Thread 19 - TalkLair: "The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long"

[Kucinghitam]

(Previous thread 18)

Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat...

In the TalkLair, the fairy lights are festooned on the mantlepiece, the tree is twinkling with baubles, the mince pies are in the oven, the MN legendary chicken is ready to feed the hordes. The denizens of the lair are a welcoming bunch, always eager for general chit-chat on all manner of topics. We just won’t mention the gnawed bones of our prey over there in the corner of the cave…

It's scorchio! Definitely time to hide from the sun with our fair viking skin

It's scorchio! Definitely time to hide from the sun with our fair viking skin

Lucky for me, I have olive skin but it's still too bleeding hot.

It's a good drying day, mind. Our big towels dried on the line in about 20 minutes and are now nice and crunchy, as we like them. I love a good scratchy towel.

I've driven back from Chester to West London today. The car was telling me it's 34 degrees, which I can believe.

There's something wholesome about a scratchy towel, though they remind me of the line in Motherland about "it's like trying to dry yourself with a Weetabix".

It was too hot here yesterday. Today it is far too hot. It sounds like tomorrow will be even worse. My mother won’t listen to reason and had a window open earlier so it’s 31°C in her room (windows open again now to try and cool it down a bit). It’s going to be a long night I think (and a long few days).

If it’s any consolation it poured with rain here today and I had to put a light sweater on.

I'm going to have to tidy the downstairs room with the sofa bed for a cooler night's sleep. Probably 5 degrees cooler here than in England but still rather hot for me.

a mere 25 here on sunny craggy island, but it feels like 55. I'm way too white for this weather.

I'm still taking 2 microwave wheatbags to bed with me to keep warm.

@ProfessorBinturong - I'll have some of that!

In time-wasting news (I have several things I really ought to be doing) I've been binge-watching Hinterland/Y Gwyll and all I can say is that the episode I watched this afternoon (Season 2, Ep 4) was frankly baffling. The main characters were obviously fine, but most of the other male characters were interchangeable and ditto the females. At the end I had no idea who had done what to whom, why, who was married to whom, and who was alive/dead. It was as though it had been done deliberately, to see if they could get away with it.

As I recall, Y Gwyll had a plethora of grumpy, dark-haired, bearded men, who all looked much the same.

Yesterday morning I went out very early to bring in the emptied bins, and found 12 x 2-litre bottles of mineral water on the path. This is apparently because we are on the "vulnerable" register (MrG is 84) and there is some problem with Southern Water, though nowhere near here.

This evening the doorbell rang and I opened the door to find another dozen bottles on the mat, and a couple of cheery men waving as they got back into their van. So we now have 48 litres of "Gill Beck" - from somewhere in the Lichfield area - and nowhere to put it.

How much more will we get, I wonder. Should I water the garden, or perhaps get a paddling pool?

Films and television programmes need a limit on the number of people with similar features any can contain. And that limit should be 1. I'll quite often be several episodes in and baffled by the fact they've just arrested someone for murder who also appears to have been the corpse, or 1 character behaving inconsistently turns out to be 2 different people. Indeed the 1-person-who-is-2 is (are) frequently married to 2 spouses who I also can't tell apart.

Goodness, I thought maybe it was just me! I need people on screen to look as different from each other as possible or I will get them confused. Even better if they're also consistently dressed in particular styles/colours. Perhaps this is why I don't generally enjoy most serious-ish drama, especially the sort with moody lighting and desaturated colours.

I realise this makes me sound like I just watch children's TV but I blame my face-blindness.

I never get the neighbourhood cats mixed up, though.

Pretty much all of our neighbourhood cats disappeared during Covid and the few that remain are contemptuous of humans. This coincided with many people getting dogs.

My favourite American 'conservative' cop shows are very good at making people look (and indeed sound) distinctive, which is presumably why they are so popular.

It's politicians looking the same that confuse me. Women with brown bobs and wearing the same outfits. Too many men with red hair and beards.

I blame Game of Thrones. Every other character is a grizzled middle aged man in scruffy armour with a sour expression who thinks he runs the seven kingdoms.

oh don't. In the UK the main contender for the next PM looks exactly like a partially grown clone of the current guy (I'm not saying he is or is not, but who knows with biotech these days). If they didn't have different barbers I'd have trouble telling them apart.

Thank goodness - I thought it was just me getting old!

For about 6 months I thought 3 male presenters on my workout app were all the same man. In my defense I was watching on a small tablet, and they were all about the fitness but still...

They're all made out of ticky-tacky and they all look just the same.

Damn you, I had that line as an earworm for a few days and now it's back! 😅

There’s a green one and a pink one, a blue one and a yellow one…