Pointless Disconnected Blabs, Ramblings and Utterances

[sdifox]

Can't think of any thread to post this random thought on.

Reading a listicle about James Bond movies, it occured to me that SPECTRE (Special Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge, and Extortion) combines a very peculiar set of roles for one agency to have.

How does "counter intelligence" (a kind of policing/detective role, uncovering enemy spies, usually on your own territory) go together with "terrorism" (something you probably don't want to engage in on your own turf)? Shouldn't it be "counter-terrorism"? Never mind the vagueness of "revenge" as an official role for an organisation.

It's almost as if they wanted a cool acronym and picked functions to make the name work.

(Should have gone with Special Executive for Counter-Terrorism, Retrieval and Extraction...but then I suppose they'd be the good guys and Bond wouldn't be fighting them)

Take it up with Ian Fleming.

 

[nakedfrog]

Whoever approved that bk jingle 'you can have it your way' in their new commercials is fucking tone deaf and needs to be fired into the sun

Fuckin' A.

 

[Lost_in_the_HTTP]

It's almost as if they wanted a cool acronym and picked functions to make the name work.

(Should have gone with Special Executive for Counter-Terrorism, Retrieval and Extraction...but then I suppose they'd be the good guys and Bond wouldn't be fighting them)

CIA was already taken.

 

[pmv]

Take it up with Ian Fleming.

Well Fleming at least started with Smersh - which was originally a real organization with a cool name (coined by Stalin himself, apparently), though I gather in reality it had ceased to exist long before the Bond era (or was that just what they wanted us to think?). It was the movies that changed it to SPECTRE.

 

[Lost_in_the_HTTP]

About 2,700 miles total driven between both vehicles this year.


(Yes, 2 zeroes, not three).

 

[nakedfrog]

About 2,700 miles total driven between both vehicles this year.


(Yes, 2 zeroes, not three).

I'm not much higher, I think I'll end up around 4,000.

 

[Lost_in_the_HTTP]

Just found mortgage papers from a house I bought in 1990. Rate was 9% on a little over $40K, P&I was around $370/mo.

 

[IBMJunkman]

Semper ubi sub ubi

 

[Red Squirrel]

Just found mortgage papers from a house I bought in 1990. Rate was 9% on a little over $40K, P&I was around $370/mo.

Crazy to think that's cheaper than most cars now. Even with the high interest rates stuff was so much cheaper, you don't need to take out as big of a loan anyway. My parents got their house build in 1986 and if I recall it cost them around 80k. Now days you're paying like 500k+ to get a house built. Even going back 15 years ago it wasn't quite as bad as it is now. I paid 165k for my house. A similar house now would probably go for like 300k. I couldn't afford my house if I was trying to buy it now.

 

[stargazr]

 

[sdifox]

Sonic boom!

 

[Lost_in_the_HTTP]

Today has seven seconds more daylight than yesterday.


Don't waste it.

 

[PlanetJosh]

Didn't even know about this thread, but the shopping networks online, on cable, on dishes and elsewhere have mostly started showing recorded shows. And most of the employees are off for the holiday week.

 

[VirtualLarry]

The simulation ran out of live people?

 

[PlanetJosh]

A couple security and a couple tech guys are there to guard and to run the recording at QVC as one example.

 

[Lost_in_the_HTTP]

One is Catherine Bell. The other is Mary Elizabeth Winstead.

Are they the same person? Did someone mix up the photo credits?

 

[sdifox]

You need new eyes

 

[pmv]

Is the song "Rich men north of Richmond" referring to Brentford, Acton or Ealing? Neither have ever struck me as particularly wealthy areas.

 

[Lost_in_the_HTTP]

Virginia.

 

[Lost_in_the_HTTP]

Power utility did something. Cost this year is $140 higher for 500 KwHrs less than 2021.


Overall average (including all fees, costs and taxes) jumped from .15 to .19/KwHr

One thing is that they've been adding a fuel surcharge each month that I don't recall from years past.

 

[jmagg]

Bacon

 

[pmv]

There are a number of lost villages, long-since drowned, off the coast of Norfolk and Suffolk. For some reason I find this fact fascinating.

And the process is ongoing, even accelerating. More coastal settlements are continuing to fall into the sea. Apparently it's a combination of multiple factors. Southern Britain sinking and Scotland rising, as a consequence of the loss of the glaciers of the ice-age, causing a kind of 'bounce-back' of the northern part of the island, no longer weighed down by all that ice, plus climate change and rising sea-levels, plus there's the fact that most of that area is basically just sand banks, and very easily eroded.

The demands of some locals for more coastal protection seems a bit futile to me, like literal King Cnute stuff, given that I gather it's been ongoing since at least the days when Doggerland disappeared beneath the North Sea (now _that_ was a real Brexit).

What I don't understand is where the eroded land is going. Presumably for every part of the coastline that erodes away some other stretch of coast gains land?

Does it cancel out across the British mainland, or is Britain gradually disappearing, as our land is slowly appropriated by those dastardly EUniks?

 

[lxskllr]

What I don't understand is where the eroded land is going. Presumably for every part of the coastline that erodes away some other stretch of coast gains land?

I don't think so. I imagine every specific locale is different, and would require analysis by a geologist, but I don't see why the land can't just be gone. There's a lot of room in the ocean to hide a comparative few shovels full of dirt. That, combined with the earth shape change from weight redistribution, and it's hard for a amateur to determine exactly what's happened, unless you were a particularly dedicated amateur.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Just ends up spread out, under water further from the shore. I remember trying to build in-water sand castles as a kid, and it wouldn't take long for it to erode over time. The sand mostly just ends up back under the water at the shore line and it evens out. Same if you try to dig a hole, it will fill in and just smooth out with rest of shore. Bodies of water have a natural shore "shape" that they seem to always maintain.

 

[waffleironhead]

Same thing has been happening on the south shore of lake superior. Areas have lost about 70 feet of shoreline.