So trivial, yet it really ticks you off.

[Edward]

That's one of those tales that is so funny that it doesn't matter if there's a little bending of the truth. Another one similar was told to me by a Catholic priest.

Centuries ago, adultery was against the law, those who transgressed were hauled before the courts, where, if a guilty verdict was returned, got themselves locked up with all the other adulterers. It was said that they became known by the acronym of their wrong doing: "Found Under Carnal Knowledge." Collectively they were referred to as the f*****s!

It was all probably fiction but when I looked it up someone had written a most eloquent version more or less repeating that which the priest told me, I just wanted to believe it.

Yeah, I think that one is a backronym - but it's got to be a sign your priest is on the right career path if he can inspire his audience to want to believe in what he's saying. I'm reminded of the hardware store I worked in as a student. We used to get all the local clergy in. Uniformly lovely, except for one minister, a Presbyterian I think, who would never believe us if we said we didn't have something in stock - you'd have to let him behind the counter to see the empty shelf for himself. I often wondered how that filtered down to his congregation when he told them about the empty tomb!

 

[Trenchfriend]

Just a tip:

-coffee pot
-3 teaspoons instant grain coffee
-1 tablespoon sugar
-cold milk

Easy ice coffee!!

 

[The one from the North]

Just a tip:

-coffee pot
-3 teaspoons instant grain coffee
-1 tablespoon sugar
-cold milk

Easy ice coffee!!

How does that tick you off? Besides that instant coffee is crap!

 

[GHT]

How does that tick you off? Besides that instant coffee is crap!

It was my intention to take Trenchfriend to task, but as you have beat me to it, and in the process, got the thread back on track, instant coffee et cetera, you have gone and taken the wind out of my sails.

How can you define instant coffee as such? Coffee is beans, ground down and either filtered or percolated. Once you extract the soluble and volatile contents of the beans it becomes coloured water.

 

[tonyb]

Ah c’mon, cut our German friend a little slack. English is not his first language and at times things get a little lost and confused.

And besides, even lifelong caffeine heads like me (an espresso machine is an indispensable appliance in this house) acknowledges that some instant coffee is, um, not bad. Taster’s Choice is pretty good, in my estimation. I’ve known of it being used in recipes for baked goods.

But yeah, there’s a better thread for it. I’ll give you that. But such veering off course is not at all unusual around here. Things unfailingly get back on track.

 

[Trenchfriend]

Instant grain coffee.

Was not in the mood to buy Nescafé Frappé, so thought about a good DIY thing.

 

[Trenchfriend]

How does that tick you off?

Speaker's Corner...

 

[GHT]

Speaker's Corner...

You should visit London's Hyde Park, you would be in famous company:
Speakers' Corner is located on the north-east edge of Hyde Park, nearest Marble Arch and Oxford Street. Historic figures such as Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin and George Orwell were known to often use the area to demonstrate free speech.

 

[The one from the North]

Instant grain coffee.

Was not in the mood to buy Nescafé Frappé, so thought about a good DIY thing.

I may not know the terms. How does instant grain coffee differ from your ordinary instant coffee, Nescafe Gold etc.? Getting back on track, thing that really ticks me off is bad coffee! We Finns drink the most coffee per capita in the world and I have every intention to keep it so! I am also very opinionated about coffee, so don't get me started! Although I've been known to drink instant occasionally...

 

[BobHufford]

We Finns drink the most coffee per capita in the world

I could probably live there ...

 

[Trenchfriend]

I may not know the terms. How does instant grain coffee differ from your ordinary instant coffee,

(Instant) cereal coffee

Normally, I like Nescafé Frappé, but they don't offer a bigger "value pack" to make the price value friendlier. So why not creating your own?

 

[tonyb]

I typically have three or four double espresso shots over ice to start my day, but I’ve taken to iced tea after 12 noon or so — straight black tea, no sugar, no lemon, no nuttin’. It’s still caffeine, but in a lesser dose.

You know those seriously addicted alcoholics, the people who can’t go without alcohol lest they get delirium tremens? I’ve known a few such unfortunate souls, guys who started the day with a drink or two, who got up in the middle of the night for a shot, whose lunchtime fare was what one called a “hydraulic sandwich.”

My one remaining addiction (I gave up the others in 2006) is caffeine. And yes, doing without does trigger withdrawal symptoms, although nothing so miserable as the DT’s, or opioid withdrawal. But I’ll get a headache if I go more than a couple-three hours into the day without my coffee.

 

[Zombie_61]

...You know those seriously addicted alcoholics, the people who can’t go without alcohol lest they get delirium tremens? I’ve known a few such unfortunate souls, guys who started the day with a drink or two, who got up in the middle of the night for a shot, whose lunchtime fare was what one called a “hydraulic sandwich.”...

At one company I worked for the head of the maintenance department was known as "half pint" at one of the local bars because he went there on his lunch break every working day and drank half a pint of whatever his favorite alcohol was (I never got to know him well enough to ask). No food, just the alcohol. And, because he went there every day, they always had it ready for him when he arrived.

 

[Tiki Tom]

Many decades ago, me and my male friends would make jokes about alcoholism and tease each other about our alcohol consumption. Then, it came to pass that we had an acquaintance who had a REAL alcohol problem. I think it scared us all. Anyway, our private jokes about alcoholism abruptly stopped.

 

[FOXTROT LAMONT]

Not that it ticks me off, just an observation really. It never ceases to surprise me how quickly a newly arrived immigrant picks up English profanities. It seems that within a week they might be anywhere near fluent but they have no problem in stringing a few words together emphasised by the "f" word. There's a couple of fellows where I work from the Sudan. Talking to one another in what was probably, Arabic, one stopped mid flow, he looked at the other and said, in fluent English: "You must be f*****g joking!" An all encompassing word that.

A term constant use Aldershot. I have since turned page para, but watching Perry Mason with GF last week
the lead namesake character ran afoul a Hollywood studio mogul and had a heated pistol barrel applied his sternum.
Exit stage studio mogul and goons, the word screamed out like I haven't heard hammer nailed shut since Aldershot.
I've learned that the actor hails New York by way of Wales. Wouldn't surprise me if he did a kid turn in the paras.

 

[tonyb]

At one company I worked for the head of the maintenance department was known as "half pint" at one of the local bars because he went there on his lunch break every working day and drank half a pint of whatever his favorite alcohol was (I never got to know him well enough to ask). No food, just the alcohol. And, because he went there every day, they always had it ready for him when he arrived.

My stepdad’s stepdad, a nice fellow who went by “Bud,” and Bud’s brother-in-law (my stepdad’s uncle), a wiry, craggy, rawboned man we all called Uncle Arch, moonlighted a few nights per week cleaning a medical office building. Both Bud and Uncle Arch were actively alcoholic when I lived under the same roof as them for a couple months in 1968 and joined them and my cousin Eddie on their evening side gig, which was always preceded by a stop at the liquor store for a pint of bourbon, which got them through the evening’s work.

Uncle Arch died in 1970 or so. I don’t know the proximate cause, but it seems reasonable to assume that longterm, heavy alcohol abuse had something to do with it. I remember being taken aback on learning that he wasn’t nearly as old as he looked when he croaked. Bud lasted into the 1990s. I heard that he gave up drinking after retiring to Florida a decade or more before he shuffled off.

I could tell of a few other people I knew who drank themselves into an early grave, as could most of us, I’d bet. I was kinda on that path myself, although my nearly daily drinking was downright temperate compared to several folks I’ve known.

 

[Trenchfriend]

Hah, you learn an interesting new thing, from time to time!

I had no idea about "rubber expansion joints" in water pipe systems or mixing batteries.

Today, I first thought, something is wrong with the water pipe pressure or my shower hose pipe. But then I thought, there must be something blocking behind the tap aerator. And wow, much black rubber crumbs there!!
Then I flushed the mixing battery until no more crumbs came out. Problem solved for the first...

 

[GHT]

I could tell of a few other people I knew who drank themselves into an early grave, as could most of us, I’d bet. I was kinda on that path myself, although my nearly daily drinking was downright temperate compared to several folks I’ve known.

It can be so easy for a habit to become an addiction. Why I ever started smoking at the age of 18, I'll never know. A fresh faced student with three years of study ahead, or just a gambit that everyone seemed to indulge in. Mind you, back then, it didn't kill you, or to be more precise, the discovery of the link between smoking and cancer was sometime in the future.

At twenty-two I got married and I made a promise to my bride, I really would try and quit smoking. So glad I did. How many of my cohorts are no longer with us? Victims of the evil weed.

 

[tonyb]

^^^^^^
I was a heavy smoker for 30-some years. Thought I’d never quit. But giving it up became remarkably easy when it appeared that the choice was quitting or dying.

I lost a friend, the closest friend I’ve ever had, to lung cancer. That was six years ago. He had quit smoking a few years prior to the diagnosis, but the damage had been done.

I don’t subscribe to the disease model of addiction, which, in my view, poses more questions than it answers and ultimately does more harm than good. (This is not to say that certain people aren’t more predisposed to addiction than others.)

There was a time, going back a couple three or four decades, when just about every excessive behavior was called an addiction, and that the persons engaging in such behaviors had the illness. Overeaters had food addictions, people who too often stopped by the casino had gambling addictions, notably horny people had sex addictions, etc.

It takes no great insight into human motivations to detect the similar psychological processes in attachments to other people and to addictive substances, hence “love” and “food” and “gambling” etc. “addictions.” Like eating, like sex, they’re all pleasurable activities. But that hardly makes any of those compulsions diseases.

In 1989 Stanton Peele published “Diseasing of America: Addiction Treatment Out of Control.” I’ll always love him for that, and for his arguing against court-mandated attendance at AA and other 12-step meetings for those whose intoxications had them running afoul of the law.

I found myself biting my tongue back when it seemed that every other person I knew was attending Narcotics Anonymous meetings. Most of those people are dead now, some for 30 years or more. “Working the steps” didn’t work for them. It was mostly a healthy fear of needles and the uncertainty of just what was in those street drugs that kept me from ever developing a heroin habit. That, and my desire to maintain a roof over my head without resorting to the sorts of crimes i just couldn’t see myself committing. Armed robbery was out of the question, seeing how I don’t point guns at people, and I never was pretty enough to be turning tricks.

 

[Trenchfriend]

I always leave 4/5 days between smoking pipe/cigar. Smoking every day? Nah...