Profile for blyerkit:
Personally addressing the Pole/Brit imbalance nonissue.
Recent front page messages:
Best answers to questions:
[read all their answers]
- a member for 21 years, 2 months and 1 day
- has posted 5516 messages on the main board
- (of which 10 have appeared on the front page)
- has posted 0 messages on the talk board
- has posted 34 messages on the links board
- (including 4 links)
- has posted 33 stories and 24 replies on question of the week
- They liked 361 pictures, 38 links, 0 talk posts, and 12 qotw answers.
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Personally addressing the Pole/Brit imbalance nonissue.
| B | Brainy |
| L | Lovable |
| Y | Yucky |
| E | Emotional |
| R | Rounded |
| K | Kind |
| I | Inspirational |
| T | Terrific |
Recent front page messages:
It would save a lot of money on cars, if nothing else...
resized to 400px wide in a wild and ultimately futile burst of optimism. Oh my! Oh .. *wipes*
(Fri 19th Apr 2013, 13:54, More)
resized to 400px wide in a wild and ultimately futile burst of optimism. Oh my! Oh .. *wipes*
(Fri 19th Apr 2013, 13:54, More)
The King has fans everywhere
ta for the FP, sorry I had to take the big one down - it's on a server at the office :@ )
(Mon 18th Aug 2003, 11:46, More)
ta for the FP, sorry I had to take the big one down - it's on a server at the office :@ )
(Mon 18th Aug 2003, 11:46, More)
God's new apprentice
struggled with the instructions.
*edit*ahhhhhhh! sweet FP! Ta, MD!
(Sun 22nd Jun 2003, 23:18, More)
struggled with the instructions.
*edit*ahhhhhhh! sweet FP! Ta, MD!
(Sun 22nd Jun 2003, 23:18, More)
Last Post then off to bed...
"Faster, bitch, faster!"
Lordy! What a day! :@ )
(Tue 17th Jun 2003, 0:35, More)
"Faster, bitch, faster!"
Lordy! What a day! :@ )
(Tue 17th Jun 2003, 0:35, More)
Poets these days
have it easy.
FP! Oh joy! I haven't slept for 23 days, you know....
(Wed 28th May 2003, 23:25, More)
have it easy.
FP! Oh joy! I haven't slept for 23 days, you know....
(Wed 28th May 2003, 23:25, More)
How bout dis?
OMG! First FP! Thank you all, and thank you Magic Donkey.
*happy sigh*
(Wed 21st May 2003, 17:11, More)
OMG! First FP! Thank you all, and thank you Magic Donkey.
*happy sigh*
(Wed 21st May 2003, 17:11, More)
Best answers to questions:
» Sorry
While working for a while as the sales manager of
(probably) the last CDR manufacturer in the UK (yes, this was a looong time ago), we were having a bit of a tough time in the final days, after the Taiwanese dumped about 3 billion CDRs on the UK market for less than it cost us to make them. We therefore took on a few extra jobs to pay the bills, one of which was putting a tranche of the latest U2 CD in jewel cases, with all the inserts, promo stickers and cellophane, and boxing them up for distribution. The whole factory got involved with this, as we had agreed to do it to a VERY tight deadline.
Not being very good at mindless tedium, I decided to amuse myself by casually autographing one or two of the discs, before they went into the cases. Nothing fancy, just things like "Enjoy! Bono", and "All the best, Bono".
So, I would like to humbly apologise to any excited little U2 fans (particularly if they are big, scary, violent, baseball-bat-wielding little U2 fans) who thought they had got their hands on something unique, personal and special, especially if they showed them off to their U2-loving friends, and especially especially if their friends were slightly skeptical about the idea of Bono standing in the CD production line with a magic marker, in a completely unpublicised publicity stunt, and therefore extracted the piss by the gallon. Sorry.
Also, apologies for length (slightly less than 119mm).
(Sun 20th Jan 2013, 10:35, More)
While working for a while as the sales manager of
(probably) the last CDR manufacturer in the UK (yes, this was a looong time ago), we were having a bit of a tough time in the final days, after the Taiwanese dumped about 3 billion CDRs on the UK market for less than it cost us to make them. We therefore took on a few extra jobs to pay the bills, one of which was putting a tranche of the latest U2 CD in jewel cases, with all the inserts, promo stickers and cellophane, and boxing them up for distribution. The whole factory got involved with this, as we had agreed to do it to a VERY tight deadline.
Not being very good at mindless tedium, I decided to amuse myself by casually autographing one or two of the discs, before they went into the cases. Nothing fancy, just things like "Enjoy! Bono", and "All the best, Bono".
So, I would like to humbly apologise to any excited little U2 fans (particularly if they are big, scary, violent, baseball-bat-wielding little U2 fans) who thought they had got their hands on something unique, personal and special, especially if they showed them off to their U2-loving friends, and especially especially if their friends were slightly skeptical about the idea of Bono standing in the CD production line with a magic marker, in a completely unpublicised publicity stunt, and therefore extracted the piss by the gallon. Sorry.
Also, apologies for length (slightly less than 119mm).
(Sun 20th Jan 2013, 10:35, More)
» Guilty Laughs
Not the first Auschwitz story..
I live in Poland. My father visits occasionally, and on one of those occasions he said "I really want to visit Auschwitz, so we did.
Anyone who has ever done the Polish Museum Experience in a coach party will testify to the fact that they (the Poles - sorry for the massive generalisation, but this one is mostly true)are really good at that kind of thing, with audio guides, information, directions etc.
However - if you are visiting as an individual, or a bloke and his venerable pa, there is basically nothing for you. Nic, nichts, nada, niente, rien, nowt. It's the same at the museum of the Warsaw Uprising, the War Museum... all of them, as far as I can tell.
I have checked my impression with many Polish friends, and they say the same. Go with a big bunch, or you're fucked.
So - we did the best we could. Dad can walk up to 50 metres without resting, and he likes a clue or two about what he is looking at, where to go, what's next, that kind of thing. We saw what we could find, we listened to the birds not singing, we didn't see half the stuff we knew was there, and there was no-one around to ask.
After 90mins of stumbling over cobbles, my father turned to me and said (with a COMPLETELY straight face - bearing in mind he knew people who died there) "I can't help thinking that this place would be better organised if the Germans were still running it".
I hope that the people who saw us clinging to each other, helpless with suppressed laughter, thought that they were witnessing a very different display of emotion.
This is not a story I can easily relate in Poland.
Incidentally, two days after we were there, some fucker nicked 'the' sign. It wasn't us.
(Thu 22nd Jul 2010, 23:33, More)
Not the first Auschwitz story..
I live in Poland. My father visits occasionally, and on one of those occasions he said "I really want to visit Auschwitz, so we did.
Anyone who has ever done the Polish Museum Experience in a coach party will testify to the fact that they (the Poles - sorry for the massive generalisation, but this one is mostly true)are really good at that kind of thing, with audio guides, information, directions etc.
However - if you are visiting as an individual, or a bloke and his venerable pa, there is basically nothing for you. Nic, nichts, nada, niente, rien, nowt. It's the same at the museum of the Warsaw Uprising, the War Museum... all of them, as far as I can tell.
I have checked my impression with many Polish friends, and they say the same. Go with a big bunch, or you're fucked.
So - we did the best we could. Dad can walk up to 50 metres without resting, and he likes a clue or two about what he is looking at, where to go, what's next, that kind of thing. We saw what we could find, we listened to the birds not singing, we didn't see half the stuff we knew was there, and there was no-one around to ask.
After 90mins of stumbling over cobbles, my father turned to me and said (with a COMPLETELY straight face - bearing in mind he knew people who died there) "I can't help thinking that this place would be better organised if the Germans were still running it".
I hope that the people who saw us clinging to each other, helpless with suppressed laughter, thought that they were witnessing a very different display of emotion.
This is not a story I can easily relate in Poland.
Incidentally, two days after we were there, some fucker nicked 'the' sign. It wasn't us.
(Thu 22nd Jul 2010, 23:33, More)
» Expensive Mistakes
So long ago it was almost in another life
and strickerly speaking I was only an innocent bystander.. anyway I worked for a while as a paint inspector for an engineering agency. I had no quals or experience, but if you can get a nice uncle to write you a CV and put it in the right hands for you, you just keep your mouth shut, read the spec and get on with it.
I had to inspect the paint on a heater being made in Scunthorpe. "How expensive could that be?" I hear you ask, because I have a vivid imagination. This heater was for crude oil about to be processed by an onshore reception plant on the coast of Scotland, it was three big fuckoff steel boxes on legs, lined with refractory concrete, filled with tailor-made pipes, topped off by a monty great funnel chimney thing, with gas burners between the legs. When built, it was about 140ft high.
The paint job was done by a company famous (in that industry) for big engineering paint jobs, and the boss man wasn't going to take any notice of the fresh-faced young inspector from the client telling him that it had failed each and every step of the whole painting process from the first shotblast to the last coat. "Don't worry sonny, it'll pass on site!" he smirked.
When they finally got this monster ($$$$) painted ($$$$) and onto the huge lowloader ($$$) and inched it slowly ($$$) up to Peterhead, it failed the onsite inspection. I was then flown ($$) along with various representatives of all the companies invlolved ($$$) who all agreed (except for the smirker) that it failed cos it was a crap paint job.
This meant it had to be scaffolded on site ($$$) shotblast with non-renewable grit ($$$) and repainted ($$$$) under weatherproof sheeting ($$$). This meant it was 10 days late for commissioning which set the whole plant back ($$$$$$).
When the dust had settled and all was back to normal, an engineer switched on the burners at the bottom. He did this without opening the butterfly valve in the monty great funnel on top. The entire top third of the heater ( a steel funnel chimney and a 45-ton box lined with concrete and full of pipes) blew off and flew 60 yards away, narrowly missing several other expensive structures, so the whole place came grinding to a halt while another heater was ordered, fabricated, painted, shipped, erected, tested and commissioned ($$$$$$$$$$).
The odd thing is, that I was the only person involved who had no qualifications (I'm really a musician), and the only one who didn't actually fuck up at some stage.
So I shouldn't have posted this at all. Sorry :@ )
(Mon 29th Oct 2007, 12:23, More)
So long ago it was almost in another life
and strickerly speaking I was only an innocent bystander.. anyway I worked for a while as a paint inspector for an engineering agency. I had no quals or experience, but if you can get a nice uncle to write you a CV and put it in the right hands for you, you just keep your mouth shut, read the spec and get on with it.
I had to inspect the paint on a heater being made in Scunthorpe. "How expensive could that be?" I hear you ask, because I have a vivid imagination. This heater was for crude oil about to be processed by an onshore reception plant on the coast of Scotland, it was three big fuckoff steel boxes on legs, lined with refractory concrete, filled with tailor-made pipes, topped off by a monty great funnel chimney thing, with gas burners between the legs. When built, it was about 140ft high.
The paint job was done by a company famous (in that industry) for big engineering paint jobs, and the boss man wasn't going to take any notice of the fresh-faced young inspector from the client telling him that it had failed each and every step of the whole painting process from the first shotblast to the last coat. "Don't worry sonny, it'll pass on site!" he smirked.
When they finally got this monster ($$$$) painted ($$$$) and onto the huge lowloader ($$$) and inched it slowly ($$$) up to Peterhead, it failed the onsite inspection. I was then flown ($$) along with various representatives of all the companies invlolved ($$$) who all agreed (except for the smirker) that it failed cos it was a crap paint job.
This meant it had to be scaffolded on site ($$$) shotblast with non-renewable grit ($$$) and repainted ($$$$) under weatherproof sheeting ($$$). This meant it was 10 days late for commissioning which set the whole plant back ($$$$$$).
When the dust had settled and all was back to normal, an engineer switched on the burners at the bottom. He did this without opening the butterfly valve in the monty great funnel on top. The entire top third of the heater ( a steel funnel chimney and a 45-ton box lined with concrete and full of pipes) blew off and flew 60 yards away, narrowly missing several other expensive structures, so the whole place came grinding to a halt while another heater was ordered, fabricated, painted, shipped, erected, tested and commissioned ($$$$$$$$$$).
The odd thing is, that I was the only person involved who had no qualifications (I'm really a musician), and the only one who didn't actually fuck up at some stage.
So I shouldn't have posted this at all. Sorry :@ )
(Mon 29th Oct 2007, 12:23, More)
» Bullshit and Bullshitters
Maaaany years ago, I worked for a few months as a guide
at the Blue John Cavern in Daaarbyshire. The guided tours were meant to be based on the guide book, which was not the most carefully researched and verifiable document in the first place.
To cut a looong story shrt, over a period of time the information from each guide began to diverge from the official party line, until you could have gone down with three consecutive guides and believed that you were in a completely different cavern each time.
We became competitive. We set each other challenges. We had a contest to see who could get one of the punters to ask the ladies in the shop for a copy of 'The Epic of Gilgamesh' (because the Blue John Cavern is, of course, mentioned several times in this antidiluvean masterpiece :p ). We span theories to our hearts' content about Coriolis forces and helical cave markings, polar reversals and whatnot.
Two things of note came from this.
1) Despite occasionally provoking a smirk or conspiratorial grin, at no time was I ever challenged on any of my outrageous lies by any teachers in charge of school field trips.
2) We were all completely outclassed and frankly had to acknowledge one particular guide as 'The Master'. The lowest cavern in the series is a fairly impressive space, and in the artful lighting looks even bigger than it is. It's pretty big by the standards of most natural caves in Britain. Nevertheless it's still a cave, so we were awestruck to hear a middle-aged couple in the shop after a trip with 'The Master' asking in all seriousness for two tickets to the forthcoming 'UK Underground Hang-gliding Championships'.
(Sat 15th Jan 2011, 20:45, More)
Maaaany years ago, I worked for a few months as a guide
at the Blue John Cavern in Daaarbyshire. The guided tours were meant to be based on the guide book, which was not the most carefully researched and verifiable document in the first place.
To cut a looong story shrt, over a period of time the information from each guide began to diverge from the official party line, until you could have gone down with three consecutive guides and believed that you were in a completely different cavern each time.
We became competitive. We set each other challenges. We had a contest to see who could get one of the punters to ask the ladies in the shop for a copy of 'The Epic of Gilgamesh' (because the Blue John Cavern is, of course, mentioned several times in this antidiluvean masterpiece :p ). We span theories to our hearts' content about Coriolis forces and helical cave markings, polar reversals and whatnot.
Two things of note came from this.
1) Despite occasionally provoking a smirk or conspiratorial grin, at no time was I ever challenged on any of my outrageous lies by any teachers in charge of school field trips.
2) We were all completely outclassed and frankly had to acknowledge one particular guide as 'The Master'. The lowest cavern in the series is a fairly impressive space, and in the artful lighting looks even bigger than it is. It's pretty big by the standards of most natural caves in Britain. Nevertheless it's still a cave, so we were awestruck to hear a middle-aged couple in the shop after a trip with 'The Master' asking in all seriousness for two tickets to the forthcoming 'UK Underground Hang-gliding Championships'.
(Sat 15th Jan 2011, 20:45, More)
» Fancy Dress
I was going out with a lass in sheffield
who had a bit of a "rugby follower" sense of humour.
She invited me to a fancy dress party, and I was under the impression that it was at the flat of one of her similarly minded mates.
It turned out to be a family party with several generations present.
Needless to say I was the only party goer who turned up dressed as a used tampon.
(Sun 15th Jan 2006, 14:13, More)
I was going out with a lass in sheffield
who had a bit of a "rugby follower" sense of humour.
She invited me to a fancy dress party, and I was under the impression that it was at the flat of one of her similarly minded mates.
It turned out to be a family party with several generations present.
Needless to say I was the only party goer who turned up dressed as a used tampon.
(Sun 15th Jan 2006, 14:13, More)