Be careful what you wish for!

Wow, I had no idea. I thought it was just a spiritual woowoo kind of thing.

Ah, ok, just clicked the link. That’s hilarious - support for plucky mystics oppressed by communist China until they go, “heaven is racially segregated”. Um, hang on…

When I was in Hong Kong a few years back I saw a small group of people quietly promoting Falun Gong (banner slogan: “Falun Gong is Good”, catchy), while across the street another small group of people quietly held up signs denouncing Falun Gong as dangerous nonsense. Not sure why, but the CCP is fairly worked up about it, calls it a cult. I thought it was banned in China.

These two:

One is hot, one is mild. It’s a lottery whether I can remember the right word in Hungarian when I open the fridge.

I visited Bhutan in 2008 when democracy had just been introduced. I asked someone what he thought about it, and he kind of sighed and said, " People were happy with the old system, but the king wanted this so we’re going along with it." Big shrug.

A good tip for bread machines is that a lot of people buy them but then don’t like them, so you can get good secondhand ones cheaply. I love my bread machine - it was about £120 new, but I got it in a charity shop for £10.

Part of the 49% the bot left out: "Employed by the now-defunct Omani private firm Dahra Global Technologies and Consultancy Services, they were contracted for providing training and related services to Qatar’s armed forces.

“While the charges have never been made public, media reports hinted at the possibility of their being charged with espionage.”

I wonder if that’s the one child policy biting them in the bum. They ditched it nearly ten years ago I think. It ended up causing a few social problems - like the one child left looking after aging parents and grandparents, and the “little emperor” thing of spoiled brats. Also skewed the ratio of men to women quite a bit.

It’s like when they decided sparrows were stealing grain, so they set about killing sparrows in their millions - only to have crops devastated by the insects the sparrows had previously been eating. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_campaign (A billion sparrows, apparently. Idiots.)

I’m all itchy just thinking about it. Good luck! New bed is the way to go. New duvet too, boil wash for sheets etc … what about the carpet? Aaaaargh! Good luck!

Especially ancient Africa! Look up Mansa Musa, king of Mali. Carthage too. Zimbabwe. Benin. Egypt too, it’s in Africa.

With my luck I’d die of a katipo spider bite in the first month lol. Also, I’m minded of the scene in the film Boy, where said boy is cooking tea for the family. “Ah no, not crayfish again!” whines his sister. (Though I can’t imagine getting sick of crayfish.) Ask yourself why the Māori started eating tītī/muttonbird…. that smacks of desperation. Pack a few kūmara in your bag, maybe an axe and a box of matches?

Edinburgh has snow, lovely!

Gigi. Absolutely fucking horrified when I watched it as an adult. “Thank heavens for leetle girls.” Yikes. It’s all about a courtesan (high class prostitute) bringing up her daughter to also be a courtesan. Happy ending: she gets married!! Phew!

Actually my first movie might have been a Shirley Temple one. I remember her singing Good Ship Lollipop on a plane with a lot of grown men. At some point her mother got run over - they didn’t show the accident but she was carrying Shirley’s birthday cake, with a plane on it, and you saw the cake crashing to the ground and the plane smashed up. I haven’t seen it since so I have no idea what was going on.

I’m really old btw. All us kids used to go to the pictures every Saturday morning. First up were cartoons, then maybe a serial (Tarzan), then an interval, then the main feature.

It’s even more mildly infuriating for us across the pond… we don’t have Thanksgiving but we now get the Black Friday/ Cyber Monday nonsense. Grrr!

No op, but kerning is the spacing between letters in printed text. If you just put the same space between each letter a sentence would look choppy, because stick letters like i and l would look very close together, while letters like double o would look further apart. So the spacing is adjusted to make letters appear to be the same distance apart, so it’s easier on the eye.

The absolute worst is when you’re swimming laps and someone goes past wearing perfume. You can taste it! Ugh. Shower before you swim, please (without fruity shampoo, lol).

Yak. Had a delicious yak goulash in a restaurant in Thimpu, Bhutan. Very similar to beef, hard to tell because of the spicing.

I bought a (nearly) 1Tb thumb drive for £10 last week and copied all my music onto it. I’m thinking of getting a few more for docs and other media and leaving them in my keysafe.

Ha ha! We are beginning to wonder. My late mother would have been over 100 if she was still alive; he was her toyboy, lol. He’s fit and active, has lots of hobbies, walks everywhere and has opinions about everything. We love him a lot, and hope he is indeed immortal.