Profile for DukeEuphoria:
I am joyous, and most excellent,
I writes in my Journal
and I Builds Things
I likes fishes, cheeses, kittins, and spelling that is correct.
I don't like Sweetcorn or beetroot.
People who wish to blow me kisses may do so with a smile.
People who wish to hit me with frying pans may join the queue and wait their turn.
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- a member for 19 years, 7 months and 21 days
- has posted 26 messages on the main board
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- has posted 69 stories and 611 replies on question of the week
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I am joyous, and most excellent,
I writes in my Journal
and I Builds Things
I likes fishes, cheeses, kittins, and spelling that is correct.
I don't like Sweetcorn or beetroot.
People who wish to blow me kisses may do so with a smile.
People who wish to hit me with frying pans may join the queue and wait their turn.
Recent front page messages:
none
Best answers to questions:
» Stupid Tourists
We know where you live...
Some years ago I was working as Town Crier for the city of St.Albans. Summer job announcing all kinds of utter crap to make sure that people knew what the hell was happening on Market Days.*
I'd just finished announcing the day's events at the top end of the town when I was approached by two of the fattest people I have ever seen. One of them, sturggling with a tiny phrasebook in his pudgy paws spoke loudly and slowly to me in a language which alas I didn't understand at all.**
The ensuing conversations remains with me to this day.
"I'm sorry, I don't understand you. Do you speak any English ?"
"Of course we speak English! We're from Idaho! Why don't you speak Italian ?"
"Ahm, because we're in England, not Italy ?"
"You're wrong, this is Rome. Rome is in Italy"
"We're not in Rome, really we're not."
"Yes we are. We're touring Europe, and we're here to see the Roman ruins."
"Well, the Roman ruins are down the hill there, but I assure you you're not in Italy, you're in England."
"No, we're in Rome. England was yesterday"
At which point they waddled off towards the old Roman city of Verulamium, muttering to each other about the fool in the red coat who didn't even know which country Rome was in.
*Yes I am serious, sad isn't it.
**Alas all the laguages I speak fluently have the phrase "syntax error" as a major feature
(Tue 12th Jul 2005, 13:40, More)
We know where you live...
Some years ago I was working as Town Crier for the city of St.Albans. Summer job announcing all kinds of utter crap to make sure that people knew what the hell was happening on Market Days.*
I'd just finished announcing the day's events at the top end of the town when I was approached by two of the fattest people I have ever seen. One of them, sturggling with a tiny phrasebook in his pudgy paws spoke loudly and slowly to me in a language which alas I didn't understand at all.**
The ensuing conversations remains with me to this day.
"I'm sorry, I don't understand you. Do you speak any English ?"
"Of course we speak English! We're from Idaho! Why don't you speak Italian ?"
"Ahm, because we're in England, not Italy ?"
"You're wrong, this is Rome. Rome is in Italy"
"We're not in Rome, really we're not."
"Yes we are. We're touring Europe, and we're here to see the Roman ruins."
"Well, the Roman ruins are down the hill there, but I assure you you're not in Italy, you're in England."
"No, we're in Rome. England was yesterday"
At which point they waddled off towards the old Roman city of Verulamium, muttering to each other about the fool in the red coat who didn't even know which country Rome was in.
*Yes I am serious, sad isn't it.
**Alas all the laguages I speak fluently have the phrase "syntax error" as a major feature
(Tue 12th Jul 2005, 13:40, More)
» LOL Bigots
Intolerance. It's funny. For certain values of funny.
So there I was on Teh Internets, more specifically IRC.
Channel isn't important.
I log in and cheerfully slap out a greeting:
"Hello there ladies and gentlemen! Are you ready to rock?"
Cliched perhaps but suitable for the circumstances. Or so I thought until amongst the replies came the line
"How fucking DARE you! That is SO rude!"
I blinked, I thought for a moment, I checked which channel I was in just in case I'd accidentally logged into "Recovering Guitar Hero Addicts anonymous" or similar.
The ensuing conversation boggles me to this day.
"How dare I what ? Say hello ?"
"You just mis-gendered me in front of the whole channel you prick!"
"erm ? Oookay, You don't count as either "Lady" or "Gentleman" ?"
"No. I fucking don't and I'm fed up of having my identity trampled by people like you and your gender intolerance!"
"Right. So, what word should we be using if 'Lady' and 'Gentleman' don't cover it ?"
"There isn't a word. I don't fit into any of your straightjacket stereotypes. I'm free. Get used to it!"
"(sigh) Ok then. Hello there Ladies and Gentlemen. Are you ready to rock ?"
"You intolerant prick! You did it again!"
"I wasn't talking to you..."
(Fri 22nd Feb 2013, 14:30, More)
Intolerance. It's funny. For certain values of funny.
So there I was on Teh Internets, more specifically IRC.
Channel isn't important.
I log in and cheerfully slap out a greeting:
"Hello there ladies and gentlemen! Are you ready to rock?"
Cliched perhaps but suitable for the circumstances. Or so I thought until amongst the replies came the line
"How fucking DARE you! That is SO rude!"
I blinked, I thought for a moment, I checked which channel I was in just in case I'd accidentally logged into "Recovering Guitar Hero Addicts anonymous" or similar.
The ensuing conversation boggles me to this day.
"How dare I what ? Say hello ?"
"You just mis-gendered me in front of the whole channel you prick!"
"erm ? Oookay, You don't count as either "Lady" or "Gentleman" ?"
"No. I fucking don't and I'm fed up of having my identity trampled by people like you and your gender intolerance!"
"Right. So, what word should we be using if 'Lady' and 'Gentleman' don't cover it ?"
"There isn't a word. I don't fit into any of your straightjacket stereotypes. I'm free. Get used to it!"
"(sigh) Ok then. Hello there Ladies and Gentlemen. Are you ready to rock ?"
"You intolerant prick! You did it again!"
"I wasn't talking to you..."
(Fri 22nd Feb 2013, 14:30, More)
» Bizarre habits
Have spanner, will travel.
I'm an engineer, my dad was an engineer, his dad was an enginner and so on. Run it back all the way, we're engineers of various types. From the chap many generations back whose hobby ws drawing beautifully detailed pictures of various steam engine gear linkages down to me and my delight in building intricate little solar powered devices from cast off electronics.
Unfortunately all this selective breeding has left us with one very solid quirk. Every male on one side of the family becomes uncomfortable in the presence of broken or badly adjusted mechanisms. It seems to be the same kind of feeling that some people describe when seeing a picture hung askew or a disordered bookshelf and occasionally it gets strong enough to require us to do something about it.
From the Washing Machine Incident*, to the day I had to spend sitting on my hands when visiting a girlfrind's parents. On the wall they had an old wooden clock, a stopped clock, a clock which GF's father had inherited from his father and was just sat there not working, a clock which I could almost feel ticking like some kind of mechanical phantom limb pain. Eventually GF's mother took pity on my twitching and handed me the clock with a look to her husband that clearly said "well he can't make it any worse, can he..."
For the next hour I was happy as a pig in cheltenham. Disassembling, cleaning, straightening, rebuilding and balancing to my little ticky heart's content. Finally finished, hung the clock on the wall and was rewarded with a good solid regular tick that even now I remember with a certain degree of pride. Even better was the slightly odd look that GF's father gave me when the clock ran, and stayed running. He'd been told that it was a hopless ireparable case and would never work again.
Some children are born with a silver spoon in their mouths, mine I expect will have a screwdriver in one hand and a spanner in the other.
*In which my dad and I were visiting my uncle. A brief mention by my aunt that the washing machine was making a funny noise and the three of us had the thing disassembled on the kitchen floor within 15 minutes.
(Tue 6th Jul 2010, 16:18, More)
Have spanner, will travel.
I'm an engineer, my dad was an engineer, his dad was an enginner and so on. Run it back all the way, we're engineers of various types. From the chap many generations back whose hobby ws drawing beautifully detailed pictures of various steam engine gear linkages down to me and my delight in building intricate little solar powered devices from cast off electronics.
Unfortunately all this selective breeding has left us with one very solid quirk. Every male on one side of the family becomes uncomfortable in the presence of broken or badly adjusted mechanisms. It seems to be the same kind of feeling that some people describe when seeing a picture hung askew or a disordered bookshelf and occasionally it gets strong enough to require us to do something about it.
From the Washing Machine Incident*, to the day I had to spend sitting on my hands when visiting a girlfrind's parents. On the wall they had an old wooden clock, a stopped clock, a clock which GF's father had inherited from his father and was just sat there not working, a clock which I could almost feel ticking like some kind of mechanical phantom limb pain. Eventually GF's mother took pity on my twitching and handed me the clock with a look to her husband that clearly said "well he can't make it any worse, can he..."
For the next hour I was happy as a pig in cheltenham. Disassembling, cleaning, straightening, rebuilding and balancing to my little ticky heart's content. Finally finished, hung the clock on the wall and was rewarded with a good solid regular tick that even now I remember with a certain degree of pride. Even better was the slightly odd look that GF's father gave me when the clock ran, and stayed running. He'd been told that it was a hopless ireparable case and would never work again.
Some children are born with a silver spoon in their mouths, mine I expect will have a screwdriver in one hand and a spanner in the other.
*In which my dad and I were visiting my uncle. A brief mention by my aunt that the washing machine was making a funny noise and the three of us had the thing disassembled on the kitchen floor within 15 minutes.
(Tue 6th Jul 2010, 16:18, More)
» B3TA Most Haunted
Gost in the machines...
Time and time ago, back in the days when the pentium was new and exiting, when the SNES was very nearly the bees knees of all things entertaining, and the PS1 was the very cutting edge of excellent...
Came home one late one evening. Bleary eyed and with my head still full of curly brackets, ampersands and double equals signs. To find Best Beloved cowering in the corner of the sofa, curled around a pillow and with evidence of extensive crying all around. Poor girl was utterly terrified.
Over the next 15 minutes I tried to pry an explanation out of her in between bouts of sobbing. Whatever this was it had scared her very badly, badly enough that she didn't want to talk about it.
So I wrapped my arms around her and we just sat there quietly.
About 20 minutes later she screamed, jumped up and started crying again. Managing to tell me this time that she'd heard "The noise" that she was certain I'd managed to banish from the house just by being there.
Explanation pours out of her like water from a burst dam. All afternoon, ever since she got home, there has been this strange high pitched screaming half heard in the background, too quiet to pin down and too intermittent for her to be certain of its objective reality.
Given that her mother is a full blown Loop-De-Doo schizophrenic and has the paperwork to prove it, the poor lass was pretty certain that it was either a) ghosts (unlikely) or b) the onset of The Voices trying to talk to her. She wasn't keen on either.
I had, of course, heard nothing...
Quietened down again and listened intently, about 15 mins later there it was. A definite, if faint, ethereal screaming noise. Lasted a long and faintly sphincter tightening 30 seconds and then faded away.
I knew that noise of old, I recognised my foe and knew how to deal with it in seconds. Told best beloved to leave the room as she wouldn't want to see what I was about to do, and took up the universal remote as the closest blunt instrument to hand...
Closing the door so that the dear girl would not be disturbed by my actions I did what I knew had to be done to banish the specter.
Switched off the amplifier that was feeding from the Playstation to the speakers. Seems that setting the volume to zero when you pause Silent Hill doesn't _quite_ result in utter silence.
Nasty bug, they should fix that...
(Wed 19th Sep 2012, 18:50, More)
Gost in the machines...
Time and time ago, back in the days when the pentium was new and exiting, when the SNES was very nearly the bees knees of all things entertaining, and the PS1 was the very cutting edge of excellent...
Came home one late one evening. Bleary eyed and with my head still full of curly brackets, ampersands and double equals signs. To find Best Beloved cowering in the corner of the sofa, curled around a pillow and with evidence of extensive crying all around. Poor girl was utterly terrified.
Over the next 15 minutes I tried to pry an explanation out of her in between bouts of sobbing. Whatever this was it had scared her very badly, badly enough that she didn't want to talk about it.
So I wrapped my arms around her and we just sat there quietly.
About 20 minutes later she screamed, jumped up and started crying again. Managing to tell me this time that she'd heard "The noise" that she was certain I'd managed to banish from the house just by being there.
Explanation pours out of her like water from a burst dam. All afternoon, ever since she got home, there has been this strange high pitched screaming half heard in the background, too quiet to pin down and too intermittent for her to be certain of its objective reality.
Given that her mother is a full blown Loop-De-Doo schizophrenic and has the paperwork to prove it, the poor lass was pretty certain that it was either a) ghosts (unlikely) or b) the onset of The Voices trying to talk to her. She wasn't keen on either.
I had, of course, heard nothing...
Quietened down again and listened intently, about 15 mins later there it was. A definite, if faint, ethereal screaming noise. Lasted a long and faintly sphincter tightening 30 seconds and then faded away.
I knew that noise of old, I recognised my foe and knew how to deal with it in seconds. Told best beloved to leave the room as she wouldn't want to see what I was about to do, and took up the universal remote as the closest blunt instrument to hand...
Closing the door so that the dear girl would not be disturbed by my actions I did what I knew had to be done to banish the specter.
Switched off the amplifier that was feeding from the Playstation to the speakers. Seems that setting the volume to zero when you pause Silent Hill doesn't _quite_ result in utter silence.
Nasty bug, they should fix that...
(Wed 19th Sep 2012, 18:50, More)
» Amazing displays of ignorance
And these people are allowed to live...
Best Beloved is a maths teacher, doing her level best to educate the 16 to 19 years-olds of this once fine country.
One day I arrived home to find her in a somewhat despondent mood. She'd been trying to drum the concept of fractions into the heads of a particularly recalcitrant bunch who were arguing vociferously that they had no need of such rubbish in a modern world.
Sighing she begun to explain using a diagram of a cake, cutting into halves, quarters, eighths etc...
Suddenly their little ears prick up, and the class is all exited attention.
"So, miss, right. A half, is like, a fraction yeah ?"
"Yes, it is. Cutting the cake into two equal pieces..."
"Okay, so like a quarter is a fraction, that's like half of a half ?"
"That's right! and an eigth is a half of a quarter." she replies, somewhat surprised by this genius level of creativity.
"So, right, if I'm buyin' an eighth off Tooma for a tenner, an' de likkle fucker says he'll sell me a sixteenth for £15. I is right to be cuttin' his face for rippin'me. Yeah ?"
(Tue 23rd Mar 2010, 12:37, More)
And these people are allowed to live...
Best Beloved is a maths teacher, doing her level best to educate the 16 to 19 years-olds of this once fine country.
One day I arrived home to find her in a somewhat despondent mood. She'd been trying to drum the concept of fractions into the heads of a particularly recalcitrant bunch who were arguing vociferously that they had no need of such rubbish in a modern world.
Sighing she begun to explain using a diagram of a cake, cutting into halves, quarters, eighths etc...
Suddenly their little ears prick up, and the class is all exited attention.
"So, miss, right. A half, is like, a fraction yeah ?"
"Yes, it is. Cutting the cake into two equal pieces..."
"Okay, so like a quarter is a fraction, that's like half of a half ?"
"That's right! and an eigth is a half of a quarter." she replies, somewhat surprised by this genius level of creativity.
"So, right, if I'm buyin' an eighth off Tooma for a tenner, an' de likkle fucker says he'll sell me a sixteenth for £15. I is right to be cuttin' his face for rippin'me. Yeah ?"
(Tue 23rd Mar 2010, 12:37, More)