Mailwatch(ed) Forum

Now we're talking!

Turns out we've got those in completely the wrong order.

What's an orc?

And is it the same thing as a troll?

Dunno, but a Hobgoblin is a beer. And also a splendid music shop specialising in acoustic and folk instruments.

I thought hobgoblin was having a stove for dinner?

Is a hobgoblin the same thing as a gremlin?

What’s a gnome?

What’s a munchkin?

It's an informal dinner with other members of our swingers group, Barbie.

Tubby Isaacs wrote: ↑Sun Feb 09, 2025 8:57 pm What’s a gnome?

A French manufacturer of aircraft engines who became famous during the first world war for the Gnome Monosoupape rotary engine as fitted to multiple French, British and other Allied aircraft including Avros, Bristols, Sopwiths (Pup and Camel), Nieuports, Vickers and Moranes.
Essentially all the memorable WW1 Allied aircraft were powered by Gnomes.

And there was me thinking hobgoblin was the stuff that carries oxygen around the blood stream.

I suppose it could be if you drink enough of it.

What’s a sprite?

Tubby Isaacs wrote: ↑Sun Feb 09, 2025 10:39 pm What’s a sprite?

Easy.

Oboogie wrote: ↑Sun Feb 09, 2025 9:25 pm

Tubby Isaacs wrote: ↑Sun Feb 09, 2025 8:57 pm What’s a gnome?

A French manufacturer of aircraft engines who became famous during the first world war for the Gnome Monosoupape rotary engine as fitted to multiple French, British and other Allied aircraft including Avros, Bristols, Sopwiths (Pup and Camel), Nieuports, Vickers and Moranes.
Essentially all the memorable WW1 Allied aircraft were powered by Gnomes.

Rotary, single valve - jolly clever stuff.
Lubricated with castor oil which sprayed out, and over the pilot when flying fast.

The Pilots were nicknamed "Twenty Minuters".

• Not, as Blackadder suspected, because they only did 20 minutes fighting per day.
• Unlikely referring to the estimated lifespan of new pilots on missions.
• Perhaps indicating the frequency of needing the khazi after a mission spent inhaling atomised castor oil.

But what’s a Greek urn ?

Abernathy wrote: ↑Sun Feb 09, 2025 10:45 pm But what’s a Greek urn ?

Three and six.

Bones McCoy wrote: ↑Sun Feb 09, 2025 10:45 pm

Abernathy wrote: ↑Sun Feb 09, 2025 10:45 pm But what’s a Greek urn ?

Three and six.

Or five Drachmas an hour in old money.

My dearest uncle, who was mayor of Bath, (or "Bath" if you're a northener), send me this - a requiem for the present.

"In my life, I have watched John Kennedy talk on television about missiles in Cuba. I saw Lyndon Johnson look Richard Russell squarely in the eye and and say, "And we shall overcome." I saw Richard Nixon resign and Gerald Ford tell the Congress that our long national nightmare was over. I saw Jimmy Carter talk about malaise and Ronald Reagan talk about a shining city on a hill. I saw George H.W. Bush deliver the eulogy for the Soviet bloc, and Bill Clinton comfort the survivors of Timothy McVeigh's madness in Oklahoma City. I saw George W. Bush struggle to make sense of it all on September 11, 2001, and I saw Barack Obama sing 'Amazing Grace' in the wounded sanctuary of Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina.

"These were the presidents of my lifetime. These were not perfect men. They were not perfect presidents, god knows. Not one of them was that. But they approached the job, and they took to the podium, with all the gravitas they could muster as appropriate to the job. They tried, at least, to reach for something in the presidency that was beyond their grasp as ordinary human beings. They were not all ennobled by the attempt, but they tried nonetheless.

"And comes now this hopeless, vicious buffoon, and the audience of equally hopeless and vicious buffoons who laughed and cheered when he made sport of a woman whose lasting memory of the trauma she suffered is the laughter of the perpetrators. Now he comes, a man swathed in scandal, with no interest beyond what he can put in his pocket and what he can put over on a universe of suckers, and he does something like this while occupying an office that we gave him, and while endowed with a public trust that he dishonors every day he wakes up in the White House.

"The scion of a multigenerational criminal enterprise, the parameters of which we are only now beginning to comprehend. A vessel for all the worst elements of the American condition. And a cheap, soulless bully besides. We never have had such a cheap counterfeit of a president* as currently occupies the office. We never have had a president* so completely deserving of scorn and yet so small in the office that it almost seems a waste of time and energy to summon up the requisite contempt.

"Watch how a republic dies in the empty eyes of an empty man who feels nothing but his own imaginary greatness, and who cannot find in himself the decency simply to shut up even when it is in his best interest to do so. Presidents don't have to be heroes to be good presidents. They just have to realize that their humanity is our common humanity, and that their political commonwealth is our political commonwealth, too.

Watch him behind the seal of the President of the United States. Isn't he a funny man? Isn't what happened to that lady hilarious? Watch the assembled morons cheer. This is the only story now."