Posts by CrazyOldCatMan

Re: The laughable thing about wine

the countdown to vinegar begins

Which is why I (used to[1]) drink LBV Port rather than Vintage. At least the LBV Port can go a couple of days without becoming expensive vinegar..

[1] Pre-diabetes. Too much sugar in Port for me to drink it now, except on special occasions.

Re: No point "wining" about the mistake...

in the restaurant's back room, funneling Charles Shaw red into the hoidy-toidy Bordeaux

Commonly known as 'fraud' and something that Trading Standards get very, very upset about. Much like pubs who take cheap blended whisky and put it into single-malt bottles on the basis that a lot of customers won't know the difference..

Re: Generational losses

I thought that SCMS was supposed to prevent that?

I had a Sony Minidisc for a while - it wasn't the worst bit of audio kit but it didn't take me long to go up against the "you can only copy it to 3 devices" thing.

Being a profession poker of kit until it breaks, it didn't take me long to realise that the Sony software used to write tracks to the minidisc player used an Access DB as the metadata storage. So a quick fix went along the lines of "kill the application if it's running, find and delete the Access DB and then restart the application". At which point it would offer to scan your hard drive for music and (assuming that your MP3 tags were properly done[1]) re-create the DB. And, lo and behold, you could copy the music three more times. Rinse and repeat..

[1] And why wouldn't you? I do admit to being somewhat anal about such things..

My BS meter just exploded

Remember - marketing (no matter what the field) is 99% utter crap judiciously mixed in with just enough fact to ensure that you don't reject it[1] immediately.

[1] Unless you have suffered an extensive career as a cynical IT person.

Re: Wine is wine

terroir, etc is nonsense

Not so - two wines made using the same techniques (methods, grapes and yeasts etc) can taste quite different since the growing conditions can make a substantial difference to the taste of the grapes - which will lead to a substantial difference in the taste of the finished wine.

Both of a similar quality though - assuming good management used throughout the process.

Re: Wine is wine

(and in some cases better) than the French ones

I introduced a previous American manager to Rioja - he was happy to pay £40+ for a bottle of Chateauneuf Du Pape up until I started recommending £25 bottle of Rioja Reserva..

(OK - so not the same wine since Rioja uses quite different grape varieties but they are of a similar quality. To my uneducated palatte anyway)

Re: Wine is wine

professional palates are terrible at judging wine

Like most professions, wine tasting will follow trends and have in-trade expectations and standards that don't always make sense outside their speciality.

Whether you like a wine or not often comes down to the individual palette rather than percieved wine 'quality'. I've had £50 bottles that I wouldn't use to clean silver and £5 bottles that were wonderful. And (as I mentioned in a previous post) wine 'quality' is often more about scarcity than actual taste.

wine is wine

.. says someone without functional taste buds (or very little experiance of wine).

Now I won't claim to be an expert but I can definately tell the difference between wines. Mind you, my taste more runs to heavy reds like Cabalie or Rex Mundi rather than Bordeaux and (in a lot of cases) cost of the wine has more to do with scarcity than actual wine quality..

Re: "Unacceptable risk", eh? - let me guess

you would expect reasoned thinking

Unfortunately, reasoned thinking is (generally) built on a sound foundation of proper education. Something that modern western policies seem to have got away from, especially in the US.

If kids are fed on kneejerk facts and not taught to reason stuff for themselves then they (generally) won't reason soundly.

offer 70 Mb/s as an entry level broadband

It might well be a 70MB/s sync speed but I doubt very much that you actually get that data speed - especially at peak times.

Unless (of course) you are the only house using that cabinet.

Taking payment for something you're not providing.

Much like Vermin^W Virgin Media Business did with us when we cancelled a bunch of lines (mix of leased lines and DSL-Max lines) - they carried on charging us on the basis that "we hadn't instructed them to cease charging us".

After dealing with increasing levels of manager that refused to deal with the issue we got our legal team involved.

A couple of days later, we got a full refund of all the money taken with a fulsome apology and a promise to amend their ways if we gave them some business.

The refund fully paid for the contractor that we had taken on to assist us with fixing the various billing issues we'd had. And our response to VMB was along the lines of "don't call us, we'll (never) call you".

What became the Intercity 125

I remember the excitement when the first one of these went past our school (in Barnet, right by the main line north).

It was a more simple time.

Nice headline

Someone's been listening to The Last Leg..

I personally find the accent once of the most unattractive on the surface of the planet

Having grown up in North London, I would agree with you..

Personal favourites:

Geordie,

Highland Scottish

Devon & Cornish[1]

Welsh

Southern Irish

Personal hates:

Belfast NI

Leeds/Wakefield [2]

Essex

[1] I have to add that one since Mrs COCM is from that part of the world. However, having spent the last 30 years in Wiltshire, she no longer has a proper Janner accent.

[2] We once went to see Genesis @ Roundhay Park (supported, bizarrely, by Runrig (yay!) and Lisa Stansfield (boo!)). While I admit Ms Stansfield is a superb singer (even though I don't enjoy her music), her spoken voice is somewhat like fingernails on a blackboard.

Re: Brummie

The accent in Lichfield, or at least south Staffordshire, is not exactly Brummie

Likewise Leicester (which is not unadjacent to Brumagen[1]) has an accent that manages to veer between a soft Yorkshire and a middling-Brummie.

Most disconcerting.

[1] Where I was actually born. Neither of my parents had Brummie accents and we managed to move to Norf Lunnon before I really had much contact with the local accent. Apparently I have a pretty neutral accnt unless I get very enthusiastic about something - when traces of Barnet creep in..

Re: They've kinda missed abit...

The Yorkshire accent is pretty much North Yorkshire

Whilst I'm a big fan of the Yorkshire accent, there are obvious exceptions - Leeds and Wakefield spring to mind. The aural equivalent of pins through the eardrum.

Re: TOO REAL - YouTube Link broken Mr Dabbs

If only the Dabbmeisters[1] powers extended to breaking YooToobe..

(Although it has to be said, Mrs COCM seems to find it useful for new sock-knitting techniques. And similer outre craft-type explorations.). What a wild and exciting life we lead.

[1] I still cringe when listening to late 80's Pendragon (but not for the reasons you think) when Nick calls the then-drummer[2] "drum-miester-general". Still, we were all young and foolish once. Some of us are no longer young.

[2] Who, in a singularly unfortunate choice of name, was called Fudge Smith. At least according to Pikiwedia - so maybe a 50% chance of being correct. And no, my memory of those days isn't as clear as it might be..

Re: Most people do just speak in a mixture of idioms and clichés.

Dabbsy will have to try his theory live

And run it up the bargepole to see which of the ducks salutes?

Sounds like a forwardly-progressive set to expected optimum outcomes to me.

Re: Build A Wall

it's a damn sight nicer looking than the one Trump wants to build

And all the Chinese one took to build was hundreds and thousands of peasants to be worked to death. A model I'm sure that Trump would be happy to follow.

Re: Pompeo has lost it ...

Quite how they're their expected to break mathematics isn't known

This being Australia, probably by drinking vast amounts of beer. Which certainly changes ones perception of reality..

Re: Oh dear

pretty soon it adds up to real money

I'm minding of the old adage: "if you owe the bank £1000, that#s your problem. If you owe the bank £100 million, that's the banks' problem..".

Re: To paraphrase Sir David Kelly..

we are in the middle of a mass extinction that you very strongly can be blamed for

Actually (and to be fair) we also share a good deal of responsibility for it too - we were the ones to start burning vast amounts of fossil fuels on our path to industrialisation.

Yes, we've started stopping now, but t'was us that started it.

Re: Fuck off Pompeo

He recently said that Trump was sent by God to save Israel from Iran

Which is along the same lines as Bush juniors' (along with Tony Blur) reasons for invading Iraq.

(There is a line in the Bible about Israel living in "peace and safety" prior to the return of Christ. Shrub has gone on record as stating that his invasion of Iraq was, in part, driven by his desire to achieve that. Which says a great deal about the depth of his (and Tonys') theology..)

Re: Fuck off Pompeo

Many times UK acts like an US poodle

Sadly, I think the last time we had a prime minister prepared to stand up to the US it was Thatcher..

Re: Fuck off Pompeo

Pseudo?

'Having a form of godliness but denying its power[1]' would fit quite nicely.

(IE - giving the outward appearance of Christianity but not actually bothering to learn or apply the principles underlying it.)

Re: 51st state

British king could be President of the USA

That assumes that we (there is no we) would want to take any responsibilty for fixing the giant sewer that the US will be by then - we have enough problems trying to swim though our own effluent..

"The only good news was that it did not rain :)"

Can't have been Scotland!

I dunno - I've ridden bikes round Scotland a few times and it didn't rain appreciably much more than in northern England.

Ireland on the other hand - out of all the days I've ridden there I think we only had one or two rain-free days. And, no matter how good your waterproofs are, the rain will eventually get through. And putting on cold, wet bike leathers in the morning is not an enjoyable experience..

Re: If the hole was the road to hell ...

replacing them with tarmac ones instead

Speaking as a (former) motorbike rider, this is a Good Thing - riding over wet cobbles on a bike (motorised or otherwise) is a somewhat interesting experience

(in the 'buttocks clenched so hard that you leave a permanent crease in the seat' definition of interesting)

Re: Insurance get out of jail free card

God created Hell

Or, alternatively, there's no such thing as hell, an immortal soul or a literal devil - which makes your rant slightly superfluous..

(The 1st century church belived in none of those things - they are all an import into christianity from varous pagan religions).

Re: Warning - tory bashing.

English is not phonetically spelled

Of course not - why make it easy for Johnny foreigner? Of course, it could be argued that the somewhat chaotic nature of English is due to our habit of borging lots of bit from other languages rather than a deliberate attemp to confuse but I prefer to think of it all as a Machiavellian plot to ensure world linguistic domination..

(Fortunately, it also ended up with an incredibly flexible language where comprehension can be achieved even with large portions of grammar or vocabulary missing.)

(ObPedant - it's 'spelt', not spelled..)

Re: Warning - tory bashing.

That's the kind of off-topic we can all get behind

Speaking as a sometime-pedant, pedantry is *never* off-topic..

Norwich has them the size of buses

As does/did London (specifically New Barnet) - at some point in the early 80's traffic along the A1081 was somewhat disrupted by a large sinkhole opening up under a 107[1] bus..

It turns out that the warter main had been leaking for quite a while and had created a large void in the clay substrate under the road. And it got big enough that, when the weight of the bus finally broke the road, that about half the bus ended up in the void. Station Road ended up having water main works for about the next six months as the whole of the water main was replaced.

[1] AKA "one-oh-seldom".

Re: There are FOUR lights!

Chinese police interview techniques aren't far off of the Cardassians

Much like Japan: "if we've arrested you, you must be guilty" - they have something like a 98% conviction rate and I'm sure that their policing techniques are not *that* far in advance of ours..