• 9 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • I agree that “not voting for the Tories” was pretty much the main driver, but these are not “new options”.

    The Brexit Party’s “surprise” increase this year, was in many ways just returning to the 10-15% that they received as UKIP in 2015.

    In the two elections in between, they agreed to not contest many of the Tory seats, to not risk “splitting the vote” to help keep “evil Jeremy” out of power.

    The Tory vote + Brexit Party vote, added together, is lower than the number who voted for either Boris Johnson, Theresa May or 2017 Jeremy Corbyn. Fewer people voted for Keir Starmer than Jeremy Corbyn in 2017 or 2019 - so technically the biggest change in vote is probably “did not/unable to vote this year”, with an increase of 3 million.

    As ever, “didn’t/unable to vote this year” won yet another successive landslide victory of about 20 million, or about the same as the top three parties added together.

    Anyway, apologies for the tangent. The graph is particularly looking at younger people, who are on average more left leaning, and have become more so in the last 40 years. Though the recent mainstream politics/media shift towards the far right is absolutely terrifying, I don’t think it’s reflected in the young people shown in this graph.






  • On a similar note, with an “absolutely” and a word ending in “ed”, you get words which mean “very inebriated/stoned”

    Common

    • absolutely battered
    • absolutely blathered
    • absolutely pissed
    • absolutely wankered
    • absolutely trolleyed
    • absolutely shitfaced
    • absolutely twatted

    Less common

    • absolutely potatoed
    • absolutely cultured
    • absolutely traffic coned
    • absolutely fishcaked
    • absolutely Belgianed
    • absolutely bin-bagged
    • absolutely cabbaged
    • absolutely Tobleroned

  • Okay, this pretty much helps, but now I don’t know what a VMA or an SNL is.

    I’m going to go with “Viking Marauder Awards”, a yearly event where people re-enact the sacking of the Lindesfarne Monastery etc, via the medium of song and dance (and pyrotechnics).

    and “Sitting Near Larry”, a weekly TV programme where a bloke called Larry sits down somewhere, and then semi-famous people come and sit near him and perform things. Larry has never heard of any of them, so gives them well-meaning but slightly patronising advice. Larry is just off-screen in the image shown above.






  • I suddenly picked up “allergies*” in my late 30s - couldn’t work out what they were, other than antihistamines (cetirizine or loratidine) made them “not as bad”, and I also needed to avoid certain things in particular (breathing in dust, aerosols, perfumes, other chemical fumes, car fumes, cigarette fumes, wood dust and drinking alcohol).

    Turned out to be Nasal Polyps. I was due for surgery to remove them in 2020, but then Covid happened and I’ve been on a waiting list since. Surgery may completely remove the problem, or at least lessen it - but they could grow back within five years.

    Basically every day is like I’ve got cold or sometimes flu. Sometimes I feel like I’m drowning in phlegm. If I take antihistamines, it’s pretty mild or controllable, as long as I can reasonably avoid those triggers. Sometimes I have to drink lemsip in the morning (powdered hot drink of paracetamol, lemon flavour & decongestant). It’s there every day, permanently, but how severe it is varies between “slightly inconvenient” and “too unwell to work”.

    Antihistamines are essential for me to function at all, and make a huge difference - though I feel they’ve become less effective in the last year or so. Thankfully they’re very cheap over the counter (~£1.30 for 30 days’ worth). I also use a saltwater nasal spray sometimes, and I sometimes eat a lot of menthol sweets. I have to be careful with decongestants to avoid “rebound congestion” where your nose adjusts to life with decongestants, then becomes twice as blocked up if you stop.

    If I drink alcohol or breathe perfume etc, my sinuses block up within half an hour, I can get an asthmatic response, and I get crippling arthritic pain in my hands and joints. Sometimes perfume and other sprays can cause severe, possibly dangerous breathing problems. I have an asthma inhaler for these emergencies, and always have to carry it with me, in case someone sprays perfume in an enclosed space (which might cause me to die).

    If I keep reasonable control over these things, I can live pretty “normally”. If I actually get a cold, it’s like I’ve got a “double cold”, and it can make me too ill to go to work.

    When it’s bad, it’s a pretty miserable existence to be honest, but in the larger scale of things it’s not a serious or life-threatening illness, so you feel guilty for complaining.

    When it’s not so bad, I can normally ignore it for most of the day - and I have a pretty active job and am otherwise fairly healthy. It’s worst in the morning/night when I’m horizontal.

    Your case outlined in the original post sounds particularly upsetting and you have my sympathies. You’re not being a baby.


    *technically it’s an intolerance or hypersensitivity, and not truly an allergy, though it behaves in much the same way, and symptoms can be controlled in much the same way.




  • Cool. Good luck!

    Just in case it’s interesting/relevant, it turns out I’ve got a couple of a similar type knocking around - in one case, the fabric is simply glued directly to the front of the inset, between the inner and outer moulding (the other one is a fabric coated mountboard between the work and the glazing).

    In this case, you’d just tear the fabric off (from the front), try and clean up some glue residue off the backing, then stick some freshly cut fabric in its place.

    Technically, you wouldn’t need unframe the work for that - but it’s still probably safer to do so.

    Anyway, let us know how you get on with the framers - and give us a before/after photo :)


  • As said above - you’re going to want to take it apart anyway and see what it’s made of. You may be able to clean the fabric - but you’d need to know if it’s glued or stretched onto a backing board of some kind first anyway.

    I’d be inclined to replace it or take it to a framers for the amount of effort it may take. It wouldn’t be an expensive job.

    If you’re interested in home repair options, if the fabric is stretched and pinned/stapled etc (i.e. not glued onto a backing board), you can try unpinning, then cleaning with any general water/mineral stain removal instructions for clothes etc - dabbing, soaking, saliva, detergent, vinegar, chuck it in the washing machine etc, then re-pinning it.

    If it’s glued onto a backing board, some of the cleaning might still work, but might be pretty impractical, and you’d perhaps have an easier time painting it.

    You’d need a stain-blocking primer/undercoat otherwise the mark will just seep back through - then you might want a few very thin coats of gesso or other quick undercoat on it, then several very thin coats of waterbased whatever-you-like matt paint on top (no real difference in using household emulsion wall paint or the finest of artists acrylics). Multiple very thin coats will keep the fabric texture more visible.

    I’d be inclined to say replacing it would be a whole lot less hassle :)