Strange British Things.

IdleRich

IdleRich

IdleRich
Mr. Tea said:
This abomination:

View attachment 7992
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It is obviously a total abomination, the very existence of which makes no sense whatsoever. I mean, who suddenly decided that a world already containing mayonnaise needed a... whatever the fuck it is. And obviously I would never ever even consider buying it even if it were possible to get it her which I assume it most definitely is not. And yet... and yet.... if somehow I am somewhere and someone serves it to me and I eat it, I weirdly find myself really enjoying it while hating myself more with each mouthful.
 
IdleRich

IdleRich

IdleRich
One that occurs to me is that the UK is surely the only country in the world to vote for and demand the implementation of a huge number of economic sanctions on itself. And to have citizens actually celebrating as they are told that their own freedom of movement is being abolished.
And for that to be entirely unsurprising in that the UK is surely the country with the most people possessing a very specific type of spitefulness in which they are willing to accept something very bad happening to them as long as some other people they don't know also have something bad happen to them.
Is there a word for that? I feel that it's a particularly British kind of misanthropy that comes in a drab seventies brown colour - that professed willingness to bravely sacrifice oneself for the greater bad, to take a hit for the team as long as the rest of the team also gets hit and some brown person somewhere suffers.
Fucking hell what happened to twist everyone up so much that there is an actual debate about whether or not life boats should pull aboard drowning people in case they turn out to be illegal? Anyone who argues that needs to be impaled on a double tap and pumped full of salad cream...
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
IdleRich said:
One that occurs to me is that the UK is surely the only country in the world to vote for and demand the implementation of a huge number of economic sanctions on itself. And to have citizens actually celebrating as they are told that their own freedom of movement is being abolished.
And for that to be entirely unsurprising in that the UK is surely the country with the most people possessing a very specific type of spitefulness in which they are willing to accept something very bad happening to them as long as some other people they don't know also have something bad happen to them.
Is there a word for that? I feel that it's a particularly British kind of misanthropy that comes in a drab seventies brown colour - that professed willingness to bravely sacrifice oneself for the greater bad, to take a hit for the team as long as the rest of the team also gets hit and some brown person somewhere suffers.
Fucking hell what happened to twist everyone up so much that there is an actual debate about whether or not life boats should pull aboard drowning people in case they turn out to be illegal? Anyone who argues that needs to be impaled on a double tap and pumped full of salad cream...
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It's called cutting off your face to spite your nose.
 
Leo

Leo

Well-known member
IdleRich said:
Actually, fuck it, I have now been officially sucked into thinking about taps. Here we go....
Firstly, I think that there was an assumption that as a proud Englishman, I would prefer the two tap system, but, let me make it clear, I am NOT arguing that having separate taps is better. I agree that in almost* every imaginable scenario the single version is better for the reasons admirably summarised and lucidly described by @suspended above. In fact, I think that everyone does agree, or at least half agree, cos every house I ever lived in had the single tap thing in the kitchen and the double version in the toilet and bathroom sink, sometimes reverting to the single tap system once more in the bath.
So, I agree that it is perplexing when you are first hit by the apparent discovery that UK tap technology has not yet reached the level at which it can develop the single flow system which allows the continuum of temperatures one desires and expects; and then one is confronted by the almost worse discovery that the builders and plumbers are indeed aware that this can be done and are in fact capable of producing that very system (possessing both the knowledge and the materials), yet, seemingly are also incapable of following the simple - and I believe irrefutable - argument laid out by Gus (and other tap obsessives before him) clearly demonstrating the superiority of one system - with the result that they somehow hedge their bets and make approximately half of the taps in a given house one way, and the other half, the other.
I and I suspect most of the rest of you have seen the reaction of Americans (and people from other countries, in fact probably all countries) over the years to their first meeting with a double-tap sink. Normally there is hilarity, perhaps some photographs shared on their social media for others to laugh with them, but it quickly becomes apparent it is nervous laughter, covering fear, cos normally they continue as though confronted by some kind of diabolical hydraulical conundrum which must be solved before the weary traveller can gain access to the life giving, cleansing fluid....
And it's this that kinda surprises me.... yes, the system that some houses in the UK use on some of their sinks is mildly worse than the system that other countries opt for, there is a possible delay of a few seconds in some situations, perhaps occasionally even some other kind of incredibly miniscule inconvenience that I can't think of off the top of my head, but I'm surprised that there are people who care enough this to talk about it and take pictures of the tap; yes just by statistics and so on I get that there could be one or even two people out there boring enough to do so... but seemingly there are millions and millions of them, constantly being amazed, staggered, blown away by this insanity, feeling the need to document it yet again, to prove that all of their other faucet fucking predecessors were not lying, those other trillions of photos out there, diligently recorded by tap geeks were in fact real and not the product of some kind of gigantic international tap hoax. I suppose that what I am saying is, who cares?



*And I say "almost" here only for the sake (now that I am, after all, giving up a rather large number of seconds which, when you think about it, could have instead been spent smoking heroin while having my dick sucked) of completeness, which I suppose demands that I should point out that one can dream up a number of artificial scenarios in which you might need two streams at different temperatures or something....
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me and @suspended are gonna make "tap geeks" t-shirts.
 
IdleRich

IdleRich

IdleRich
Leo said:
me and @suspended are gonna make "tap geeks" t-shirts.
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Why not.... some people collect records, others stamps, some like to stand by railways and note down train numbers. Did you ever see that film Helvetica about the font? There is this bit where they are interviewing this designer guy and he is explaining his love for fonts in general and Helvetica in particular and he says something like "Some people are obsessed with girls' bottoms, I am obsessed with fonts" - and to me that makes absolutely perfect sense.
BUT
It's a bit like religion in that I am happy for any to practise what they want pretty much, when I start having an issue is when the religious start tell me I'm not living right cos I aint following the tenets of their religion. And hobbies or whatever, obviously they don't go so far in that direction and cause the same problems as that, but for the hobbiest or enthusiast or whatever, it can be very frustrating when others don't share their interest. And I guess it becomes more so with the obscures ones.... like yer music geek can start a conversation with a "normal" about music and reasonably expect that the man on the street will have a certain level of knowledge about the topic, that he will have favourites and so on, and that given a new (to them) piece of music he or she will likely have an opinion on it and quite possibly feel a desire to express it and maybe explain why they feel as they do. But even with music and its ephemera it can be taken too far, I remember reading Andy Votel saying that he would be watching tv at home with family or whatever and there's a film or an advert and suddenly the music that is playing is some ultra rare Czech psych thing from the sixties and he'll be like "Hey, I've got the original seven inch of this" and looking round excitedly for the approbation he sees just a load of completely uninterested faces who barely register what he's saying, and then he kinda realised that the seven people in the world who would be excited by that are perhaps not those that he ought to set the compass of his life by.
And some things.... say, cars, I have no interest in, if someone comes up to me and tells me that my Renault Modus should not have that colour scheme or ought to have certain wheels (I dunno, does that happen? People do get excited about cars I know but I don't really know what they say about them) then I will look at them blankly and shrug and quite possibly avoid them from then on....
And this is it really, I think it's cool that Suspended digs into these obscure minority things such as basketball as previously discussed and now, perhaps even more obscure, this tap obsession, and don't worry, I am not in any way gonna start edging away from him as with the hypothetical car guy in the example above, but at the same time, while I respect his interest in taps and the time that you need to spend to build up real deep knowledge, as in any field - and we know how he is, if he really wants to get into it, he will fucking get into it - but for me, you know, it's just gonna always be just a fucking tap i'm afraid. Sorry.
 
sus

sus

Moderator
IdleRich said:
Actually, fuck it, I have now been officially sucked into thinking about taps. Here we go....
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Rich, you've really opened my eyes on this one. I didn't understand why Martin and others felt the need to defend two-taps, but now I do. I can only imagine how infuriating this stream of tap commentary coming in and out of your country is.

For myself, didn't realize until yesterday that the Brits even had two-tap sinks. I've never mustered the money to fly across the pond and hang in Londy. So I wasn't aware.

Not to defend the pedants, but I believe the main cause of the cacophony is pure conundrum: why why why the foreigner asks. It is less the quantityt of inconvenience and more a complete inability to explain a design choice that appears to be commonplace.
 
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william_kent

william_kent

Well-known member
IdleRich said:
like yer music geek can start a conversation with a "normal" about music and reasonably expect that the man on the street will have a certain level of knowledge about the topic, that he will have favourites and so on, and that given a new (to them) piece of music he or she will likely have an opinion on it and quite possibly feel a desire to express it and maybe explain why they feel as they do.
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I wouldn't even expect that - once when I was hitch-hiking I attempted to make conversation by asking the driver what music he liked, and he was "that one that goes da-di-da" - just not interested in music whatsoever - what he was interested in was pointing out the points on the road where he had had a car crash and telling me that he was a "glamour photographer" which turned out to be a much more interesting conversation than talking about records
 
IdleRich

IdleRich

IdleRich
suspended said:
Rich, you've really opened my eyes on this one. I didn't understand why Martin and others felt the need to defend two-taps, but now I do. I can only imagine how ingratiating this stream of tap commentary coming in and out of your country is.

For myself, didn't realize until yesterday that the Brits even had two-tap sinks. I've never mustered the money to fly across the pond and hang in Londy. So I wasn't aware.

Not to defend the pedants, but I believe the main cause of the cacophony is pure conundrum: why why why the foreigner asks. It is less the quantityt of inconvenience and more a complete inability to explain a design choice that appears to be commonplace.
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I reckon you're right on that last bit... I think I even said that in my post didn't I? It's almost worse that they do have that kinda tap but they don't use it.... or weirder still, I reckon ninety percent of houses in the UK have that system in the kitchen but not in the bathroom, surely one way must be better so just do it that right? Mixing them up seems to be just total tap anarchy or.... do they really think that somehow one is better for the kitchen and the other for the bathroom and if they do think that, why? Could they possibly know something I don't.
But I'm not sure you mean ingratiating there do you?
 
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IdleRich

IdleRich

IdleRich
william_kent said:
I wouldn't even expect that - once when I was hitch-hiking I attempted to make conversation by asking the driver what music he liked, and he was "that one that goes da-di-da" - just not interested in music whatsoever - what he was interested in was pointing out the points on the road where he had had a car crash and telling me that he was a "glamour photographer" which turned out to be a much more interesting conversation than talking about records
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Of course, not all people fit the prescription, but music is one of the safer ones as a rule.
And "glamour photographer" - are we back to girls´ bottoms here?
 
william_kent

william_kent

Well-known member
IdleRich said:
Of course, not all people fit the prescription, but music is one of the safer ones as a rule.
And "glamour photographer" - are we back to girls´ bottoms here?
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yes, he took photos for porn mags - although apparently the secret to a good photo was "come to bed eyes"
 
IdleRich

IdleRich

IdleRich
although apparently the secret to a good photo was "come to bed eyes
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Can't believe that he was willing to give away that trick of the trade, once you know that the rest of it all just falls simply into place.
Then again, I guess that the job of glamour photographer is yet another of those skilled artisanal trades which is no longer needed, now that the template for pornography has changed from being a cute girl with come-to-bed-eyes suggestively starting to peel off her scanties, to a dead-eyed cocaine barbie being brutally sodomized by two (or more, why not) donkey-dicked sadistic bullies, choking and slapping her as they quite literally fuck the shit out of her...

yes, he took photos for porn mags
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Obviously a dream for a lot of people... but I am really never sure of that; if you can do your hobby for your job, then while it might mean that you enjoy your work hours more than most, does it not decrease the pleasure of your hobby outside working hours? Of course it varies depending on the hobby and the person and so on...
I remember years ago when Blackberries first came out and there used to be a billboard that I went past a lot which said something to the effect that with a Blackberry you could "make your office the beach" - I suppose the idea was that, instead of getting up and going into the office you could - for the first time, with smartphones not yet arrived - go to the beach and work from there. But even then, callow and naive as I was, it was immediately obvious that the converse would also be true, and that if you had your blackberry with you on the beach when on holiday then that beach had itself... So yeah, when you make your office into the beach, you also make the beach into you office, in fact this is just self-evident in terms of language (or identity relations) right? If A IS B then B can't help but be A can can it?- no-one can say they weren't warned... although even if you were warned what can you do if your boss or company gives you a company blackberry (not usually a sign that having it will reduce your working hours) - "oh, I can make the office into the beach, thanks so much for thinking of me Mr Smith".
In fact, it's worse than beach and office being squashed into one ugly mutant place, all places basically ended up becoming one place didn't they?, Not in a good zen jedi kinda way, but just in a blurry messy way that as long as you have your phone and a company that owns you then the office walls are always there, solid and grey behind the translucent and transient place in which you are relaxing...
All completely obvious stuff of course that every single one of us knows down inside without actually having to explicitly say it.
 
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