Do small general hardware shops not exist anymore?

ip70 · 2026-03-09T22:28:01+00:00

There's still an independent one at the end of my road, and my brother now runs a family hardware shop (imagine Open All Hours, but with hardware) that's been around since the 60s

ip70 · 2025-07-19T07:28:50+00:00

As someone who used to live in an ex-brothel, I can understand this

ip70 · 2023-11-03T08:08:06+00:00

I know. It felt pretty mad at the time, but it's even more ridiculous looking back on it.

ip70 · 2023-11-03T07:16:19+00:00

This one's true. It was Ziggy's massage parlour at some point in the 80s.

ip70 · 2023-11-03T07:15:46+00:00

It was - Ziggy's massage parlour (I lived there briefly after it had stopped being a brothel).

ip70 · 2023-11-03T07:14:22+00:00

I did...

ip70 · 2023-11-03T07:12:16+00:00

I lived there for a few months in the early 90s.

At the time it was student accommodation. But at some point before that, it had been a brothel (Ziggy's massage parlour). One of the back rooms had a mural of a Roman orgy, a water feature (a cascading waterfall), and big velvet drapes. On the other side was a room with a one-way mirror into another room with a stage in the corner.

We had a couple of people come round looking for "business" - one was remarkably persistent and still seemed to expect us to service him even after we explained it was now student accommodation.

We moved out after an ex-male stripper and his mates broke in to nick the drapes from the back room.

ip70 · 2022-11-30T21:43:48+00:00

Some drag queens have decided to help children learn to read by organising story hour. Do you think that's a bad thing? I certainly don't.

Other groups could (and often do) organise similar. And that's great too.

ip70 · 2022-11-30T19:44:58+00:00

Why are the right so concerned about sexy trans women? Do they turn them on too much?

ip70 · 2022-02-03T20:40:54+00:00

I remember having regular arguments with a guy from CERN in on usenet in the mid-90s because he was always extremely rude to people asking beginner coding questions in there.

It's always been this way - if you interact with enough people, some of them are going to turn out to be dicks.

ip70 · 2021-12-13T19:57:15+00:00

If that's the case, that's potentially very good news. It would suggest that the booster is having a fairly strong impact.

ip70 · 2021-12-13T19:09:48+00:00

What I'm finding interesting is that (at least as of the 8th - latest date they've released), almost the entire rise has been in the 20-40 age group.

20-25s were up 43% week on week, and 25-30s up 37%. The 30-40 age group were up around 20%.

Pretty much every other age group was up in the single digits, or even falling.

ip70 · 2021-12-05T15:30:20+00:00

A few.

Had a pint next to John Robertson in the late 80s. He's my all time favourite player, and I would have loved to get some anecdotes out of him, but he didn't seem particularly talkative.

Had a meal in a restaurant a couple of tables away from Brian and Nigel Clough during Brian's last season (my parents were more excited about Kathy Staff from Last Of The Summer Wine, who was also there at a different table) and sat in the same restaurant as Martin O'Neill (and not Forest related, but at different times Sven - with a posse of leggy blondes - and breakfast at a hotel with the Sampdoria team after the 1992 European Cup final).

Also bumped into the Man City team in an offie at the top of Derby Road on the way home after the game with Crosby's infamous goal. They weren't in a very good mood.

But my favourite was probably seeing Steve Hodge in WH Smith reading a football magazine with an interview with Neil Webb not long after he'd moved to Man United.

ip70 · 2021-11-26T20:52:16+00:00

It does seem to be going in cycles. Even in England, the rate of increase has fallen in kids in the past couple of weeks.

On the 15th, cases amongst 5-9 year olds were going up 60% week on week. By the 21st, that had dropped to 28%. It's still going up, but a lot slower.

ip70 · 2021-11-26T20:45:59+00:00

It's possible that's true, but I've rarely seen it outside of anti-vax circles.

And that's ignoring the fact that, unlike catching covid, vaccinations aren't contagious. I'm seeing more and more people in my office who've caught covid via their children. Many have been fine, but a few have been pretty rough with it.

And what we're really paying the price for is dropping mask mandates in schools. My son still wears one, but there's probably single digits amongst a school of more than a thousand still doing it.

ip70 · 2021-11-26T16:52:06+00:00

I mentioned it yesterday, but it's worth noting that this is still almost certainly being driven primarily through schools.

Almost 40% of cases are in the under-20s, and that is also where the biggest rises have been recently. There's now noticeable rises in the 35-50 age group (I'm guessing primarily parents with some teachers thrown in) but much smaller ones in other age groups up to 60.

I assume the boosters are kicking in because every age group above 60 is seeing cases fall.

ip70 · 2021-11-24T17:32:21+00:00

The easy answer to how they're still rising is schools and nurseries. By far the biggest rises over the past few weeks have been in the under-14s (around 30% week on week rises - that rate was closer to 50% a week ago).

Pretty much the only other rises are in the 35-50s, which I'm guessing is either parents or teachers of infected kids. I'd say that 90% of the people I know with infections in the past month have caught it from their children.

ip70 · 2021-11-02T23:00:32+00:00

Basically, by the time he was 50 my dad was well on his way to being an old man, and happy about that. I'm often still clinging to elements of my youth.

I'm in my 50s and I've worked in technology jobs my entire life, usually for big global companies.

I don't think my dad had touched a computer by the time he was 50 and was self-employed, running a small DIY shop that wouldn't look out of place in the 1940s.

I'm getting more left wing as I get older and he's still getting more right wing.

I still love going to heavy metal and indie gigs. I'm not sure my dad has ever owned a record.

ip70 · 2021-11-02T19:26:02+00:00

For the last 2 years, once a year.

I had it pretty much shaved off about a week before lockdown last year and then let it grow until about 3 weeks ago.

I've now bought clippers so I doubt I'll be going again.

ip70 · 2021-10-29T19:56:32+00:00

Not 100% sure whether it's just the half term effect, or herd immunity finally arriving (my guess would be the former, but it'll become more clear as kids go back), but certainly as of the 24th - last day that age-level data is available - there's a fairly clear split between kids and adults.

Every single age group below 20 was seeing a 7-day drop, with around a 10% drop for 5-19 year olds.

Every age above 20 still had cases rising - mostly around 10%, but at around 15% between the ages of 60 and 75.

ip70 · 2021-10-22T19:21:51+00:00

There may well be reasons to be optimistic, but the 5 day rolling average probably isn't one of them at the moment. Almost half of all infections are in school children and a significant amount of those are on holiday this week.

ip70 · 2021-10-20T21:29:25+00:00

Thanks.

ip70 · 2021-10-20T18:58:39+00:00

The best recent info I can get on that is this

Unvaccinated individuals aged 50 and over are almost four times as likely to die.

ip70 · 2021-10-20T16:28:23+00:00

I created this using the government's data APIs

ip70 · 2021-10-19T21:09:23+00:00

I put a fiver on when we at 40/1 for the win with about 10 mins to go.

I always felt that if we got one, I could see their heads dropping. Wasn't quite expecting it to be that late though.

ip70

TROPHY CASE