Broithe

Even if the 'French', or Normans, were really Norsemen, or Scandinavian migrants, who had arrived in fairly small boats...

People living on the big island in the Orkneys might be confused by all this. I can't find the Community Map, to see if there is a member there.

It is also my personal experience, on the Big Island, that organisations using the word 'Trust' in their titles are often less than averagely trustworthy.

Not slang for a few sacks full of shillings..?

In Rathdowney, there is the Dawn Meats factory, in the old Perry's brewery, and a large proportion of the workforce there are Brazilian - Portuguese would be the second language in the town now. I spotted a chap with 'that sort of name' and the same 'sort of look', making local videos on YouTube - the videos had information and comments in English and Portuguese - fair enough - but, occasionally there was another language. Further investigations revealed that he was not Brazilian, as I had assumed, but from East Timor. Of course, that was also a Portuguese colony in the past, so he could travel halfway across the world and still end up working with people in the same language...

Whoops! There's two then...

I think you might be safe. Only France and Mexico have won every game so far - and only Mexico have done it without conceding a single goal. How long will people keep going on about 1966 for? I can remember when the Boer War was that far in the past. Trivia - eight countries have won the World Cup, but only one of those has not won it on home turf...

Lettuce pray that doesn't happen. Cos it would be a Titanic disaster, if it did...

At the risk of mentioning the World Cup, which appears to be going on at the moment, apparently, it seems to me to be fortuitous that Northern Ireland didn't get to the finals in the USA. It would be very confusing for the viewers and listeners, as Haaland and Wolfe seem to be playing for Norway, for some reason.

https://www.blitzortung.org/en/live_lightning_maps.php?map=10

Harsh! I'm sure her posture is better than most of us can manage. The texture of the finish looks excellent for a wagon made from planks and a metal framework with decades of reapplied paint - almost like it's physically pre-weathered, just needing some suitable colouring now.

Including Artificial Incompetence - so you don't even have to do it yourself.

Anybody fancy starting a channel reviewing the reviewers? Maybe it already exists? Much the same thing exists in 'real life', with people deliberately misinterpreting reality on politics, news, health - and many other subjects... Truth matters less than belief in many cases.

Exactly that. We are all fully prepared to accept the risk that Patrick's personal weakness poses for him - and the benefits that it has for the rest of us, which far outweigh the personal detriment that he may suffer.

So, I did find it during a recent spate of domestic archaeology. It is marked "Tested 15,000 volts" - I don't intend to see if that's still true. I remember now that this one is not ex-RAF, but came from a coal mine, or, at least, via a miner. I'm not sure that removing the web in the middle, as seen in the RAF version further above, is really a good idea - you might save half an ounce, but you could end up getting snagged up on fuselage stringers, etc., as you hack through the skin, especially from outside. I wonder if I should stamp it "HS2" and save it to sell in the future?

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c39y0pj1j92o

A Dapol rail cleaner might be cannibalised? https://www.dapol.co.uk/products/b800-oo-ho-gauge-dapol-motorised-track-cleaner?variant=43341336248543 It works far better on a DCC system, as you need decent power to run the cleaner/grinder, but have it propelled fairly slowly by a loco - not easy to get a good compromise on DC.

There were feral wallabies in the Peak District, around Buxton, since WW2. I've never seen one, but they are still reported, though they seem to be in much smaller numbers than were around in the 70s - and they are still occasionally seen in other areas of England. https://www.roaches.org.uk/wallabies.html

I'm still very occasionally asked to "sign" on a screen - it seems a bit of a futile thing, no matter how hard I try, even I wouldn't be able to see which one of three random squiggles was really done by me. On the Big Island, I have established protocols with a lot of the actual individuals that deliver to me when I'm there, rather than with their employers, and this has been 100% successful. It does involve an element of reciprocal trust, but it does work better than official systems might - for me. In Ireland, anything coming by AP is covered by the automatic understanding of my individual habits. The rare event of an outside courier who might not be aware of me before, is covered by a Post-It note next to the doorbell.

Not marsupials maybe, but I've always liked this picture of a few lemurs heading off for a night out in the metropolis. That No Pedestrians sign needs updating - the instruction is clearly only applicable to humans. https://www.flickr.com/photos/finnyus/19970181912/in/photolist-wqGpkf

A while back, I bought a CD in Japan, priced in Yen - on the day the conversion was under £15, which was what I paid for the whole thing. When it arrived in the UK, they converted the Yen value and came up with £15:10. This was over the £15 threshold, which resulted in a £3 VAT charge. Almost fair enough, but, there was then an additional £8 charge to facilitate the payment of the £3. It was held hostage until I paid this, taking a £15 purchase to £26. I complained to the Financial Ombudsman that the £8 charge for processing an electronic payment without even a man-second of cost was ridiculously over-the-top - but they never even replied.

I found this number, which might be worth trying. 028 2073 2844

Many years ago, my first real job 'on my own' was to design a new valve system for a circuit breaker for a cement works in Malaysia. They needed to have the phases operable independently, rather than all three at once, which was normal. The mechanisms were hydraulic, powered by a nitrogen accumulator 'spring', to provide the high speed operation necessary. Our previous standard breakers were supposed to have two stored operations in the accumulator, but they couldn't really manage the second one, because of huge losses as the valves operated. I took the opportunity to introduce some small changes to my new valves, to reduce this problem. The valves were made and the bearing and sealing surfaces were ground. The were then to be blasted clean of debris, to keep the hydraulic system clean. The ground surfaces were to be protected during this phase, of course. But, they weren't. This was discovered when the system wouldn't pressurise, as the leakage rate past the rough surfaces was too great. We were always late with everything - usually overdue even before anything was actually built, much less tested successfully. We had a crisis meeting and I was told it had to work by 3pm that day or we would have to default to a bizarrely expensive replacement operation, using stuff that we already made. It was my view that we only needed to get it to pressurise, then a few operations would hammer the seats to seal properly. I considered trying to fit a few more pumps in parallel, to beat the leak, but we just didn't have the time. So, I took off the cap at the accessible end of the valves and beat them with a hammer - in an attempt to get it to seal well enough to pressuring and then hammer the seats with operations. At 1pm, I had it all back together and turned the pump on. The system pumped up! All the way to 320bar, with no apparent leaks. A few quick test operations before the Armageddon Meeting at 3pm and it all worked amazingly well - it had four stored operations from the same accumulator that the standard breakers couldn't really do two from. We only made two of these and they went off to Malaysia and worked faultlessly for decades, which our stuff generally didn't. This got me a reputation for being able to come up with unorthodox, but effective, techniques. Anyway, the point of all this rambling is that, about two months later, as we were shipping the breakers off to the East, it suddenly became apparent to me that I had hit the 'wrong end' of the valve, it was the other, inaccessible end, that was leaking as the pump tried to build up the system pressure. Either the simple shaking of the valves, or the small amount of 'hammer' they got from the spring driving them back onto the seats, was enough to create a seal better than the pump rate could beat, I don't know - but, it worked. We had other things to worry about by then, so I never bothered anybody with that information...

The ship can stop off on the way north to cut down delivery costs. I don't really see a problem here.

It would surely be a simple enough matter to fit the model with dual-gauge track - like where it changes over from 4' 8 1/2" to 5' 3" on the Boyne Viaduct?