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Post by mickthecactus on Jun 1, 2020 15:07:15 GMT
In the flag counter at the foot of the page we have North Korea which is apparently much sought after by flag counter afficionados.
And if you click on it there is a vast amount of information...
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Post by kerouac2 on Jun 1, 2020 15:30:52 GMT
I think that Kim Jong-un hides most of his visits here under the "anonymous proxy" label.
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Post by bixaorellana on Jun 1, 2020 16:42:49 GMT
That seems reasonable.
Whenever I use Opera's free VPN it places me in Ukraine, which would not be my choice.
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Post by whatagain on Jun 1, 2020 17:29:20 GMT
Yet Odessa is a splendid city. Superb.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jun 1, 2020 17:35:35 GMT
We have had 585 visitors from Ukraine, but the last date is May 1st.
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Post by bixaorellana on Jun 1, 2020 19:58:08 GMT
Oh, I didn't mean to imply that I don't like or care about Ukraine, simply that it would suit my purposes -- anonymous air fare searching -- much better if the VPN placed me in the US.
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Post by Kimby on Jun 1, 2020 21:37:32 GMT
I learned today - I think - that whatagain is a reincarnation of pariswat. Funny I have very different impressions of the two alter egos. Surely I am mistaken.
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Post by Kimby on Jun 1, 2020 21:41:34 GMT
Oh, I didn't mean to imply that I don't like or care about Ukraine, simply that it would suit my purposes -- anonymous air fare searching -- much better if the VPN placed me in the US. My phone thinks I am in the Dallas TX area, probably because I inherited the phone from a deceased brother in law who used to live in TX, decades ago, and I don’t leave location services turned on. But I can’t find any way to permanently reset my location, so I have to change every online store I shop in and every weather app etc. It’s annoying. But at least Texans speak English. (Sort of.)
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Post by bixaorellana on Jun 1, 2020 21:42:53 GMT
Did you also know that you can mouse over anyones name to find out their registered forum name for when you want to tag them?
What is interesting about that is if they have a different user name than the one registered, the preferred (user) name will show when you post your tagged message, rather than the @registeredname you wrote in order to tag.
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Post by Kimby on Jun 1, 2020 21:51:19 GMT
That went right over my head, bixa. Probably wouldn’t work on a phone, though. No mouse.
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Post by bixaorellana on Jun 1, 2020 21:59:45 GMT
Hmm. (in regard to post 1421)
I keep location turned off, too, but I think there is a way to set it permanently. See if google has the answer for your particular phone.
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Post by Kimby on Jun 7, 2020 19:33:53 GMT
I learned that “venal” and “venial” are both actual words - with different meanings ! - and not misspellings of each other. Venial relates to sins, while venal refers to money.
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Post by bixaorellana on Jun 7, 2020 22:57:46 GMT
It refers to about half of the United States Senate.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jun 8, 2020 5:19:22 GMT
The traditional depth of graves ("six feet under") was determined to keep people safe from the bubonic plague virus.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jul 12, 2020 19:03:04 GMT
90% of the fireworks shows for the 14th of July have been cancelled in France. The Paris fireworks will go on as scheduled but all areas "of interest" from the Pont de l'Alma to the Pont de Grenelle are closed to the public. However, since the show is televised and also streamed on the internet, lots of people will see it.
I thought it was interesting to learn that Calais has cancelled its usual show wherever it is, but there will be 8 smaller fireworks shows around the city at secret locations. The locations will not be revealed so that people will not congregate. I bet that anybody who is really determined will be able to find out the locations, though, since setting up the stuff will not be invisible.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jul 30, 2020 11:44:55 GMT
I already knew that Dr. John Kellogg had invented corn flakes as a spiritual food to prevent sexual impulses and other trauma. They were first served in his sanatorium and were designed to be as bland and insipid as possible so as not to excite the patients. He wasn't considered a quack, and his patients included George Bernard Shaw, Henry Ford, Sarah Bernardt, and Thomas Edison. Meat and spices were totally banned from the institution.
Okay, what I just learned was the story of his brother Will. The two brothers had founded the corn flake company together to stop the rich from eating eggs and meat for breakfast and the poor from eating porridge. But Will was interested in making more money and he knew that corn flakes really had their limits in appealing to people. So he invented frosted flakes as an alternative. The brothers got into a big fight and lawsuit, but Will won the case and got the company, which is now feeding us with all sorts of atrociious sugary crap.
Poor old John kept up with his radical vegetarianism and also engaged in genital mutilations to keep young people from being interested in sex.
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Post by patricklondon on Aug 16, 2020 15:24:57 GMT
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Post by bixaorellana on Aug 16, 2020 17:19:14 GMT
By "people" they mean "women", right?
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Post by Kimby on Aug 17, 2020 23:15:35 GMT
I learned a new word “bokeh” this week.
I’d never seen it before and it showed up in a movie review (for Joker, I think) and in a Pollinators post by our own erudite bixa.
It apparently means out-of-focus spangled background in photos or film when the focus is on a foreground subject..
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Post by whatagain on Sept 10, 2020 8:55:39 GMT
I learned that we have one baby box in Antwerpen and will open a second one in Bruxelles. A baby box is a monitored place, in full anonimity, where a mother can discard her unwanted child. Safer than leaving it on a church doorstep they say... The flemish baby box has collected a bit less hhan one child a year.
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Post by mossie on Sept 10, 2020 14:26:20 GMT
The mind boggles, which part did they get???
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Post by kerouac2 on Sept 10, 2020 15:12:57 GMT
Maybe missing an arm or a leg.
More seriously, these boxes used to be relatively common on the sides of churches. I think the last one I saw was in Bayonne (no longer in service).
I would imagine that in modern times, such a thing would only be used by undocumented aliens and other people totally out of the health system.
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Post by kerouac2 on Sept 12, 2020 18:43:40 GMT
The 4 notes of the SNCF jingle apparently have the highest recognition rate in the world (more than 90%) in the home country of France, as well as most of western Europe.
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Post by whatagain on Sept 13, 2020 7:12:01 GMT
You get mad after one hour in a train station hearing those constantly.
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Post by kerouac2 on Sept 22, 2020 13:01:48 GMT
Ghengis Khan was the only military leader who ever managed to conquer the Afghan tribes. And yet they keep trying 800 years later... (and all for sand and rocks, not even any oil!)
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Post by kerouac2 on Sept 23, 2020 18:17:11 GMT
If tyres were their natural colour, they would be beige instead of black. They are tinted with carbon.
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Post by kerouac2 on Oct 8, 2020 5:44:48 GMT
The largest French military cemetery on foreign soil is in Crimea. It has 95,000 graves.
It was destroyed in 1982 to obtain building materials. Rebuilt in 2004.
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Post by bixaorellana on Oct 8, 2020 15:48:50 GMT
How do you rebuild a cemetery? What happened to the graves in 1982?
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Post by kerouac2 on Oct 8, 2020 16:24:41 GMT
I don't know. I suppose they just removed all of the stone monuments and mausoleums and left everything else as it was.
This was in the news today because the Ukrainians Russians interred another 150 French soldiers this week, who were discovered during the preparation of a new building site. They are constantly finding more human remains (from the other side too, of course). However, there were no official representatives from France because the French refuse to go there since Russia (re)confiscated Crimea against international law. Politics is often shit.
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Post by whatagain on Oct 9, 2020 18:43:56 GMT
Most of the casualties in this war resulted from diseases. Helped by the great choice of a swamp to establish their camp.
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