Alcohol helps. I did understand the movie straight away as satire, and had a good laugh about it.
I love the throwing knives scene. And the fact that where the trainee gets asked to put his hand, there is a few knife landing marks already.
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I accepted a trade on BGG from someone who lives in Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch.
Llanfairpwllgwyngyll, for short.
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Oh, that brings me memories of my first days in the UK working as a vet in Wrexham, trying to send “mad cow” samples to the lab and giving them the details over the phone… I always dreaded the time they asked for the farm address…
“Ehmmm, uhmmmm… you know what, I will try to spell it…” (this in a very Spanish accent)
I got the Lima Yankee Whiskey Foxtrot system really quick. After two weeks I didn’t need my printout on the office wall any more…
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This is the video I track down whenever I become aware that someone I know has stumbled across LLanfairpwllgwyngyll
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Yesterday I was talking to my colleague about memes and quotes and I related a story from our RPG days from around 2000. And it so happened (I swear completely on accident) I reused a similar phrasing a moment later and … 22 years late I got the joke!
Of course, I may just have forgotten it. I am reasonably sure the line stuck because I knew it was funny, but I had not remembered the actual pun it played on. And for 20 years, I more or less used it as a non sequitur—turns out there was an actual joke hidden inside.
(Sorry not very translatable):
The Barbarian said to their opponent: „Implizit heisst ergib dich!“
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Was that totally made up for tourists like LlanFairpwllgwyn was?
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Dave Gorman talked about that place in an episode of Modern Life is Good-ish:
(It’s at the start of the episode.)
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Okay, UK fire alarm question. Do they all talk, and politely tell you that, possibly, the building just might be on fire, and suggestion you might want to start thinking about sauntering out, instead of ringing a bell or siren and flashing lights? When I was in London earlier this year, I experienced two fire alarms going off. One was a test, which the voice politely announced was going to happened, made the building could possilby be on fire spiel, and then apologized for the disturbance. The other was an actual alarm at my hotel, which also featured a voice apologetically saying there was a fire. If the flashing lights hadn’t have woke me up, the alarm was not going to get me evacuating.
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We do also have the ear-splittingly loud siren variety of fire alarm.
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I look after some buildings with a ‘Stay put’ policy.
In theory the concrete construction means that any fire in a flat should be contained to that one flat.
Although research shows most people evacuate anyway.
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(Moved comments from the Tekelilicon thread to here, hope nobody minds.)
Some time in the mid 1990s someone at a fire safety conference in the USA took notes on what happened when the alarm went off: almost nobody evacuated, even among these professionals, because they “knew” it was just another false alarm. After that they started trying to change how alarms sounded.
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And today I learned that the rolls I know from North Rhine-Westphalia as “Brötchen” are sold in Lidl UK as “petits pains”. I may get fatter.
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When I was in work the other day we had a fire drill.
The initial few moments where everyone sits there thinking, “Is this going to continue? Will I have to get up?” always amuse me.
At least it was early in the morning so it wasn’t unbearably hot. The recurrence of the alarm as we were heading back inside was not amusing but mostly ignored.
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It’s like when you are on the 13th floor working and everyone’s phones start chiming an earthquake warning, and the building starts shaking. People look around, chatter some, maybe look up the severity online, but no-one is about to get up and start walking down 13 flights of stairs.
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After Grenfell, I don’t imagine many people have much faith in buildings and fire!
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My favourite fire alarm was visiting a friend who was doing his PhD. He was also a warden of a student accommodation block. We had arrived late after driving all the way to Aberystwyth after work and had been sitting drinking whisky with our friend. When the alarm went off, I and the friend I traveled up with came out of the block in three-piece suits and overcoats, drinking whisky while all these students piled out into the cold winter night in various states of undress.
We were stared at with a mixture of jealousy and hatred!
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In my University halls I lived with an actual arsonist.
We had several small incidents, one time a sandwich maker got placed on top of a turned on gas hob.
One snowy night in December the alarm went off about 1am in the morning. Lots of us bolted out, I was just wearing boxers, a robe and slippers.
A student’s room was entirely ablaze (not the arsonist this time, a coat hanging on a door came in contact with a candle). A fire warden asked why we weren’t properly dressed. We then got told to go find alternative accommodation for the night.
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Did it become a Toasted sandwich maker?
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if anyone is interested in a good Brötchen recipe (no sourdough required, just overnight leavening in the fridge, I can write it up.
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