Affentitten

From a bunch of first year politics essays I was marking today: "...a dessert dwelling people..." "....old-fashioned social morays..." "Lebanon has a lot of Sheer Muslims." "....Islam is a peaceful and gentile faith..."

I thought you'd like Nutella, Emrys. I mean, you don't need teeth to eat it.

No. Thats teh diffrenec.

Quite obviously there is going to be more of a focus on the menu in France than there is in Britain and there is far less tolerance for processed food products. No French parent is going to be happy with their kid eating chips and baked beans every single day. But.... Funnily enough, I bet if an English school put chocolate sandwiches on the menu there would be a parental uproar too.

Well, it's written in French, so it looks fancy. But "Pain blanc et beurre" is bread and butter in anyone's language. And "Purée aux trois légumes" is low grade boiled veggies mashed into a paste. The thing is, you could describe even a hospital menu with that degree of flair, but what turns up on your tray will still probably taste like crap. I know from very recent experience at my nieces' junior high school in Le Mans that the same centralised industrial kitchen does all the food for the district's schools, hospitals...and prisons.

Or why they placed the MG42 in the middle of an open area behind an upright wall of sandbags instead of digging it in or positioning themselves within the substantial concrete structure of the radar station. Maybe they'd been playing too much Close Combat Normandy.

What I find interesting about Welsh, Gaelic etc. is that they have adopted the Latin characters, but with radically different phonics from what those characters represent in most of the other languages that use them.

My daughter asked me the other day why I say "Dial a number" with a phone instead of "type" or "enter".

20 quid?!! I'm moving to Nottingham.

Or you sit back and let the company mortars/arty take care of the MG nest, which was anyway sited pretty much in the open.

Yeah you're too late. There was a few posts back someone who came on and in every sentence he wrote was a link promising "New York Escorts". Just before JonS' "options please" post. But it's now been deleted.

Just to help Stalin's Organist with the ambiguity thing:

And my example was something that I put all of 10 seconds thought into. But it shows that radically different interpretations can occur. Here's a couple more old faves from when I was teaching English: The secretary said the boss is wrong. "The secretary," said the boss, "Is wrong."

Alice threw the looking glass.

On a related note, the b-i-l in question was on one of the testing voyages that put the nail in the coffin of the Super Sea Sprites. They went down into the Antarctic Ocean and looked for the very worst weather and sea states they could find to try the choppers out. Not much fun working in front of a PC screen whilst pitching through waves of 7 – 10 metres. There was point where the ship (Oliver Hazzard Perry frigate) dug into a wave and was submerged up to the superstructure for several seconds. The officer on the bridge thought it wasn’t coming up again and was at the point of initiating an abandon alarm when it slowly crawled back out to the surface. Apparently the stresses of the trip accounted to about 50% of the lifetime wear in terms of keel flex on that frigate.

Jaysus. You're looking to Mauritania to proof your designs!! And the grand old Irish navy?

Was speaking to my b-i-l yesterday. He's career RAN as an engineer and project manager. (Not associated with these NZ ships.) He says that the patrol vessels in question have been built to an NZ design that was tendered out and won by Tenix. The original design was queried at the time, particularly its capacity to handle Antarctic sea states, but went ahead as what the customer ordered. I guess that's why this is locked in legal arbitration.

I guess you don't have options?

I sure hope it has all the usual Close Combat features. Like infantry that crawl around in the middle of a road or position themselves partially outside buildings, tanks that rotate their hulls endlessly before bothering to take a shot and battles that are over in 30 seconds because you are forced to position units in LOS situations that are hopeless.

All of which or course I have cheerfully admitted in various posts above. NZ is a small and backward country, so nobody is really surprised when they mess this stuff up. (Like someone expecting the banjo kid from Deliverance to solve cold fusion.) Australia is at a more dangerous level of size: we're big enough to believe that we should be able to do stuff like build submarines, but we only know just enough to get ourselves into trouble. Like the mid-range computer user who knows enough to open the registry files and fiddle with them, but then ends up in strife when things don't turn out the way he expects.

Very, very rarely do I literally LOL at anything I read on the Interweb. But that did it for me.

Obviously the NZDF are fairly amateur in their project management and scoping.

Well certainly I can't think of a better view of Wellington than through the bomb sight of a Lancaster.

Well you actually bought new ones. We did the equivalent of finding a derelict FJ Holden frame in somebody's back shed and trying to fit a BMW motor and some Honda electronics into it. We would have been better off waiting for Peter Jackson to finish his film and strapping motors onto his Lancaster replicas.

But will they change the name of the dog?