Abi@38: Yup, HMFC are distressingly "Protestant". A few years ago I used to steward for Rock Steady and some Hearts fans just couldn't get it into their heads that Hibernian, once the "Irish"/"Catholic" team in town, had rebranded themselves as the team for North Edinburgh and Leith, doing their best to lose their sectarian overtones (this used to cause problems at Celtic matches).
For quite a while the colour of the Lothian buses was officially described as "madder" to add a little distance from the HMFC colours (this is kinda sorta similar to Dundee Utd playing in tangerine (if you had to draw a religious line between the two Dundee teams, City would be the "protestant" one), but the purple and cream livery has been being phased out now for a good few years.
[Thinks: it may be that growing up in Norn Iron has selectively both blinded and sensitised me to some aspects of sectarianism]
Sandra@16: sadly no. There's a lot more to me than in those high and far-off times. Maybe a slowly crumbling statue that gets lighter year-on-year as I do otherwise.
Abi@30 - Very droll, but no: I'm in Edinburgh, and suspect that Guthrie's just not matched name and face. (Oh, and Edinburgh buses? The city buses (once council-run, and now a private company called Lothian Buses) were always purple, and are the "town" buses. The outer areas of the Lothians and (I think) all the way to the Borders were served by the SMT buses which were green when I first lived in Edinburgh - they have since been taken over by FirstBus. Unlike Glasgow, who used to change their buses from Blue/Red to Green/Gold when there was a change of council, there was never any "religious" or even football-related coding)
Guthrie@6: there's a reason for that....
The Wildeman's a beautiful example of a brown cafe (much improved by the smoking ban) - it's closed on Sundays, sadly. De Jaren's more of an eating cafe (which is not to say there's not a good range of beer): big, light and airy, with a canal-side terrace. It can be packed on a Saturday, but Sundays tend to be quieter.
By total coincidence, Jenny and I celebrate our 29th wedding anniversary on 22/3/09, and we're also going to be in Amsterdam....
@1: Let A = Old ⊆ Pilots; B = Bold ⊆ Pilots; It can be shown that: A ∩ B = ∅. Or something.
Lovely pictures. We were }{ this close to staying at the Botel over
Easter, but found somewhere on Damrak that was abut 10 euro/night
cheaper....
(We made it over to Amsterdam Noord once, but Cafe Ot en Sien was closed)
Now, if it had been some of the dodgier markets up here in Scotland, I can see why they wouldn't want pictures taken of the piles of dodgy DVDs and CD-ROMs of pirated software, but the request to not take pictures would have been a little more vigorous....
So there we were on a Sunday afternoon, laundry safely in the machines at Canonmills Laundry, and ourselves sitting in the Orchard bar (that used to be the Northern) while having a quick play with the internet tablet, when we find this thread....
Somewhat disconcerting, as we'd looked for the heron earlier as we crossed the bridge.
Bruce@16: you don't need an expensive red contact lens, any more than Von Daniken(?)'s cavemen would have needed access to an x-ray source to illustrate skeletons. Red cellophane or a piece of red lighting gel should do the trick.
(I'm not sure that doing this would add to the colour experience of people who were already trichromats, though)
There's a WW1 cartoon from Punch, later redone as a propaganda poster. It showed a wounded British soldier, obviously thirsty, being taunted by a German nurse pouring a glass of water on the floor in front of him.
Apparently that poster was responsible for the introduction of conscription being delayed for a year. Of course, after the War it turned out that the incident had been fictional....
Retro-editing?
Mark Foley (D-Fla.) back in September?
The rodents in organic solvent story was going when I was an undergrad in the 70s - except then it had happened in the 60s and the solvent was given as either formaldehyde or isopropyl alcohol - both of which (unlike ether) are miscible with water).
It's good to see that lab hygiene has improved since the mid-90s, but I still think that to do any damage with permanganates, say, you'd need quite a concentration.
I did wonder if the current ban on travelling with liquids wasn't to stop a completely different attack altogether (which I'm definitely not describing here) that could potentially simply end all passenger air transport.
Well, I used to work in synthetic organic chemistry, and after that spent more than a decade in university departments with synth labs, and "D" was in fact the right answer - individual benches would have waste bottles at each end, but these would be emptied into larger vessels, which would in turn go into a vat....
Accidentally producing Bad Stuff was fairly unlikely because the individual compounds that would react together were more likely to have reacted with something else in the mix first.
Of course, if Passenger A turns up with a gallon jug of one compound and a few minutes later Passenger B turns up with a similar jug of another, and they get poured into a virtually empty vat, then you just might be able to get a reaction, but if you're just adding small amounts of material at a time to some kind of primordial supermarket stew of shampoo, cleaning fluids and fruit juice, then a nasty reaction is pretty unlikely.
All the same, the disposal system should be designed at least as well as an ordinary lab sink, with a decent sized trap and maybe a one-way valve.
Ah. but did they reject it, or was it their spam filter?
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| 2009 | 7 |
| 2008 | 4 |
| 2007 | 1 |
| 2006 | 4 |
| 2005 | 1 |
| 2002 | 1 |
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