EEPhil
Number 28
Probably written in all those letters Royal Mail fail to deliver.
Amusing Items
- Thread starter Black Hole
- Start date
OP
Black Hole
May contain traces of nut
Yes, I've definitely got them worried. Sorry folks, I'm now going to get the blame for all the self-inflicted austerity coming down the track.
I think it's more higher taxes than austerity.
OP
Black Hole
May contain traces of nut
Higher taxes... less money to spend.....
OP
Black Hole
May contain traces of nut
Best laugh I've had for a while:
There were tales, from the days of street trams powered by overhead electric cables, of leaky insulators and dogs getting a nasty surprise when they cocked a leg against the pole, but this is a new one!
There were tales, from the days of street trams powered by overhead electric cables, of leaky insulators and dogs getting a nasty surprise when they cocked a leg against the pole, but this is a new one!
EEPhil
Number 28
We had a party line for a while, but can't remember an earth spike. A thin wire from the junction box, through the front door frame and across a small amount of brickwork and into the ground. Nothing obvious and nowhere to tie a dog (even if we had one). I always thought dogs got a shock from faulty lampposts. I do know my old head of research got some consultancy from the local tram consortium regarding EM and other interference with underground cables etc. No mention of dogs though.
antipodean
Active Member
My father used to get n Australian electronics magazine which had a section every month entitled "The Serviceman Who Tells". The writer of the section was a radio & TV servicemen in Sydney, and would relate stories of unusual faults that came his way, and how he diagnosed and fixed them. He would also periodically include stories from fellow service men and others in the general trade. One story related to a telephone engineer having to deal with telephone lines to outback homesteads. Many of these lines were a single wire with earth return, so at best the circuit was not great. The distances involved meant that everyone had to repeat the ringing code as the distances were such that the hand crank generator could generate just enough voltage to get to the homesteads each side. Apparently when it was known that there was noone at a particular homestead then people would resort to taking the crank off and attempting to generate extra volts by attaching an electric drill to the generator, not realising that the generator had a governor so that the generator couldn't be turned too fast and generate a frequency that was too high to ring the bells.
OP
Black Hole
May contain traces of nut
There's nothing unusual about that.
The full chemical name for the human protein titin is 189,819 letters, and takes up to three-and-a-half hours to pronounce.
Floccinaucinihilipilification
By virtue of having one more letter than antidisestablishmentarianism, this is the longest non-technical English word. A mash-up of five Latin elements, it refers to the act of describing something as having little or no value. While it made the cut in the Oxford English Dictionary, Merriam-Webster volumes refuse to recognize it, chalking up its existence to little more than linguistic ephemera.
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After a very quick look "describing something as having little or no value." was the most apt I saw in English.
EEPhil
Number 28
Of course, my original comment was hoping to find a German word - because they have a habit of creating one long word for an idea - to express "how you feel". trog chucked in a chemical name from Latin not German. I decided to show off with a Maori word.
Doesn't really matter, I hate surveys with silly questions so I'm not filling it in. But asking for one word and providing 200 spaces was a challenge.
antipodean
Active Member
Yes, it is a Maori place name.
OP
Black Hole
May contain traces of nut
That being the one which beats LlanfairPG?
antipodean
Active Member
I believe it is that one.