A random thread for small things that don't really warrant a thread of their own

[Cudzoziemiec]

you don't need a degree to have dreads. Young lad I shortly worked with in the LBS. Walked from Yorkshire to Rome in 2019. When he came back he had a dreads. So the only thing that holds you back is hair and for me it's the lack of said thing

You are Samson. This means Peli must be Delilah. Now we are waiting for Tom Jones.

[Beardy]

It’s not unusual.

[perpetual dan]

I had dreads back when the Levellers were popular. Keeping them even half way tidy was a challenge and eventually I gave it up.
These days I’m working on a Status Quo’s roadie style pony tail. But no desire for dreads again.

[mrcharly-YHT]

My erstwhile chum* Samfast, who coined the phrase “Filthy Lying Journalist Scum” to describe his own job, once opined that white people with dreadlocks should be shot in the face with very slow bullets.

* because he emigrated to Captain Cook's Mistake, not because he was FLJS

I sort of agree with Samfast, on the grounds that most WhitePeopleWithDreads (WPWD) are hippy dropouts. Some of them very nice, but still.*

The cultural appropriation thing is a bit daft though. There are plenty of statues in europe showing dreads, and sagas describing 'hair like snakes'.

Dreads in europe just dropped out of fashion for a while.


(*)I know a few WPWD, most of whom shaved them off after a while. Uncomfortable while sleeping, neck strain and horrendous tales of dealing with head lice (if you have small children, sooner or later they will bring lice home from school).

[hellymedic]

I didn't get headlice until I was 19, despite being the Test Card Girl's double for most of the late 60s & early 70s.

My headlice were POSH. I caught them in Hampstead garden Suburb.

Dreads are kind of fun for a bored, fidgety long-haired lass...

[ian]

Top tip drivers, throwing away your parking ticket doesn't make it actually go away.

[Mrs Pingu]

Top tip drivers, throwing away your parking ticket doesn't make it actually go away.

Shop them for littering!

[grams]

Top tip drivers, throwing away your parking ticket doesn't make it actually go away.

Depends if you have fake plates.

[ian]

Nah, I looked them up, it's the right car (and one presumes they check this, but who knows). Ironically, not the main miscreant who kicked this off though.

As far as I can tell, they're having a passive aggressive parking war around the corner – they have dedicated parking (it's a private street) but pretty much one or two spaces per house and there's zero additional parking. It seems that someone has another car. So in an attempt to not park entirely on the double-yellows, they're encroaching on someone else's parking space, so they keep moving cars around trying to block one another. It really makes the junction dangerous for pedestrians (who have to walk out around the cars, as the miscreant is basically on the pavement) and cars (who have visibility) and I really doubt they'd get an emergency vehicle around the corner, so if there was a fire, I guess it would get interesting.

ETA: though apparently it's parked there again. I guess some drivers don't learn. Oh well.

[rafletcher]

I found a suitable replacement built-in microwave on Amazon last evening, so placed the order.  Only to find, when the receipt arrived, it was shipping from Germany, via FedEx.  What could possibly go wrong  .  I wonder if I'll get stung for import duties and VAT, although it does say VAT paid at checkout. 

[robgul]

I found a suitable replacement built-in microwave on Amazon last evening, so placed the order.  Only to find, when the receipt arrived, it was shipping from Germany, via FedEx.  What could possibly go wrong  .  I wonder if I'll get stung for import duties and VAT, although it does say VAT paid at checkout.

I've had a few items from Germany through Amazon in the last few months and the price paid was the price - seems that they're on the case with including any duty/taxes etc. at payment point.

[andrewc]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-59323895.amp  "A British F-35 fighter jet has crashed into the sea during a routine operation in the Mediterranean"


"The pilot ejected and has safely returned to the Royal Navy aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth"


His insurance premium will be going up a bit.....

https://twitter.com/UKDefJournal/status/1463421274970066947?s=20


https://ukdefencejournal.org.uk/carrier-f-35-crash-potentially-caused-by-rain-cover-being-left-on/


Does the navy still do flogging at the mast ?

[Cudzoziemiec]

Rain cover? I'm having visions of a fluorescent yellow helmet cover... Surely the plane is water tight? I look forward to TimC's explanation of what this actually is.

[Jurek]

Covers on the jet intakes, I would guess.

[Beardy]

For any kind of cover to be left on ther has to be a lot of mistakes. The final responsibility is with the pilot however because he will need to have done a walk round checking his aircraft before he gets into the cockpit.

[Giraffe]

Might have been a cover over the cock(-up)pit and he didn't notice.

[TimC]

All aircraft have a load of removable covers over any orifice that you really don’t want birds/insects/small children going down when you’re not looking. Military jests spend quite a lot of time not doing anything, so fitting these covers is a ground-crew responsibility when they put the aircraft to bed. The major covers should be removed before the aircraft is released to the pilot, and - as Beardy says - the pilot does a final walk-round before entering the cockpit; on that walk-round it’s normal for a fighter pilot to remove the pitot/static vent covers as they are held in the aircraft.

If the linked article is correct, the aircraft started and took off with one or more intake cover(s) (known as blanks) still in place. At high power, these will be sucked into the (single) engine. That guarantees the aircraft will be lost.

While it is most certainly the pilot’s responsibility to check these blanks under most circumstances, there are rapid-response scenarios where that responsibility is devolved to others. And every aircraft should be scrutinised by the deck dispatch team before it’s allowed to depart. So there will be several layers of failure here, but it sounds like a fuck-up at some level.

[Cudzoziemiec]

All aircraft have a load of removable covers over any orifice that you really don’t want birds/insects/small children going down when you’re not looking. Military jests spend quite a lot of time not doing anything, so fitting these covers is a ground-crew responsibility when they put the aircraft to bed. The major covers should be removed before the aircraft is released to the pilot, and - as Beardy says - the pilot does a final walk-round before entering the cockpit; on that walk-round it’s normal for a fighter pilot to remove the pitot/static vent covers as they are held in the aircraft.

If the linked article is correct, the aircraft started and took off with one or more intake cover(s) (known as blanks) still in place. At high power, these will be sucked into the (single) engine. That guarantees the aircraft will be lost.

While it is most certainly the pilot’s responsibility to check these blanks under most circumstances, there are rapid-response scenarios where that responsibility is devolved to others. And every aircraft should be scrutinised by the deck dispatch team before it’s allowed to depart. So there will be several layers of failure here, but it sounds like a fuck-up at some level.

You're kidding us!

[TimC]

Ho ho!

[Kim]

I was wondering how you even take off with an intake cover in place, but a single-engine aircraft with more than one intake makes sense...

[TheLurker]

...So there will be several layers of failure here, but it sounds like a fuck-up at some level.

New piece of kit, ergo new and unthought of ways for it to fail or be made to fail.  At least the most valuable bit was saved.   When I heard it was (probably) an intake cover left in place I wondered if it was a sight line problem.  I.e. the intake design is such that a look from anywhere but *exactly the right viewing angle* wouldn't see the cover.

[Jurek]

It'll be interesting to see how they go about recovering the wreckage of the aircraft. I've no idea what the topography of the ocean floor in the Med is like. I also note that they've called for the assistance of the US as, apparently, the US have some recovery kit based in Spain - As opposed to calling Smit International in Rotterdam who deal in this kind of thing all the time - I guess there's an element of not wanting a commercial outfit being too informed about their most clandestine of aircraft.

[Beardy]

The Med is, relatively speaking, a shallow sea, so the recover operation shouldn’t be too difficult.

[TimC]

...So there will be several layers of failure here, but it sounds like a fuck-up at some level.

New piece of kit, ergo new and unthought of ways for it to fail or be made to fail.  At least the most valuable bit was saved.   When I heard it was (probably) an intake cover left in place I wondered if it was a sight line problem.  I.e. the intake design is such that a look from anywhere but *exactly the right viewing angle* wouldn't see the cover.

The F-35 has been flying for 14 years, and in service since 2015. Over 700 are now in service. It's not new, or unfamiliar, and the procedure of using blanks and covers has been established since the early days of flying jets. Whatever processes are in place, people will always find a way to ignore, forget, or neglect them.

[hatler]

The Med is, relatively speaking, a shallow sea, so the recover operation shouldn’t be too difficult.

It gets as deep as 5000m in places. I would call that deep.