Thread 6 - TalkExiles: "Yup, still round."

[Kucinghitam]

Continuation of previous threads (thread 5).

Gather here all ye refugees from the JTT Flat Earth Society, welcome to the reassuringly oblate spheroid of MN! Ye all already know the answers to the questions "How the heck do I format my post?" "Why can't I edit my typos?" "What do those acronyms mean?" and most importantly, "Where is everybody that I used to know?"

So really we're all here just to chat randomly.

And those are great pictures @Kucinghitam - they make me actually want to get a camera out!

@CyanCrystalViolet That sounds awful - sympathies.

@Kucinghitam Love the bird pics - very good shot of the goldfinch's markings.

Sorry for your woes, @CyanCrystalViolet. My blood pressure was very high yesterday but seems to have calmed down to merely high. I wonder if it's after effects of Covid from a couple of weeks ago because it hasn't been a problem before. Have to go to get it checked properly at the GP. Not fun feeling crap and worried.

@artant that’s reassuring, thank you. I keep trying to tell myself it doesn’t matter how long it takes, that it won’t seem like a big deal in a few years’ time.

@Kucinghitam lovely pics! I’m really enjoying seeing/hearing the birds come out to play again. I need to get some sort of bird feeder for my balcony.

@bignosebignose that sounds scary. Crossing my fingers for you, hopefully just a blip.

I had to take Kasper for his booster jab this morning. My god, what a fuss he makes at the vets. He curls himself up into the tiniest ball in the carrier and refuses to communicate with anyone or accept treats, poor thing. Then the second we get home he jumps out, casually strolls around as if nothing’s happened while demanding the previously-refused treats. He doesn’t seem to be too pissed off with me although he didn’t like me wiping the lube off his bum.

I’m so relieved it’s over.

Oh, and he’s massive now. 5.5 kg, normal for his breed but what a porker.

Fingers crossed for you, @CyanCrystalViolet - they will be able to do something. xx

Badger is gearing up for wandering season. Have to keep my eye on him when I let him out to pee, as he wanders around grazing, with the occasional sneaky look back at me to see if I’m watching. Makes a couple of purposeful steps towards the compost heap at the bottom of the garden, which is his preferred exit route, although there are many escape routes as we have only woods and an easily-crossable river as our property boundaries, but if you catch him at the start he always comes back when called.

It’s the SNEAKINESS! The innocent grazing! The little glances to check if I’m watching!

I feel like a jailor but it would cost £1000s to fence the boundary, there’s 2.3 acres of it!

And just reading that back, @CyanCrystalViolet , I don’t mean “fingers crossed they’ll be able to do something”, I mean “fingers crossed. They WILL be able to do something.”

Haha I understood @MavisMcMinty x

Naughty grazing Badger!

Ouf Cyan how awful for you. I do hope things get sorted soon.

Lovely bird pics @Kucinghitam . We occasionally see bluebirds in our garden, and jays and goldfinch are regulars. We get cardinals too sometimes.

@MavisMcMinty our old mad springer (Emma) was so terrible for running away that in the end we just rigged up a running line in the garden for her, so you just clipped her on to the long lead looped over it and waited for her to try to escape to terrorise the neighbours' rabbits (she would jump on top of their hutch and rock it back and forth, occasionally peering in to see what effect she was having).

Re the birds, I have a large lime tree directly outside my bedroom window. Most mornings when I pull back the curtains there are at least 6 parakeets, sometimes up to 15 or so, sitting in it, staring in at the window. It's hard not to feel judged by the sleek green bastards as I lurch around in a mad-haired stupor.

We're on the parakeets' morning and evening flight path, with great gangs of them hurtling over to and from their roosts, with one of them shrieking "This way!". The rest of the day they hang around in smaller groups, like teenagers, all shouting at once.

Naughty Emma! @SqueakyDinosaur

Unusual for a bitch (assuming by the name Emma) to go a-wandering, isn’t it? Dottie never leaves my sight! Although our last springer Molly did sometimes go and see neighbours she knew and liked, usually after we had been out without her (which was very rare), and designed solely to teach us a lesson. “See? Not nice, is it?? Not nice being left all alone in the house IS IT???”

Oh, it was purely hunting instinct, @MavisMcMinty ! She had been trained as a drug-sniffer (which was always very funny at stations, in queues, etc etc - "Oh, she must really like me!" as she sat down by someone and stared at them) and I'm not sure she'd really been off the lead in any meaningful way before we got her, aged 4 - I assume they used to exercise all the dogs within the perimeters of the RAF base we got her from.

I remember driving home with her from the base, and she was utterly silent, just staring hard out of the window, but she learnt very quickly that nice countryside might = walks and used to sigh theatrically and draw pictures with her nose on the window.

and used to sigh theatrically

I had a dog that would imitate me when I did an exasperated sigh. My then girlfriend would crease up laughing every time he did it.

The great thing about the Covid lockdowns was the effect on dogs. I don't know if it was because they only got to socialise with people during walkies, rather than having friends and family around, but even the snootiest and yappiest became eager to make new friends. This has survived and we now can't walk 200 yards without being made a fuss of. Even random dogs we've never met before are insistent on saying hello.

Of course we know their names (if not, I always ask) but not their owners' names.

I'm a dog botherer. It's one of life's great joys.

@Kucinghitam lovely bird photos! Being by the sea there are a fair amount of seagulls but also at the sea there are a lot of crows and I will make them my friends. I do have sparrows singing away every evening on a tree outside my front window and that makes me happy. Most things about living here make me happy. For example, yesterday morning I was woken up quite horribly because I was sick in my mouth and the taste was vile. I spent the rest of the day feeling quite sick. Today I woke up without sick in my mouth. I still feel a little unwell but you know, not awful. And through it all? I'm happy to be where I am. I'm very lucky indeed.

In other news, watching the Paula Yates documentaries has reminded me that I used to have far much fun with my clothes and I intend to do just that again. I'm not horribly boring or anything but I need to be more silly again and I intend to do just that.

Having seen some of your photos from when you were younger @NotDrowningJustCrowing I totally get how you could have been mistaken for Paula Yates.

And for what it's worth, I think that clip of Paula Yates on HIGNFY ought to be shown every single time Ian Hislop gets hailed as some sort of liberal free speech hero. Paul Merton and Angus Deayton were awful but Hislop really showed his true colours when it comes to what he thinks about women.

HIGNFY was one of those "game shows" that puzzled me - panelists get points for smarmy little in-jokes. I can't remember what other shows were called but one seemed to be mostly fat male comedians.

I never watched QI because the format looked exactly like that.

@mach2 - I'm biased because I do some online work for QI, but I think you have a mistaken idea of what it is. When John Lloyd was developing it, he said he wanted to make it like the most interesting bits of an encyclopaedia alongside comedy, and to include things people thought they knew but didn't really (that's the General Ignorance part of the show).

I went to a recording of the new series (U themed) and it was great fun. They record for a couple of hours and then edit it for the broadcast version.

The only thing I have against it is the inclusion of Jordan Gray on a recent panel because I can't stand the idiot, but it's definitely diverse beyond middle aged white comedians these days.

It is still mostly men, and repeat guests tend to be the ones who are 'funny' rather than the ones who are interesting☆. But the underlying idea is definitely not in-joke based and there's a lot of good content.

☆ Ben Miller was on once and was cut off when explaining a fascinating bit of physics, whereas Giles Brandreth is a repeat guest allowed to witter on endlessly in name-dropping anecdotes.

Harry and Paul's pisstake of the format and the show was so bang on the nose it hurt.

Well it is essentially a comedy show so being funny is important! It's also the case that there are far more male than female comedians, and that not all comedians want to be on that kind of show. But they do aim a lot more for diversity these days.

@Dotellhimpike that gave me a proper LOL. Love the depiction of Hislop in particular.