw his O-Z filing cabinet.

That letter sequence is a really good method for shelving multiple books by author. Take a four shelfctrolley, subdivide into the four groups then put in order properly. Much quicker than putting things straight into alphabetical order.

Pyxis

vivatifosi wrote: »

Different time and place, but it's also how the Wizard of Oz got its name, when L Frank Baum looked over and saw his O-Z filing cabinet.

.

Can't remember if I've mentioned this on this thread already, or whether it was another thread, so apologies if I have, but when I was a child, and had only seen the Wizard of Oz written, not spoken, I thought it was the Wizard of Ounce.

chris_m

zagubov wrote: »

Absolutely everybody had a Streetfinder atlas or an A to Z. You could live in most towns for a long time before you'd considering buying a street atlas, but most people in London seemed to have bowed to the challenge and bought one.

The estate agents in Southampton used to give street maps away - which was handy for getting a stock for the Scouts to use.

There was a very good TV series a few years ago, "Map Man" by Nicholas Crane (who also did some of the earlier series of Coast), covering a different map and its history each episode. He did a good one about the London A-Z - including some of the "ghost streets".

chris_m

vivatifosi wrote: »

Different time and place, but it's also how the Wizard of Oz got its name, when L Frank Baum looked over and saw his O-Z filing cabinet.

Good heavens, I never knew that.

It's a bit like the variety entertainer H Verneon Watson, who took his stage name from the sign writing on the backstage double doors - Nosmo King.


Another was Maurice Micklewhite, who started his acting career using the name Michael Scott. However, when he moved to London he was told that there was already an actor using that name so he needed a new one. At the time he was in a phone box in Leicester Square and he he looked around for inspiration, noted that The Caine Mutiny was being shown at the Odeon Cinema in 1954, and decided to change his name to "Michael Caine".
He joked on television in 1987 that, had a tree partly blocking his view been a few feet to the left, he might have been called "Michael Mutiny"

Cilla Black, boringly, just used the inverse of her real name.

GDB2222

silvercar wrote: »

How good is Alexa? Apparently hive works with Alexa but I haven't tried it.

Alexa is a work in progress. Very limited in what it does well. I use it to listen to music and as a timer. Apparently, you can link it up to the lights at great expense. It's not a patch on Siri or Ok Google for getting things done.

It will read the weather forecast and the news headlines.

You can link it to your calendar, if you use the right one, which I don't.

Pyxis

chris_m wrote: »

Another was Maurice Micklewhite, who started his acting career using the name Michael Scott. However, when he moved to London he was told that there was already an actor using that name so he needed a new one. At the time he was in a phone box in Leicester Square and he he looked around for inspiration, noted that The Caine Mutiny was being shown at the Odeon Cinema in 1954, and decided to change his name to "Michael Caine".
He joked on television in 1987 that, had a tree partly blocking his view been a few feet to the left, he might have been called "Michael Mutiny"

Cilla Black, boringly, just used the inverse of her real name.

Ronald Wycherley
Thomas Hicks
Reginald Smith
Clive Powell
William Ashton
Marie Lawrie
Mary O' Brien



Could go on and on.....




Edit.......how could I forget Harry Webb?