Back in my day, we had to hand-draw our memes in the back of school textbooks, then wait until next time we had a lesson in there to see if anyone had seen it.

I have to admit I love these ladder related jokes - they work on so many different levels :D

Britons of a certain age refer to this as the “Trigger’s Broom Paradox”, after a character from a comedy TV Series “Only Fools and Horses”.

Trigger, who worked as a street sweeper, got an award from the City Council for maintaining the same sweeping brush for twenty years (though the broom has had 17 new heads and 14 new handles).

Trigger’s Broom (Youtube Link)

Black cats of all nationalities are welcome :) The charity that declared the day is from the UK, but the idea that “black cats are beautiful and shouldn’t be overlooked” is worldwide :)

According to the best school playground scientists of the time, opening a packet of crisps upside down (i.e. so the branding/writing is upside down, and you open the bottom of the packet, at the top) actually “made you gay”.

It wasn’t just gay if you did it, but it would literally cause a spontaneous eruption of gayness in whoever did it - who would be permanently gay from that point onwards.

In the 1990s in the UK, it was gay to wear a backpack using both shoulder straps (as opposed to using one strap over one shoulder, which was the heterosexual way to carry things to school).

All three of ours play fetch, but only with specific objects. They’re all brothers about 2½ years old.

The tabby cat plays fetch with fluffy toy balls with feathers on them, the grey cat plays fetch with spare cat collars and the little black cat plays fetch with menthol sweet wrappers.

I think you’re going to need some Blackadder to go along with your Monty Python.

Start with the second series though, as the first series is a little weaker (the characters and style are a bit different), and might put you off.

Great, I’ll look in to that, thank you - and I hope you do write such a book one day :)

This is fascinating stuff. Is there anywhere where more of this kind of thing is written down?

Our silver cat is a huge fan of tummy tickles.

He specifically requests them, and he’s certainly gone over ten minutes without any hint of wanting to stop, he just “supermans” his arms out one at a time, and sometimes drools a bit.

Cat tax picture:

“The Darkness Out There” by Penelope Lively.

In short, a “nice old lady” tells a couple of young kids about what they did to a young German who survived a plane crash over Britain during WW2.

I think it was there for the “the nice old lady was actually nasty and cruel and the evil nazi was actually just a scared, fairly innocent boy”.

Great link! I love the little story in there.

I actually use “shevelled” alongside many other words which to my mind “should logically exist” - for example, at the weekend I dismantled and then remantled a wall in my garden.

Don’t feel bad about it. Reward them by using it a lot, practicing, learning and improving - and sharing with them some of the work you’ve made with it.

(Obviously still get them nice stuff for mother’s/father’s day too)

My nose/sinus/throat is all very sensitive to perfumes and aerosols these days, and even if it’s not strong enough to close my throat up and choke me, it still tends to make me feel sick. I’ve not used any spray and rarely any smelly stuff for over a decade.

Most soaps and some shower gels are fine though, so there’s no problem with starting a day “clean”.

On the morning train, you can normally smell people who use deodorant instead of washing. It’s quite hard to describe - air freshener in a festival toilet? Artificial sweeteners on a stilton cheese? Anyway, if their perfume isn’t strong enough to physically harm me, I don’t care.

I used spray deodorants as a teenager, and unscented roll-ons for many years after - but after stopping using it, I found, like the couple you mentioned, that I didn’t sweat as much, and the sweat that was there didn’t smell as bad. Oddly enough, anecdotal evidence suggests my natural smell increased my attractiveness quite significantly. Of course, all of these may have just been coincidental factor of age/hormones/circumstances etc though.

I was a bit paranoid for some years, and always asked/checked with trusted people “do I smell?”. I found I can smell myself when I do.

My work is sometimes quite physically demanding, so during the ~two months a year when it’s potentially warm (Northern UK), you can get a bit sweaty - but so is everyone else. If you really feel the need, a quick armpit wash in a sink at lunchtime, or a “festival shower” with a wet-wipe would sort that out.

Anyway, so the rough answer is “There is less body odour. You get used to what’s there. Most of it smells quite pleasant, sometimes even to the extent of it being animalistically magnetically attractive”

Yeah, you just have to wait it out for a few years. Can’t be long before it moves back to new variants of straight, loose, baggy, bootcut and flared and that sort of thing etc. I’m stocking up next time.

I would probably be the same, had I been born 5 years earlier or later, and hit a different part of the skintight/baggy cycle.

“Skinny” jeans, or other skintight trouser variations. Been a fad four times during my life, I think. Somehow manage to be slightly more ridiculous each time.

[Edit]Also “shellsuits”, the crinkly, extremely flammable alternative to the already-vile tracksuit.

Kriss Kross will make you jump! jump!

Well, every now and again, someone needs to post on the reddit one saying “look at them misidentifying a thing on Lemmy”.

They’ll either be genuinely helpful types, and join us to help out, or they’ll be “someone is wrong on the internet” types, and join us to be correct.

Obviously I have no idea if this would work in practice.