xaphod

I was at the 'Age of Enlightenment' exhibition at the British Museum yesterday. I was amused by this note on an exhibit, a stick about 50cm long and 2cm square with notches carved across it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From 1100 to 1826, tally sticks were used to record payments of taxes and other money into the Royal Treasury. Wooden sticks were notched with a record of payment and then split in half lengthways, one half given to the collector and the other kept as a receipt for payment. In 1834 there were so many in the store at Westminster, that they were largely responsible for feeding the fire that burnt down the previous Houses of Parlaiment. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- .... hey guys, it's Tax Return time again in the UK. I wonder what would happen if we all sent back our returns on the most inflammable stuff we could find? .... heh heh. Xa

point 1 .... well done the Yanks. point 2 .... Yanks go galumphing in with a totally unsubtle media splash ! Have the Yanks not learnt a thing about mentality and values of the people of Islam? Despite the fact there is overwhelming evidence for Saddam being a pretty gross abuser of Human Rights, Islamics will be totally offended with the image of a Yank poking around for a DNA swab in the mouth of a member of the faith. Over everything else, this image will crystalise anti-western feeling for tens of years .... and the Yanks were stupid enough to allow it to be broadcast ! Does not anyone there understand the middle and far-eastern concept of 'saving face'? ..... you f*****g stupid idiots. To coin a Yank phrase "that's another fine mess you've gotten us into" Xa

Look under the 'shops' heading (top of the main page on the forum) and add your comment and rating. I have really hammered 'Western Ranch' for doing the same thing. The more people on this board who make use of this facility will help give these internet rip-off merchants a difficult time. Xa

Do I see lots of 'Fuss' labels .... a woman with taste ! Xa

Sorry, guys, Chunky 4" heels went 'out' about two to three years ago. They were everywhere then. Yours truly stocked up and now has 5 pairs which should hopefully keep me going until the fashion comes around again. I've been thinking along these lines for a while. It's actually easier for guys to wear heels which are 'out of date' by a few years, because there's no established 'norm' for people to compare with. The number of times women ask me where I got my heels from and I have to disappoint them by saying I bought them 3 years ago must say something; it could be the fact that today's styles aren't quite so exciting. Xa

Daz, I believe the expression is 'let's share .... what's yours is ours and what's mine is mine'. Xa

This subject has been covered before by Nata on 26th Mar 02 in the 'For Everybody' forum.

I find the extra space and more upright position in my 4wd allows me to wear 5" heels without scuffing the back of heels.

http://65.160.96.70/hhplace/images/1052226566

Ask Calv how my control of the vehicle is, but don't ask him to comment about sticking to the correct lane markings which I regard as suggested guidance to one's trajectory.

Xa

Just bounced this back to the top for Heelman

Xa

" .... snip.... "You know, engineering wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for all this technical stuff."

I can't remember who said this ....

Lord of the Rings .... a book read by engineering students called Dave.

Xa

Been there, done that. As a TV, I could scare traffic wardens, so I tried to co-ordinate heels with a guy's style. OK, I get laughed at because it's different, but when people go out of their way to say it's cool, that really makes my day and compensates for the negativity. A while back, a couple of guys in a small truck honked, I looked round expecting to get abuse, but was surprised to see the passenger with a smile from ear to ear giving me the 'thumbs up'. Xa

.... yes I agree about the Spice Girls I used to think they had one brain cell shared between the lot of them. Actually I was impressed by one of your exports, to whit Gwynneth Paltrow. She used the word 'didactic' on a chat show here. It aint often I have to dive for a dictionary, but she had me stumped ! Xa

.... attributed to Noel Coward I like long walks .... especially when they are taken by people who annoy me ! Xa

Some Hell's Angels were raided by agents from ...

the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives !

holy sh**

Xa

From a satirical TV programme:- By train, Paris is about 2 1/2 hours from London .... Birmingham about 9 Xa

Have a look at this !

http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_843978.html?menu=news.surveys

Don't blame me for what it says, but I thought it might provoke discussion.

Xa

As, certain people, including lawyers acting on behalf of paranoid parents, delight in misconstruing things so they can earn lots of legal fees while persecuting innocent people.

Yes, 'no win no fee' has a lot to answer for. Regretably, for those under 18, I will avoid you like the plague, just in case some clever-a**e lawyer tries to get into my wallet !

Xa

Goebbels said that lies repeated often enough become truth

Now we are bombarded with various chunks of 'information' where organisations would like us to perceive things in a way than we otherwise might, ie they are trying to pull the wool over our eyes.

Now, you can't fool all the people all the time, but when you try to fool me, I just get very pissed, and start writing something like this piece.

Here's a couple of examples from the last few days.

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Global warming has put more pressure on sea defences to prevent the flooding of low-lying land.

Our Government can't afford to spend anything reinforcing our defences (I suppose it is hiring too many politically correct do-gooders like 'outreach diversity facilitators'), so it is proposing to let some sea defences fall into disrepair and allow flooding.

This was called managed retreat

Due to this having unacceptable semantic overtones, the official phrase is now

managed re-alignment

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South-West trains decided to remove 72 seats from their 4 carriage trains to 'boost train comfort'

This is actually horse****t for the fact that the trains are so overcrowded, that to squeeze extra passengers in, they are taking a lot of seats out .... one person standing takes less floorspace than one person sitting !

Xa

HI, HF, The other point I will make is that my shirt matched the boots ! Xa

Welcome, both. When we have the London meets, I suppose the major problem for someone new is meeting us lot for the first time. It's easy enough to be a little cautious .... just hang around near our meeting point and scope us out for a while. OK, we might be dressed a bit weird, for example be wearing heels, but I hope we don't look like a coven of axe-murderers ! Xa

It's a doddle, isn't it? As I always say to people just starting out, makes sure everything else is elegant to match those elegant boots, otherwise you look like a perv in high heels, a dirty mac and a pair of scruffy jeans. Xa

Lies win sprints.

The truth wins marathons.

Michael Jackson (or his spin doctor)

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From a UK 'reality TV show'

Mother in Law .......... Hitler with boobies !

Xa

Hi, JeffM, I wasn't going to say anything, but it seems there was a bit of Pom-bashing went on in the Aussie press before the game. The comment I picked up on was that we were accused of playing 'boring Rugby'. ..... must have bored the pants off them ! Xa

Well it's true. they are booooooooooooooooooooring. The same thing over and over again. I enjoy some British comedy and DR. Who. But the later is no longer aired here in the U.S. where I live. So much for Public TV.

I my self no longer have cable in my house and been like that for over a year and a half. I think paying over $50. a month for basic cable was a rip off.

Hoorah .... I knew the yanks wern't as bad as all that. We have a new series of Dr Who starting soon, so I hope you will be able to see it in due course.

The trend is to try to make more money out of television .... to get quality programmes you have to go to the subscription channels who are steadily buying up the rights to anything decent. In the UK, you don't even get the Spencer Tracey / Katherine Hepburn classics on the box any more .... I think the satellite lot have bought them up !

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.... another story:-

Way back when, I went for an interview to do some Engineering at a company on Long Island. It was quite pleasant, because the Engineering Manager and his wife went out of their way to entertain this Brit and to show me a little of the area. What has always stayed with me is that he made a point of saying that the US was not all drive-by shootings and inner-city violence.

He did apologise for the TV, though. He said that to get anything decent, they paid for a subscription channel. What won me over was that he really liked Monty Python. Hell, intelligence is not quite dead yet !

Xa

I've been meaning to post this article from August.

It seems that 'Coupling' hit the NBC networks a while back and lasted all of 2 weeks. I have my ideas why anything with a modicum of sophistication bombed in US ratings, and why our garbage shows are popular, but I won't mention them here.

Any ideas from the heelies across the pond?

From the Sunday Times, sometime in August:-

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Lost in Translation

Steve Moffat winces as he recalls his first exposure to Hollywood. It was only hours after the filming of the pilot episode of the Americanised version of his BBC comedy Coupling, and half of the cast were being sacked !

The softly-spoken Scot, a 42 year old former schoolteacher from Paisley, pauses for a moment: "It was vile." At that moment, the American version of Coupling was falling apart, the fate of so many British comedies that jump across the pond, only to land in the Bermuda Triangle reserved for mutilated translations.

It was too much to expect an American television network to broadcast a British comedy un-neutered: beyond New York and Los Angeles, we all sound like Australians with speech impediments to them. Cultural exports are largely one-way. The NBC network, however, urgently needed a replacement for Friends. So they looked at Coupling and its plot of six good-looking, urban thirty-somethings and their emotional entanglements as Friends with extra smut. But, as Britain's 2.7m Coupling fans know, that's where the similarities stop.

Not for NBC it wasn't, who set off down the wrong path by shooting an episode from the middle of the first series that Moffat wrote, but its array of unfamiliar and sexually upfront characters - twisted by Moffat's hallmark narrative switches and feints, which are like nothing else on American sitcoms - left test audiences gasping and confused. NBC could hardly blame the writer, as Coupling is already huge across Europe, so they fired the actors and then some executives !

So NBC shot a second pilot, and the next month Coupling will make its debut on American prime time, the first British comedy to make it since Till Death Us Do Part (incidentally produced by a guy from the school where Xaphod's dad was headmaster) became All in The Family in 1971.

What Moffat neglected to add is that, unlike most American comedies, where dozens of writers are thrown at a sitcom, Coupling has always been a personal soap-opera. The linchpin characters, Steve and Susan, share the names of the writer and his producer wife, whom he met at the Edinburgh Television Festival. Like their alter-egos, they were going out with other people at the time. The other four characters represent the couple at their most confident - the 'insane bitch' Jane and priapic Patrick - and their most inept selves, encapsulated by the body-obsessed Sally and the deeply disturbed Jeff. Sue Virtue, who produces Coupling, has admitted to censoring some of her husband's more revealing script lines.

So what has changed for the American version? "Well, they had to cut each episode down to 21 minutes for ad breaks, and I have lost some of my favourite lines, " says Moffat. It's faintly weird hearing very English witticisms coming out of Chicago mouths. A few obvious references have been changed, and Anglophiles who watch our version on BBC America will miss Jack Davenport and Gina Bellman.

The good news, however, is that the first 13 episodes, stretched by the NBC scribes from the original six, look to stir up the American Heartlands like Friends never could. British television is currently riding on a wave in America, with reality formats, quiz shows, and themes such as Changing Rooms. Coupling is, make no mistake, a bold move for mainstream American television. It could still flop, although the omens are good.

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There was a critique of the translation of Coupling to its American version on the UK idiot's lantern a few days ago. Incidentally, this is where I learnt that the US version bombed.

It seems that the Yanks like one-line humour whereas the Brits like a realtively protracted narrative, gradually leading from reality to a more and more incongruous situation, but, working on the principle of acclimatisation by slow change, the inanity of the joke is not seen until the punchline which brings the strange position to which the viewer has been drawn un-noticed into immediate and stark relief.

By comparison, I think the sort of one-liner from the Yank version:-

"Susan, why do women always look at men's bottoms?"

.... "because they're lip-reading"

could be why the Yank version would bomb in Britain !

Xa

Posh Spice? Who's she? Some UK Bimbo? Not well known anywhere else!

Sang in what I think to be a second rate group.

Is second rate to her football-star husband.

Thinks she is the bees knees !

Xa

Clearly all of us here are 'solemates', but how about the people we haven't enlightened? Let's have your suggestions, everyone.

What do we call people who don't wear heels ..... irrelevant.

Xa (tongue slightly in cheek)