MrsDoyle

Thanks! You’re right, it doesn’t make sense. But Norway played it smart with their oil wealth, didn’t they? Tiny country, and there they are lending money to the US.

Who actually owns this debt? Who is getting the interest payments? It seems like every country runs on some kind of deficit - where is all this money coming from?

The best thing about digital photography is that you can keep trying your shot with different settings for exposure, aperture etc. it’s a great way to learn what works best in what situation.

This is the movie Yesterday, where a failed musician gets knocked out and wakes up in a world where the Beatles never existed. A few other things too, but mainly the Beatles. Spoiler: he becomes a mega star.

They’ll be broken down, metal smelted, gems recut if necessary. They’re gone, who cares. It’s not like they were the actual crown jewels, just a few baubles.

It’s my understanding that everyone has sleep paralysis - the brain “switches off” the body (apart from essentials: breathing, heart beat etc) so you don’t come to grief acting out your dreams. What we call sleep paralysis is when you wake, but your body hasn’t been switched back on.

I used to have horrible sleep paralysis nightmares quite often. But then I read about what it really is, and I stopped having them. It was like my brain realised it was out of sync and corrected itself.

I agree - I make a lot of soup, and can use the stick blender directly in the saucepan. So much easier to clean than a jug blender.

Not weird at all. I reach into my left pocket for my phone with my left hand and am ready to operate it with my right hand. Having it in my right pocket would be awkward.

72. I haven’t noticed a great slowdown in healing/recovery - I had a knee replacement six years ago and recovered well from that. Never had COVID, rarely get colds. I feel like my health is generally better now than in my youth, when I drank, smoked and took drugs. When the doc suggests I lose weight I want to show him pix of my speed-addled self in the 70s. I was super slim! But so bloody unwell.

I wish. My WiFi is ZeroGravitas, a ship name from the Culture novels; the only other named WiFi in my vicinity is Routered in Faith. :-(

I can’t recall anything in particular - I was working, I had a dog… But I had a look at a “what’s in my bag” photo I took that year, and it included a cheque book, a diary, a Nokia phone, a Palm Pilot, an MP3 player, a compact digital camera and a portable radio. All of which have been superseded by one single device. Amazing.

I’m another monthly donor. I use Wikipedia nearly every day and appreciate the effort that goes into maintaining it.

Your “Send to Kindle” email address is in your profile details, under devices and apps. In the app (Android) it’s under settings.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/sendtokindle

Since at some point recently. You can still email files (epub not mobi now) to your kindle, but usb transfer doesn’t work any more.

I remember meeting a guy from East Berlin soon after the Wall fell, he was super excited at getting to travel outside the GDR (we were in Kenya).

One I came across in a novel I’m reading just now: “I wanted to tell her how happy she must be as a married woman now that she no longer have to bother with looking attractive”.

Is Antifa an actual organisation? I always thought of it as a vague lumping together of leftish people by … well, by people like Trump.

I’m poised… might try a dual boot first.

They can’t convince me to switch to Win 11 because apparently my computer isn’t good enough.

I’m not American, so this is an outside perspective I guess. I had never heard of Charlie Kirk before he was shot, and it’s been interesting watching it all play out. Ring wing leap to assuming it was a leftist attack, with a huge amount of violent rhetoric; suspect arrested & turns out to be from conservative background; trickle of suggestions he might be further to the right of Kirk.

I’ve learned a new word: Groyper.

Meanwhile in the UK we’ve got a kind of fascism-lite going on, with a “socialist” party in charge that’s leaning to the right of Thatcher in order to attract the votes of bigots. There’s a massive right-wing rally going on in London right now, with a couple of anti-fascist, anti-racist counter protests as well. https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2025/sep/13/aerial-footage-shows-scale-of-unite-the-kingdom-rally-video