Thread 16 - TalkLair: "Well, I'm not exactly quaking in my stylish-yet-affordable boots, but there's definitely something unnatural going on here."

[Kucinghitam]

(Previous thread 15).

Another year over, a new one just begun...

In the TalkLair, the hearth is glowing, the walls festooned with tinsel, books by non-approved authors line the shelves, rugs are down on the floors, the tree is twinkling with fairy lights (and possibly being clambered on by cats). The denizens of the lair are a welcoming bunch though, always eager for general chit-chat on all manner of topics.

We just won’t mention the gnawed bones of our prey Christmas roast beast over there in the corner of the cave…

Yes, in FWR posters often link to the likes of the Scottish Daily Express etc and they're a nightmare of difficult to dismiss adverts.

I hate when I click on a link and realise that I've gone to a Reach newspaper. They're beyond ridiculous.

My current side advert is for diamonds. This is because I was looking a lovely rings and thinking how lovely it would be to have one. I pity them wasting their time on me because there isn't going to be a time when I'm all "Oh yes, that antique £3k ring is just what I was looking for." I do like looking at the pretty jewels though.

I got jewel ads for a time, too. So pretty and do not what I would ever be buying!

Reach sites are indeed beyond awful.

Well I've had around 12 hours of this, and what I'll say is, on MN I can deal with that no problem, but on many other sites, an ad-blocker is a must. So I either need new browser, or new ad-blocker, or both.

Touch wood, after a day's trial it appears that the ads on MN are not being intrusive (Safari on laptop). A banner one on top and something video-y in the sidebar. Much better than the old days where ¾ of the screen would be obscured by a flashy, garish moving monstrosity.

I've jinxed it now, haven't I?

OK, I am now on MN on Firefox! Guess I still need an ad-blocker, though.

check out the duck

If you go to addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/extensions/category/privacy-security/ you may find uBlockOrigin does the job.

Yeah, I've got ublock on it, Gonners, thanks. It's not so much MN, but Jeez, YouTube was unuseable!

We celebrated MtG's birthday with the daily walk by the beach (not on the beach, what with the tide being in), then stopped off on the way home to see Conclave at the weeny local cinema. It was on the biggest (not very big) screen, which unfortunately has Dolby surround sound -This doesn't really work for me - when there's a loud noise from something like an explosion on screen, I really expect to hear it from the front, not the side! Good film though, and Carlos Diehz is very decorative indeed.

That's what I always have, @Kucinghitam so I shall declare you are not putting the bock on anything at all. I hope.

I still want to see Conclave on the big screen if they show it at one of my locals again. It'll be good practice for the one that will probably be coming up quite soon I'd have thought.

Yes. Having seen it, it will be hard not to picture all sorts of behind-the-scenes machinations going on. I'm sure there's a very good reason why those conclaves aren't public. And there seems to be some - er - controversy about the method for appointing a new Archbish of Canterbury.

Robert Harris writes cracking good stories. I'm currently re-reading Fatherland, interspersed with some Camus - L'Etranger and La Peste - just to wipe out any few remaining shreds of optimism.

Heh! Reminds me of the time I thought it'd be a great idea to buy my dad Fatherland for his birthday. He near enough threw it back in my face! 😃

Arf! My army dad would have loved it, but sadly died before it was published.

My dad wasn't even in the Army (protected profession)!

I saw Conclave on the big screen. We were gripped by all the machinations.

Grr. Why does doing the right thing have to be so expensive?

I want a Thing. It's available from Amazon, 1 other webshop, or by taking a trip to Finland.

Option 3 is tempting but totally impractical. Option 2 avoids further enriching Bezos at the expense of his exhausted workers. But option 1 is ⅔ of the cost of 2 (which, yes, for a reason but it's still ouch when the difference is the cost of a meal out).

<mutters about remembering when a pack of crisps was 8p>

Well as my Mum used to say, worse things happen at sea.

Indeed.

It may be the least practical option but I say take the trip to Finland. Helsinki is great. (I have a terrible Amazon habit though; I’m not proud of that but it’s too convenient and there’s a substantially higher chance of parcels arriving than from purchases from other places, especially ones that use Evri.)

I took the not-Amazon (better choice of colours) but no-holiday (much faster) option, in the end.

I do want to go to Finland, but not this week.

I took a lot of interest in the last two conclaves and drew up lists of all the papability in the Benedict one and wrote a little bit about each of them. I was aware of some of them, others not so much. Anyway, when it got to Benedict - and I hope I'm not repeating this because it was talked about by my friends a lot at the time especially as he obviously went on to become pope, I wrote his job, etc and then "Seems a bit cuntish".

There are two things I've been wondering about so I thought I'd just put them here.

The envelopes/packaging of nearly all our post and deliveries smell of perfume and often it smells of the same perfume, though I couldn't name it. I mean, some stuff that turns up reeks. This has started happening fairly recently and I'm wondering why.

The other thing I've been wondering about are the sharpening and polishing stones that people used to use to finish flint axes. There's one at Grime's Graves and I was told about a field in a neighbouring county where there are several of them. What if you turned up with your bag of unfinished flint tools and found that all the sharpening stones were in use? Was there a queue and how often did this happen?

Here is a polishing stone.

New postie who likes wearing perfume?