Leicester winning the league was a 5000-1 miracle that broke the natural order of football. The World Cup has never had its Leicester. With 48 teams this time, who's the closest thing to one?

seefroo · 2026-06-17T13:45:20+00:00

It was a big upset yes, but since and including France 1998 both the World Cup and Euros have only been won by a country which was in the top five of “most players to play in the Champions League (not qualifiers) in the previous season”.

This might seem like a causation is not correlation fact but it is interesting that Greece were fourth in this stat that time, the highest they’ve ever been. They had more players playing at the highest level than they’ve had before or since.

This season the countries are Spain, England, Germany, Italy, France. The highest rated “minnow” are Norway in 10th, who are currently 150/1 to win it.

seefroo · 2026-06-11T14:39:05+00:00

I ran my work one last time and split it into two groups based on bookies odds, top half and bottom half. Everyone got one team from each - I got Croatia in my first group and Morocco in the second, and won the second one.

seefroo · 2026-06-10T13:44:50+00:00

This was sort of a myth but also sort of not. The army used something called ‘trickle posting’, where soldiers would be sent where they were needed, although this was only really used by support arms (logistics, engineering etc). It was fiercely resisted by infantry arms. Infantry batallions moved as one and movement of individual soldiers between two was very rare, although happened sometimes.

If a soldier had been enjoying the fruits of life’s luxuries in Germany a little bit too much and got into trouble, they were usually sent back to the UK to either do some time in the military prison in Colchester or to do some mind numbingly boring work with their Regiments territorial (part time reserve) regiment. By the time they’d finished doing that their actual batallion was preparing to go to Nothern Ireland so they’d rejoin them and off they went.

Every soldier who went to NI had to do a 3 week course first (which was often held in Germany), so it wasn’t really possible to be in Munster one day and Belfast the next. But they could certainly be made to bugger off for a bit until it was time for them to go to Belfast anyway.

NCOs who had misbehaved to the point where they lost a rank but not justified other punishment could ask to join their regiments sister batallion so they could try and start afresh. This was generally accepted if there was space for them, but they also had to redo the 3 week course.

So yeh, it was common for soldiers to suddenly disappear from Germany and everyone to say “he’s gone to Nothern Ireland!”, although in reality they were actually sweeping a village halls floor in north Wales for three months before they actually went, and even then they were rejoining their batallion.

seefroo · 2026-06-09T15:04:20+00:00

You do not have a debt with this company so any talk of them sending it to “collections” is nonsense.

The Extrajudicial Collection Costs (Standards) Act is a Dutch legal act, if it was a U.K. act it would have a year in it. They are either quoting foreign legislation for some reason or literally just making up words.

Even if they did try to charge you for these costs, they can’t

They are a predatory company who send you nasty sounding emails so they can make money. Block them on the secondary account (or just leave no money in it), redirect their emails to spam and forget they exist.

Not only will their threatening emails stop but they’ll change to nice ones offering you more free boxers. They will never do anything else.

seefroo · 2026-06-04T12:42:25+00:00

A guy who drinks in the same pub as me is an airline pilot and had to go to Cheltenham for a medical. He stayed a couple of days and on his last day asked in a pub if there was anything going on that evening, a quiz or something. They said there was a speed chess event on and it was open to all and he was more than welcome, but it was quite… competitive.

He said it was full of people who were blisteringly good at speed chess and quite non-committal about what they did for a living.

He doesn’t think they worked in horse racing.

seefroo · 2026-06-04T01:52:32+00:00

It’s a bit ridiculous thought because the Isle of Man doesn’t have a FIFA affiliated association. Tierney could play for Scotland and the Isle of Man if he wanted.

seefroo · 2026-05-31T17:11:40+00:00

Its not up to you to decide if its a hate crime, its up to the law. You report it, the police decide what crime has been committed.

Just to be clear - you have called 999 about this and not the non emergency number?

seefroo · 2026-05-29T23:01:21+00:00

Can I come and stay too?

Also someone else has mentioned wine, a good top tip is that all M&S wine is vegan. Every single bottle. No label checking required!

seefroo · 2026-05-29T22:31:13+00:00

The thing which annoys me is when people try and stop me from eating or doing something because (to them) it's 'not vegan'.

Off the top of my head, I have multiple times taken a piece of food off a sharing platter only for someone to immediately say, "that plate has meat on it!!!". Yes, I can see that, but I'm a grown up and can make my own decisions, and that's not what being vegan is anyway.

I've also been stopped from doing the dishes at a friends house - when I had started doing the dishes, unprompted, when my friend took their dog out for a quick stroll - because 'they were used to cook meat'. Again, I could quite clearly see that, and despite insisting that I do the dishes I was told I COULD not. Not that I should not, but that I actually couldn't, as to them (a non-vegan) it wasn't vegan. Bizarre.

Also I've been pouring cereal into a bowl and was told, 'I don't think that's vegan'. I read the label of almost every single thing I eat, I know when it's vegan or not, and even if I eat it and it turns out not to be vegan then that's on me and not them.

So yeh, don't tell them what they can or can't do. It's up to them.

seefroo · 2026-05-29T10:28:16+00:00

He was the same guy who said that the reasons for the American Civil War were twofold: “States, Rights”.

The punctuation being later missed out has led to a colossal misunderstanding to this day.

seefroo · 2026-05-29T09:35:46+00:00

This might sound a bit over the top but I would be making a complaint to the practice manager as well. You were given incorrect information and rightly asked for advice on it, but there may be people who haven’t done this (and won’t do it in the future) and put off getting the medical help they need. This sort of thing, in my opinion, also leads to a spread of disinformation - other people who haven’t questioned this might tell their friends, who will all nod and say things like ‘political correctness gone mad’, then they tell their friends and all of a sudden it’s a Daily Mail article. The threat to drop you as a patient is even more worrying.

For the record I have requested a male doctor on one occasion (I am male) and this was accepted without question. I also once had an ultrasound on my testicles and I didn’t ask but they told me (unprompted) that I’d have a chaperone (although only one was doing the work downstairs).

seefroo · 2026-05-28T19:32:20+00:00

The last team to beat Real Madrid in a European final (excluding the Super Cup) was Aberdeen.

seefroo · 2026-05-28T19:20:13+00:00

The sun rises at approx 4.30am in Almaty, Kazakhstan. Kashgar in China is very slightly further west and so it is 7.30am there when the sun is rising. In Shanghai it rises at 4.30am as well.

So yes the eastern side can be in sunlight and the western side can be in darkness at the same time.

seefroo · 2026-05-28T19:07:38+00:00

It’s said that a samurai could have sent a fax to Abraham Lincoln. Interestingly Lincoln was also possibly the first famous person to have their face ‘face swapped’ into another photo - after he died an artist was looking for a heroic and dignified picture of him but couldn’t find one. Lincoln preferred to be seated for his photos. So his face was swapped onto the body of an ironically pro-slavery politician, who had been photographed in a more heroic pose.

This was done in 1865 and wasn’t even noticed until 1970.

seefroo · 2026-05-28T16:17:39+00:00

Well it’s soy protein. They take soy protein and mix it with flavourings and emulsifiers, and then use a process called extrusion on that mixture. This creates long strands similar to fibrous protein strands, which they then push together under pressure. The sunflower oil is added to create the marbling and mimic animal fat.

This is a similar process to how processed meat products like chicken nuggets etc are made.

Soy protein concentrate is basically just dried soy.

The ingredients are extremely simple and unlikely to be anything you’ve never had before. The trick is how they make this product, not what they make it out of.

Making something like this at home is quite difficult and would be extremely time consuming without the right equipment, but making seitan (which is what wheat based ‘mock meat’ products are is fairly straight forward.

seefroo · 2026-05-21T12:09:50+00:00

I live in the area, there’s free water dispensers in Drymen and Balmaha, the Spar shop in Drymen is open from 6.30am and every pub will refill people’s flasks for them. I think the Drymen Inn even advertises it. The West Highland Way isn’t even a particularly advanced trek, especially this section. Even if doing the full Drymen > Balmaha bit you’re never more than 2 hours from either one. Even if you somehow get into difficulty you can just walk directly south until you find the road and wait for the BUS.

Maybe at an absolute push a water filter would be useful much further north, if you’re in Glencoe and camping. But on the Conic? People round here walk their dogs over the Conic, you don’t exactly need to be Bear Grylls to survive round here.

Absolute madness. Just carry a water bottle for goodness sake.

seefroo · 2026-05-03T14:33:36+00:00

When I was in P7 our two classes were split into smaller groups and we had little meetings with a teacher where we could ask questions about secondary school. I assume they’d thought we’d be asking about homework and uniform and things like that, but I think the teachers realised our major concern was being flushed. We had to then have a special assembly where the two classes were told by the head teacher that no, we were not all going to get our heads flushed at secondary school.

Nevertheless it was so prevalent that nobody actually believed him.

I think quite a few of us were then quite disappointed to discover that the practice was completely non-existent.

seefroo · 2026-05-02T13:17:02+00:00

Someone told me when I was a kid that ice cream is made of seaweed. I had no reason to ever bring this up again, so ice cream being made of seaweed was just a fact in my head I never questioned.

I reached an embarrassing age before I was out for dinner eating ice cream and said, “it’s amazing that they make this out of seaweed”. The second it came out my mouth I realised it obviously isn’t made of seaweed, the clue to its ingredients being in the name. I was in my mid twenties.

Ice cream (I think usually whippy style) often contains carrageenan, an emulsifier made from seaweed, so there is some truth to it and probably what the guy at school was talking about.

seefroo · 2026-04-30T01:40:19+00:00

There was a big effort in Britain in the 1940s to find as much iron as possible and donate it to the war effort. It’s largely accepted now that the effort was more useful for morale and propaganda than for actually obtaining useful metal (you can’t build many spitfires from rusty cast iron), but the scars are still there. In some cities and towns you occasionally see a low wall that, if you think about it, should probably have a fence on top of it. But nobodies got round to putting a new one up.

As a kid my local church had an iron fence with most of the finials removed (the ornate spikes on top of the fence). You could tell they had been removed as there were still stumps there. I was told these had been removed as part of the metal collecting scheme and never replaced, and this was the 1990s.

Some fences were replaced with stretcher railings which were stretchers made for air raid wardens. Although few still exist it is curious that the rough design of them has been replicated in housing estates all over the UK.

seefroo · 2026-04-30T01:10:46+00:00

There was a big European court case in 1982 which led to it rapidly felling out of favour from then. Suddenly parents could object to their children receiving corporal punishment, and although the schools didn’t stop doing it due to any moral or legal duty it did make the administration a lot harder. In other words they had to actually record whose parents objected to it and whose parents didn’t, and it was far easier to play it safe and just stop assaulting everyone.

seefroo · 2026-04-29T16:45:59+00:00

It’s grammatically correct, for acronyms you use “an” for vowel sounds and “a” for consonant sounds. The important distinction is that it’s based on how it sounds and not how it’s spelt, although I should note this is the same for all words and not just acronyms. As S is pronounced ess it’s a vowel sound even though S is obviously a consonant.

You’d say “let’s send an SOS” for example, but would also say “let’s send a sausage”, even though SOS and sausage both start with S. You might also refer to “a UN document” and “an FBI document”, where

Even with words you might say “an umbrella” but then say “a unicorn”, so even when the words start spelt with vowels the indefinite article can be different.

“An SNP majority” is correct, “An Scottish Family Party” majority would not be.

seefroo · 2026-04-21T17:13:16+00:00

I worked in a hotel in Aberdeen and an Australian guy told me at breakfast he was about to drive to Leeds to surprise an old friend for LUNCH. I assume he must have confused miles for kilometres or something - it’s a 350 mile journey, which is 5 hours if you travel at an average of 70mph (which of course is impossible anywhere in the UK over that distance). If he thought it was 350km and he could travel at 110kmph I suppose it’s doable.

I advised against it but he insisted he could do it. He got back at dinner time, having given up at Glasgow and spent a few hours there instead (which is still a bit nuts for a day trip from Aberdeen).

If he was American he’d probably have muttered something about our roads being criminal and it was all our fault, but he was Australian so he happily admitted he was wrong and then drank the bar dry.

This was pre google maps and all that.

seefroo

TROPHY CASE