allanlear.bsky.social
Twit and dilettante
2,288 posts
506 followers
492 following
Getting Started
Active Commenter
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"Because the current rail network doesn't provide enough opportunities for fights"
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But by a bioessentialist view Carrot wouldn't be a dwarf, and he is. So you kind of do have to misread the books, and quite a LOT of the books, including one where the baddies are literally bioessentialists trying to police what is and isn't "dwarf", to come to that conclusion.
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"It was the warfare of clerks, and it harried the enemy through many columns amd files" - I love that line
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IIRC she even catches Magrat's eye when she does it. Fire burns, fact.
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A medial doctor wouldn't specialise in the ends
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She doesn't know he looks like that until she lets him out
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"The maverick cops with their average flasks and boring unorthodox ways"
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Thank you so much for joining us! :)
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As was Capaldi, I think
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To be fair it was very depressed in the late 80s, but the regeneration surrounding Capital of Culture really revitalised the town centre and it's just wonderful now
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Good work!
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See, I would pronounce "underway" with diminishing emphasis, like "undertow"
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Isn't Cavil a big wargames nerd though? So that part of the rumour isn't *that* silly
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I appreciate intellectually that the descriptivists are right and language evolves with usage
BUT
emotionally I want to hit people whose subjects and objects don't agree with a stick
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As Richard Herring once said, "Oh, fuck off, Julian"
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He also got very angry about Downton Abbey because it used terms like "a learning curve". "Is Fellowes deaf!?"
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Clive James used to get very exercised about "visibility", as in "the Challenger tank has 360-degree visibility" which, as he pointed out, just means you can see it from any angle
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I think Bill Bryson mentions "comprising/composed of" in his Troublesome Words, which must be a quarter of a century old at least
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In the UK it may be ALCS who can help?
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Comprising; composed of
(See also: myriad, not A myriad)
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One from the "I didn't listen to the lyrics, just read the title" school of aural selection
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There was a day in the early 20th century when the BBC announced "there was no news today"
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Briefly: Unbound, a publishing company whose USP was crowdsourcing the money to publish each book, has gone bust (due to fraud) owing six months' royalties to all its authors. Boundless, the company replacing it, had initially promised to honour royalty payments but has today declared they won't
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You're welcome!
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*suburbanites, sorry
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A French term literally meaning "bottom of the bag", in English a cul-de-sac refers to a road that is only open at one end. Beloved of subarbanites because of the lower traffic rate.
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I think her medical bills were about half a mil - this was coming up to thirty years ago - but the jury in the first instance saw the photos and were like "McDonald's owes this woman all the money she can carry"
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She did win it but McDonalds appealed, IIRC, and the amount of damages she was awarded was reduced from about $5m to about $750k. But she hadn't been seeking punitive damages in the first place, just to have her medical bills covered
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As you say, she suffered nasty injuries. And it wasn't just that her coffee was hot, it was a good 20 degrees hotter than it had any need to be.
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Yeah and she needed plastic surgery to her labia. Horrible story
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Thank you for this! I love it when "ridiculous example used for ridicule" turns out to be "valid
example it's just that you don't know anything"
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It's heartening that Bill and Ted both seem like they grew up to be sweethearts
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Yes, I would have guessed Darvill on the shorter side, but you're right, that's purely due to the character
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Not JFK, LHO, but you prpbably guessed I meant him
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...naming no Mission Impossibles...
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Thought your autobiography was great, BTW. Funny in parts, touching in parts, generally the right parts for each. And big respect to Olly for the tabloid ad sabotage!
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Wait, they think that 30% of the US population lives in NYC? That's, like, 100m people. That's not New York, it's Megacity One
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Peter Capaldi is six feet but both times I've met him it's taken me by surprise. I think some part of my brain thinks "yeah he looks tall on the telly but six inches of that is charisma"
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"In today's column I, a man made entirely of the bits of bacon they throw away when they pack medallions, will explain how Malcolm X invented racism"
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All I got was the Jarvis Cocker impression
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Surely must have been.
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I think a lot of it's very funny, but it depends on how well Morris has picked his targets. I don't like the song at all. But even three years later the media atmosphere was stupider than anything Brass Eye did
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That's not Hay!
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You could even say "I refuse to watch it" without sounding entirely stupid.