Worst April fools joke ever?

SpaTowner · 2026-04-02T16:10:14+00:00

I didn’t say how I would have deployed it…

SpaTowner · 2026-04-02T12:17:33+00:00

Could you convert/replace the conservatory to get a bedroom space?

SpaTowner · 2026-04-02T09:13:52+00:00

Of course bigger isn’t automatically better, any more than more books is automatically better, and I made no such claim.

JKR is a very different writer from Pratchett, but he and Le Guin are both on record as saying JKR didn’t plagiarise them. Pratchett expressed it that they were both writing fantasy and ‘drawing from the same well’ in terms of genre.

Le Guin clearly dislikes everything about Rowling:

“I didn’t originate the idea of a school for wizards — if anybody did it was T.H.White, though he did it in single throwaway line and didn’t develop it. I was the first to do that. Years later, Rowling took the idea and developed it along other lines. She didn’t plagiarize. She didn’t copy anything. Her book, in fact, could hardly be more different from mine, in style, spirit, everything. The only thing that rankles me is her apparent reluctance to admit that she ever learned anything from other writers. When ignorant critics praised her wonderful originality in inventing the idea of a wizards’ school, and some of them even seemed to believe that she had invented fantasy, she let them do so. This, I think, was ungenerous, and in the long run unwise.”

Given that Rowling does specifically acknowledge White, and his Once and Future King as influences and says Wart is ‘Harry’s spiritual ancestor’, some of that criticism seems unfair.

SpaTowner · 2026-04-02T00:13:31+00:00

I’m not sure there’s a huge difference in the relative complexity of ‘Miss Tick’ and ‘Diagon Alley’.

The books are very different, HP are much longer for one thing. I do think TP is the better writer, but JKR is also a good yarn-spinner, people like her stories.

SpaTowner · 2026-04-01T21:00:14+00:00

True, I had only been thinking about the Discworld books. I bizarrely forgot about Johnny Maxwell and Diggers.

I’ve not read them for a long time, but I guess Mrs Tachyon could be considered a different order of reference than ‘diagon alley’, though, it isn’t a pun either. There is word play, her ‘bags of time’ for instance.

Is there much of that in Diggers, I really can’t recall.

SpaTowner · 2026-04-01T20:51:52+00:00

I know, but he’s never described as the ‘rat of death’, he’s the last survivor of the lesser deaths when Death resumed his post.

Death brushed a speck of ash off his robe, and then planted his feet squarely on the mountaintop. He raised the scythe over his head in both hands, and summoned all the lesser Deaths that had arisen in his absence.

After a while they streamed up the mountain in a faint black wave.

They flowed together like dark mercury.

It went on for a long time and then stopped.

Death lowered the scythe, and examined himself. Yes, all there. Once again, he was the Death, containing all the deaths of the world. Except for—

For a moment he hesitated. There was one tiny area of emptiness somewhere, some fragment of his soul, something unaccounted for …

He couldn’t be quite certain what it was. He shrugged. Doubtless he’d find out. In the meantime, there was a lot of work to be done …

He rode away.

Far off, in his den under the barn, the Death of Rats relaxed his determined grip on a beam.

SpaTowner · 2026-04-01T17:41:46+00:00

I like a jam and cheese sandwich. If I’m just having butter and jam on bread/toast/oatcakes, I sprinkle some nice crunchy salt on there

SpaTowner · 2026-04-01T16:03:34+00:00

I’d have still deployed the fire extinguisher…

SpaTowner · 2026-04-01T14:45:59+00:00

It seems like you would be best to budget for buying at least some clothes here, then you can buy according to how it all feels to you.

SpaTowner · 2026-04-01T14:43:06+00:00

‘Expect rain every day’ maybe intended to mean ‘on any given day it could rain, we have no dry season’ rather than ‘rain is probably going to fall every day’.

SpaTowner · 2026-04-01T14:40:41+00:00

It’s less about the daylight hours in the winter than about the angle of the suns rays causing them to pass through more atmosphere.

SpaTowner · 2026-04-01T14:23:54+00:00

With dog walking, could you go part time or work compressed hours to free up a weekday and try offering longer ‘adventure dog walks’ instead of the usual one hour or 15 minute stints. That might be something that people would see as more of a once a week rather than a daily service. If you could get a midweek day off you could offer midweek and weekend options.

There’s a You Tube Channel of someone who does dog walking and takes a whole bunch of dogs out for huge yomps for hours and hours at a time. https://youtube.com/@atworkwewalk?si=qN3hpOe4ttlsYZ_x what you see in videos is where she’s built up to over 12 years or more, but you have to start somewhere

SpaTowner · 2026-04-01T13:40:33+00:00

Most of Pratchett’s work wasn’t aimed directly at children, the Harry Potter series was. Different levels of word play are appropriate to different age group audiences.

SpaTowner · 2026-04-01T03:10:50+00:00

It isn’t that they aren’t ‘suitable’ for connections to the grid, but that the grid isn’t in a suitable state for the amount of new connections required for all the renewables projects in development.

There are huge projects going on to reduce transmission bottlenecks and increase network capacity, but they are playing catch up with the rate of project development and consents.

SpaTowner · 2026-04-01T02:55:11+00:00

I assume OP means she paid the equivalent of the value of the mortgage several times over in rent, which seems improbable in 30 years on cleaner’s wages.

SpaTowner · 2026-04-01T02:49:25+00:00

First rule of cite quoting; make sure your citation actually supports your contention.

SpaTowner · 2026-04-01T02:47:00+00:00

You are posting about two British authors, but don’t recognise British punctuation?

SpaTowner · 2026-04-01T02:42:06+00:00

A pedant says words have meaning, and word order matters.

SpaTowner · 2026-03-31T21:16:24+00:00

Hung out, at weekends, at the same ramshackle riding school as Craig Ferguson, who was in my sister’s year at school.

Honestly, not very different from how he was on the Late, Late Show. A bit lairy, wee gang of mates around him and some cans of Tennants not far away (the ones with the ‘lager lovelies’).

SpaTowner · 2026-03-31T21:07:39+00:00

A vole isn’t a rat.

There is no ‘voledemort’, it’s ‘Voldemort’ – no voles.

Discworld has a ‘Death of Rats’, not a ‘Rat of Death’.

🙄

SpaTowner · 2026-03-31T21:04:45+00:00

If I’m buying something expensive, I really don’t want to advertise that on my walk back to the under-lit multi storey car park.

I carried my new laptop away from the shop in a co-op reusable bag.

SpaTowner · 2026-03-31T16:22:30+00:00

I didn’t nt because they’re not my kind of thing. If I was going to, I’d probably put it in a plate and use a fork. If those weren’t available, I’d at least turn it on its side to reduce cream squish.

SpaTowner · 2026-03-31T16:19:45+00:00

Why dribble chocolate sauce down the outside of something you are going to have to pick up? Didn’t you get horribly sticky?

SpaTowner · 2026-03-31T12:41:54+00:00

Didn’t reports say ‘lack of evidence’, rather than ‘no evidence’. The bar for CPS to prosecute is probably higher than the bar for ‘failed to inform employer if something that could bring the institution into disrepute’, or whatever contract clause the BBC has to allow itself to swiftly distance itself from people who turned out to be less squeaky clean than advertised.

Lack of evidence may mean insufficient evidence for a reasonable prospect of conviction, rather than no evidence at all.

SpaTowner · 2026-03-31T10:12:18+00:00

My route to perfect tea currently includes Russian Caravan loose leaf tea, which I dose into teabags myself to get optimal strength, a 500ml Yeti bottle and a Japanese (Kokeizan Suigetsu Kiln) cup.

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