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TV tonight: the explosive train thriller Nightsleeper gets even wilder
  • Has anyone who likes this not already binged the full box set on iPlayer?

    Anyway we enjoyed it. It was bonkers, and definitely don't poke too hard at the many, many plot holes, but there were enough games of "who really is the baddie" to keep us entertained.

  • For a proper cucumber sandwich...
  • If the thread had been titled "how do I make a bahn mi" then I'd have upvoted you to the moon. But it wasn't. It was asking how to make that most English (not British, but English) of foods, a cucumber sandwich. And in case that wasn't a clue enough, the community is Ask UK. Not Ask Vietnam or Ask America.

  • For a proper cucumber sandwich...
  • If you went into an English tea room for afternoon tea and they served you that monstrosity and claimed it was a cucumber sandwich, you'd be perfectly within your rights to burn the entire place to the ground and not a single judge in the country would convict you.

  • One in six Tory voters are likely to be dead by the next election. Assuming nothing else changes, the total impact of demographic change alone would mean +29 seats for Labour and -34 for the Cons
  • That "assuming nothing else changes" is doing a huge amount of heavy lifting.

    Something that I heard a few years ago really demonstrated people's rightward political shift as they age like nothing else.

    Imagine a child born shortly after the end of the Second World War, say 1948-1950. That child would have been a young adult, 18-20, in 1968. That was both the year that the hippie movement gained greatest prominence as well as the year of radical protest where young people around the world organised and fought back against corruption and repression.

    Now fast forwards to 2016. Those very same post-war children are now aged 66-68. That's the demographic that more than any other voted in favour of Brexit. I bet if you'd gone back to those young radicals of '68 and told them they were going to become bigoted, narrow-minded xenophobes they'd have laughed in your face. But it happened.

  • Has anyone else watched "Spent"?
    www.bbc.co.uk Spent

    High fashion, low funds. Model Mia may have a world class skincare regime but the catwalk queen’s career has crashed down to earth. Uplifting comedy drama with Michelle de Swarte.

    Spent

    This popped up at the weekend on iPlayer's promo list and we thought we'd give it a go, knowing nothing about it at all.

    Well it became our latest binge watch (not too difficult, there are only 6 half-hour episodes). It's very well written and acted and just the right mixture of comedy and pathos.

    I would love to know what others think about it.

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    Yggdrasil Linux working for once (Fall 1995 edition)
  • Looking at that screenshot, even though I've been a very happy KDE user for many years now, I do kinda miss the days when many Xfree86 desktop environments were influenced more by NeXTStep than Windows.

  • As you get older, how do you feel about being the next forgotten generation?
  • Well like it says in the sidebar, we're the Meh Generation so, I suppose, meh!

    Seriously though, I'm not bothered. If anything it's to our credit that we've never done anything bad enough to make us despised by the young'uns.

  • UK people who were adults when the Chunnel opened, what was it like?
  • Nothing changed. I'm not sure what you were expecting would change - the only difference was that instead of driving to Dover, putting your car on a ferry and then getting off in France, you'd drive to Dover, put your car on a train and then get off in France.

    The Eurostar passenger services started a year or so later iirc, but again although it was fun to be able to take the train to Paris rather than taking the plane or boat, it didn't really affect anyone who wasn't travelling to Paris anyway.

  • Please Stop
  • Maybe do a simple Google search next time?

    Rather than resorting to that age-old cry of the cult member "do your own research!" can I respectfully suggest that if you're aiming to change somebody's mind, the onus is on you to provide the evidence, not on them. By all means take hours out of your day to search google and compile a list of things that you think will convince me. Me, personally, I have better things to do with my life.

  • Please Stop
  • That's kind of my point. Blockchain evangelists have been banging the drum for many years saying "This is a perfect fit for the financial industry. Why won't fintech wake up and recognise that?"

    When in fact fintech took a long, hard look at blockchain a long time ago and decided "nope, there's nothing here that would tempt us" outside of a few very niche applications.

  • Please Stop
  • Blockchain has been around as a technology for nearly two decades. If financial institutions thought it could help them you can bet they would be all-in on it by now. As it is, blockchain has no significant advantages over traditional financial ledger systems, so what incentive is there for them to use it.

    It's not something new or cutting edge any more, just waiting for a bright spark to discover the technology and put it to use.

  • Has anyone else given up on daytime Radio 2?
  • I enjoy Sara Cox's evening drivetime show. I sometimes wish I didn't, but when you're doing yet another 4-hour slog up the M1/M6 in evening rush hour traffic it's perfect company.

    And Zoe Ball can be OK in the mornings, although I'll often tune into something with a bit less chatter unless I'm feeling particularly enthusiastic. Other than those two shows, R2 doesn't really do it for me. And yes, Jeremy Vine is utterly off-putting.

  • Starmer challenger calls for new left mass movement outside Labour Party
  • We've seen this happen before, and it always ends in failure. A small number of Labour Party members leave the party in disgust, an even fewer number are angry enough and motivated enough to form a new party. It either fizzles out due to burnout, or gets invaded by Trots and destroyed from the inside.

    The one example I can think of that's survived for many years is Arthur Scargill's Socialist Labour Party, formed in very similar circumstances to now: a decaying, corrupt, widely-hated Tory government almost certain to lose the next election but the leader of the Labour Party (i.e. Blair) was in no way left wing or promising any socialist policies.

    The SLP was set up in 1996 and is still going. After nearly 30 years, how much electoral success has it had? How many people other than ultra-committed political obsessives (such as us!) even know of its existence?

  • TV tonight: the brilliant Prof Hannah Fry is back with her fascinating series
  • Ooh thank you for this. Hannah Fry is an excellent presenter and brings enthusiasm and clear explanations even to complex subjects. I'm looking forward to this new series.

    Edit: for those who can't be bothered clicking through to the Grauniad article, the programme's called "The Secret Genius of Modern Life" and it's on BBC2 at 8pm.

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