What The Hell?

[perrykneeham]

I had an Idiotic Eureka Moment today. I was walking along the beach with Mrs. B and we noticed a flashing light out to sea. The conversation turned to noise code and the SOS signal and Mrs. B said that she thought that SOS was just something to do with a song by The Police.

That song would be Message in a Bottle and she was quite right but it has never, ever, occurred to me that the lyric "a doo-doo-doo and a dah-dah-dah" was a reference to the international mayday signal.

D'oh!

[mids]

Hang on, aren't you mixing up Message in a Bottle and Doo Doo Doo Dah? The bass line in Message might be Morse Code. Dum dum dum dum da da da dum dum dum (I think it goes).

[perrykneeham]

They're the same track, aren't they?

[flatandy]

Ha! I thought Baloo had a brilliant moment and then Mids puts me right. Of course they're two different songs.

[perrykneeham]

Mids is quite right. I had attributed more wit to Sting than I should have.

[flatandy]

It was possible that 1980 Sting might have had some wit, and certainly the other two were no idiots - even if they were, by all accounts, truculent arses.

[wetkingcanute]

The theme tune to the TV series Morse - beats out the Morse Code for the word morse.

Endeavor is Morse's first name.

[marechal]

Gwyneth Paltrow’s high-profile skiing lawsuit is now a musical: Gwyneth Goes Skiing.

The production will debut in London on December 13 with a 10-day run at London’s Pleasance Theatre and tells the story of Gwyneth Paltrow’s skiing lawsuit, which saw the star sued by an optometrist following a collision on a Utah ski slope in 2016.

“She’s the Goop-founding, Door-Sliding, Shakespeare-In-Loving, consciously-uncoupling Hollywood superstar,” reads the musical’s logline. “He’s a retired Optometrist from Utah. In 2016, they went skiing. On the slopes of Deer Valley, their worlds collided, and so did they – literally. Ouch. Seven years later in 2023, they went to court. Double ouch. This is their story. Kind of. Not really. But also, it’s at Christmas.”

www.ign.com/articles/gwyneth-paltrow-ski-lawsuit-has-been-made-into-a-musical

Debuts in London so some of you are in luck.

"Consciously uncoupled" is how Paltrow described her breakup with Chris Martin.
I thought consciously uncoupling is what you do when the kids walk in on you and the Mrs. doing the deed.

[perrykneeham]

"Ultra-marathon runner Joasia Zakrzewski has been banned for 12 months by UK Athletics for using a car in a race.

Zakrzewski accepted a medal and trophy for finishing third in the 2023 GB Ultras Manchester to Liverpool 50-mile race on 7 April.

Tracking information later showed she travelled by car for about 2.5 miles before continuing the race.

Zakrzewski claimed she told officials she used a car and finished the race "in a non-competitive way".

"The claimant had collected the trophy at the end of the race, something which she should have not done if she was completing the race on a non-competitive basis," said an independent disciplinary panel.

"She also did not seek to return the trophy in the week following the race.

"Even if she was suffering from brain fog on the day of the race, she had a week following the race to realise her actions and return the trophy, which she did not do.

"Finally, she posted about the race on social media, and this did not disclose that she had completed the race on a non-competitive basis."

www.bbc.co.uk/sport/athletics/67432970

I wonder if she's just a bit mental, but how is it that organisations feel they have a either a duty or the resources to listen to this sort of tripe?

[flatandy]

That is a bit mental. She's a serious athlete, too, not just an amateur who was knackered, so things like medals actually matter.

Also, having spent time with a bunch of ultramarathoners, it seems very out of character for the kind of people who are willing to spend 6 or 10 hours plodding along. Most of them love the running but regularly fail to finish races for whatever reason and seem totally chilled out about it. It's not like testosterone fueled sprinters.

[mids]

Company corrected after carrot craftsman conks out in rotational root-crop catastrophe.

"A food producer faces a hefty fine after admitting that one of its workers was strangled by a carrot baton machine because of its safety failing.

The worker, Remigiusz Cyrek, was choked unconscious after he was dragged into the machine by the hood of his jacket and trapped there by a giant roller.

Kettle Produce, which runs a facility at Orkie Farm near Freuchie in Fife, admitted in court on Wednesday it had failed to ensure its staff were safe there between August 2017 and June 2018."

www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/nov/15/worker-choked-unconscious-by-carrot-baton-machine-at-scottish-factory

[perrykneeham]

A carrot garrotte?

[perrykneeham]

Nov 15, 2023 21:32:08 GMT mids said:

Company corrected after carrot craftsman conks out in rotational root-crop catastrophe.

"A food producer faces a hefty fine after admitting that one of its workers was strangled by a carrot baton machine because of its safety failing.

The worker, Remigiusz Cyrek, was choked unconscious after he was dragged into the machine by the hood of his jacket and trapped there by a giant roller.

Kettle Produce, which runs a facility at Orkie Farm near Freuchie in Fife, admitted in court on Wednesday it had failed to ensure its staff were safe there between August 2017 and June 2018."

www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/nov/15/worker-choked-unconscious-by-carrot-baton-machine-at-scottish-factory

It's always the company to blame even though - yet again - it was some lazy twit who couldn't be arsed to follow process.

People are funny: I routinely fish around in the toaster with a knife, while it is toasting. The switch is probably closer than the toaster itself. I also change sockets and ceiling roses live sometimes. Of course, the worse that will happen from my laziness is a short belt from a 13Amp circuit on an RCD. This worzel could have got himself mangled.

[mids]

Wearing a hood sounds odd under the circumstances. Unless it's a sort of required hair-netty thing.

[perrykneeham]

That's true. I used to know an electrician who took certain delight in making the apprentices get their hair cut on H&S grounds. He was just a nasty dickhead though.

[mids]

Ages ago I worked for BP, crushing core samples rocks for mineral analysis. The was one machine called the rolls crusher that was like heavy steel mangle driven by an electric motor. It had to be cleaned between each sample using a home made wire brush affair that you pushed against the rollers while they were spinning. Normally there was a small hopper that you pushed the sample into but you had to lift that out the way to clean it. This bloke was careless one time (he was a heavy drinker and used to come in shaking with the DTs sometimes) and caught the first joint of his middle finger and the tip of his ring finger in the rollers. It just mashed them beyond repair. While it was his own fault up to a point (we'd all cleaned it 100s of times safely) it wasn't a great system either. It changed of course. As far as I can remember there was no real comeback for BP.

[flatandy]

Nov 15, 2023 21:55:30 GMT perrykneeham said:

People are funny: I routinely fish around in the toaster with a knife, while it is toasting. The switch is probably closer than the toaster itself. I also change sockets and ceiling roses live sometimes. Of course, the worse that will happen from my laziness is a short belt from a 13Amp circuit on an RCD. This worzel could have got himself mangled.

It weird. I've got contractors in doing a ton of work on bathrooms and kitchens. They're happy with angle grinders and chopping tiles with their bare hands and no safety glasses, things that would terrify me. But any time they touch anything electrical they go and turn it all off at the main panel.

[flatandy]

Nov 15, 2023 22:10:25 GMT mids said:

Ages ago I worked for BP, crushing core samples rocks for mineral analysis. The was one machine called the rolls crusher that was like heavy steel mangle driven by an electric motor. It had to be cleaned between each sample using a home made wire brush affair that you pushed against the rollers while they were spinning. Normally there was a small hopper that you pushed the sample into but you had to lift that out the way to clean it. This bloke was careless one time (he was a heavy drinker and used to come in shaking with the DTs sometimes) and caught the first joint of his middle finger and the tip of his ring finger in the rollers. It just mashed them beyond repair. While it was his own fault up to a point (we'd all cleaned it 100s of times safely) it wasn't a great system either. It changed of course. As far as I can remember there was no real comeback for BP.

That reminds me of a conversation I had with the (then-) wife of a friend who was a hand surgeon in the US northeast. She said that she had much more work in winter and it was almost always because of snowblowers. No matter how often they're told, people still seem to think that when the snowblower chute gets clogged and needs to be cleared out that the best way to do it is with their hands.

[mids]

That's gay. Mains is only about 9v in America.

On that same job at BP there was an issue with people getting very mild shocks off the machines. It was almost certainly static electricity but they got an electrician in to have a look. I was chatting to him and he told me he'd had a few 240v shocks that were pretty harmless but he was terrified of the 440v that our machines used.

[perrykneeham]

Also, big ampage.