Nice People Thread No. 15, a Cyber Summer

Pyxis

I wonder if I could attach the handle of the grater to an electric drill?





Or...the sprocket of a fan?




I know! To a hamster in a wheel!



Perhaps we could train a chihuahua to use a mini dog wheel, like the ones they used to use to turn spits.

michaels

Pyxis wrote: »

For Parmesan, I do have a metal pop it in and turn the handle grater. I keep it in the fridge, so it doesn't need washing all that often.

Never heard of washing cheese before?

Pyxis

michaels wrote: »

Never heard of washing cheese before?

It gives it a nice, clean flavour!

LydiaJ

ukmaggie45 wrote: »

You have my sympathy ivyleaf and Pastures, I have the downturned mouth too. And get the "cheer up it might never happen", though less so now as hardly ever go out! :rotfl: Mostly it did happen last year, so that would be my retaliation - "it already did!"

What is it with people who think it's OK to say things to total strangers that make massive assumptions about them? When DS had his arm in plaster after "the accident", cheerful strangers used to go up to him in shops and other public places and say something like "Oh, you've been in the wars... did you break it playing football?" He used to freeze in horror, and then try to hide behind me as if he were much much younger than 9.

zagubov

Pyxis wrote: »

Oooh! Pastures! Parmesan isn't posh!

It's been a staple in most households for donkeys' years! Even One-Stop, Asda and Lidl sell it!


Thanks for the grater info. I had a look at the electric ones, and the reviews aren't wonderful, so I won't risk the £25.
I bought a little mini-processor last year, cheese for the grating of, and it was useless, so I gave it away.

There's deffo a gap in the market for a decent, effective, small electric cheese grater.
Lakeland used to sell one, but they don't any more.
There seems to be a problem.

My hand one works. All it needs is something electric to turn the handle. How can that be so difficult?

(PS. I did buy some Roquefort today! A treat, for the first time in ages!
I suppose you might be able to call that a wee bit posh!
But it was from Sainsbury's , not Fortnum and Mason!)

I made the mistake once of grating one type of cheese and then, without washing the grater, grating some parmesan which I then opened about a year later.

Never grate two cheeses and leave the second one to eat later. Unbelievably evil sensation. Not a strong smell, but wrong, wrong, wrong.:(

PasturesNew wrote: »

I got all wrapped up in a random article I stumbled across online. No idea why I landed there, or why I read it .... but I was then held hostage as I wanted to work out who was who .... and what happened.

The BBC ran a series of online articles some years back, inviting people to send in their War experiences. This article was posted by somebody my age (yes, stalked the whole family) ... who posted it in 2003, two years after her mother had died. Her mother had written it in 1981.

The original writer (1924-2001) lived in Plymouth with her family when the War started. Plymouth, like London, was blitzed to bits (including the maternity hospital). She was the youngest child, aged 15. She tells the story of how they evacuated her ill mother, how her uncle died (trying to get home to make sure she was OK), how they had to tell their mother her brother was dying and he seemed to be waiting for her visit before he died) ... and then her dad died. Along with several other eventful stories of having to leave the town on family business and accompanying people to make sure they were safe.

By the end of the War she'd lost both of her parents (natural causes).

It's a bit difficult to "follow" as you don't know who the players are .... which is why I then tried to work them all out. She had lots of brothers, a few sisters, a couple of brothers in law ...

And even Peter the dog got two mentions! In one case causing an early labour/birth.

She was just writing down what she remembered - including Mrs Organ, who was a large lady, so they went to the Anderson shelter in the garden, which took a direct hit, wiping out Mr & Mrs Organ and their three sons. The extra info "large woman" really drags you in. Or Mrs Mills - she was a widow who had been seeing Uncle Willie until he died (they had to go and tell her he'd been hit by a bomb) ... and then she lost her house and when she came out of the shelter all that remained of her house was the fireplace with her wedding photo on it ... and she then went to Devon (aided by the author of the piece).

All that - and the fate of chocolate cakes for weddings!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ww2peopleswar/stories/59/a1951959.shtml

Unfortunately the billeting of kids out to the countryside caused a massive transfer of city disease like TB into areas where personal contact was to intermittent to keep it such a major threat.

Doozergirl wrote: »

Canada is much closer

Visited Canada. Some of it’s a bit like Britain, some like the US, which we’re familiar with due to our media.

Pyxis

PasturesNew wrote: »

I got all wrapped up in a random article I stumbled across online. No idea why I landed there, or why I read it .... but I was then held hostage as I wanted to work out who was who .... and what happened.

The BBC ran a series of online articles some years back, inviting people to send in their War experiences. This article was posted by somebody my age (yes, stalked the whole family) ... who posted it in 2003, two years after her mother had died. Her mother had written it in 1981.



http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ww2peopleswar/stories/59/a1951959.shtml

That was interesting!

It just goes to show how important it to write things down.... experiences and suchlike. Even mundane everyday things that to us seem boring, would be very interesting to people in 50 and 100 years time!
In that respect, the demise of the personal diary-keeping is a shame.

Heh! Just had a thought!
Maybe Facebook will be a very valuable social history tool in years to come! All the "I've just washed my teeth", "I'm just in Tesco buying some loo cleaner" posts will have future generations riveted to their seats in wonder!



I remember the first time I went to Plymouth, I was horrified. I thought that for a city that was so ancient, it looked so incredibly naff. The buildings, the architecture were awful.
But then I realised, of course, that it had had the heart bombed out of it in the war, and been virtually flattened, and all the rebuilding had been done quickly during the 50s and 60s, decades which were not renowned for their architectural design qualities.

The same happened to Southampton, too. Most of its centre seems soulless, for the same reason.
What a shame.



Interestingly, though, when I went to Liverpool in the 1970s, the city centre didn't seem so bad. Bombers had further to go, I suppose, or maybe the docks were far enough away from the centre. Dunno.
What did intrigue me, though, was that there were still large swathes of empty bomb sites, where you could see where the blocks of houses had been, like a chequerboard of bare earth, but on various corners were still the pub buildings, standing all alone and forlorn.

I've often wondered what those swathes look like now!

chris_m

Pyxis wrote: »

The same happened to Southampton, too. Most of its centre seems soulless, for the same reason.
What a shame.

Why do you think I moved away? :rotfl:

I think, with Southampton, part of the issue was that the person in charge of the rebuilding decided not to have more than two stories (storeys?) on the new buildings down the High Street - thereby inhibiting much option for character.

Pyxis

That got me thinking about the first time I went to Exeter, too, and got the same shock.....it's an ancient cathedral city centre, but with all post-war buildings.
No docks there.
A puzzle.
Perhaps there were arms factories or suchlike?

So I just did a super-quick google and found this.......

" Exeter was little affected during the Blitz, the German night-bombing offensive against Britain’s cities, though nearby Plymouth was severely damaged in early 1941.
This changed in 1942 when Exeter became the first target of the so-called "Baedeker Blitz", a campaign to attack targets of cultural and historical, rather than military or strategic, value. The raids took place in retaliation for the bombing of Lübeck by the RAF earlier that year.

........In total, the nineteen air attacks on Exeter caused the death of 265 people and injuries to 687, of which 111 were serious. A large part of the city centre had been devastated, and it was some 20 years before repairs were fully completed, resulting in a completely new infrastructure."


Hmm.
The Cathedral got a lucky escape. One chapel was damaged, and the Vicars' Choral College was destroyed, along with a lot of documents, but otherwise it survived, unlike Coventry.

Pyxis

Yes, it's storeys. :cool:

Usually, but not, of course, always (!), a terminal y after a consonant changes to -ies in the plural, but there are probably lots of exceptions.

I expect that if there is more than one Mary in a class, they would be Marys and not Maries.

There isn't a consonant before the y in storey; I think that's why the plural is storey and not storeies!

You've got me wondering now..........................




Edit. Got my Chambers out!

Apparently, they use story in N America, so there, the plural would be stories.

Chambers gives storey/storeys, story/stories.

Etymologically, in its sense of a floor in a building, it is thought to have the same origin as story in the sense of a tale, possibly due the meaning of a narrative of incidents in their sequence, so storeys are a series of floors.

Seems a bit tenuous to me.
Though it's not mentioned in Chambers as a possible origin, I would have thought it's more likely to derive from 'store'.




While looking, I came across attic, which derives from attic storey. Attic was the description, (from the Ancient Greek style of architecture), because it was the (gable) style of the roof, under which was the storey in question. So a house might consist of two storeys plus an attic storey. We all know that the attic storey was/is used as a store-room!

zagubov

Pyxis wrote: »

That was interesting!

It just goes to show how important it to write things down.... experiences and suchlike. Even mundane everyday things that to us seem boring, would be very interesting to people in 50 and 100 years time!
In that respect, the demise of the personal diary-keeping is a shame.

Heh! Just had a thought!
Maybe Facebook will be a very valuable social history tool in years to come! All the "I've just washed my teeth", "I'm just in Tesco buying some loo cleaner" posts will have future generations riveted to their seats in wonder!



I remember the first time I went to Plymouth, I was horrified. I thought that for a city that was so ancient, it looked so incredibly naff. The buildings, the architecture were awful.
But then I realised, of course, that it had had the heart bombed out of it in the war, and been virtually flattened, and all the rebuilding had been done quickly during the 50s and 60s, decades which were not renowned for their architectural design qualities.

The same happened to Southampton, too. Most of its centre seems soulless, for the same reason.
What a shame.



Interestingly, though, when I went to Liverpool in the 1970s, the city centre didn't seem so bad. Bombers had further to go, I suppose, or maybe the docks were far enough away from the centre. Dunno.
What did intrigue me, though, was that there were still large swathes of empty bomb sites, where you could see where the blocks of houses had been, like a chequerboard of bare earth, but on various corners were still the pub buildings, standing all alone and forlorn.

I've often wondered what those swathes look like now!

For all that we think we're a creative country, we had the misfortune to adopt the cornflakes packet model of architecture for too much postwar reconstruction. Too many town centres look soulless and characterless.

I've always wanted to visit Dublin to see what a victorian city might look like if it wasn't bombed to bits by the Luftwaffe, but I'm worried that ordinary urban development may have had a similar effect over there.