h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Historically Isle of Wight Cheese was notoriously hard and the most common cheese, Chock Dog, was also called 'rock'. There are lots of stories about brencheese reportedly breaking people's teeth at nammettime, being used as grindstones and also used to make bullets when the French were raiding.

If you look up 'cheese' in the Isle of Wight Dialect Dictionary you see:

CAMMICKY CHEESE. Cheese made from milk flavoured with rest-harrow, giving it
a strong, rank taste.

CHOCK-DOG. Isle of Wight cheese; very hard or tough - sometimes called “Isle of Wight Rock” - is made from skimmed milk, and by keeping becomes exceedingly dry and hard. It is related that a cheese being sent to someone at a distance as a present, the recipient, not for a moment suspecting it was anything meant to be eaten, with great difficulty cut a hole through the middle of it, fitted it up, and used it for a grindstone with great success.

MINTY CHEESE. Cheese full of mites. See also: HOPPERS. Small maggots found in cheese

RAMMER CHEESE. Cheese made of new, or unskimmed, milk; the best kind of cheese.

VINNID CHEESE. Blue mouldy cheese.

The Isle of Wight of Cheese Company doesn't use the traditional recipes, specialising in soft cheeses that have won prizes at the British Cheese Awards. It's not the same.

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I could use a wedge of chock-dog as a door-stopper then.

Just read on a Dutch site ( https://www.ttm.nl/transport/rotterdam-stuurt-hyperintelligente-container-op-wereldreis/116757/ ) about the launch of an intelligent freight container, equipped with sensors (tilt, humidity, air pollution, impact, location, etc.) to track what happens to it, solar panels to check if mounting those makes sense. It drew my attention because the project is called "Container 42".

Children's illustrator John T Kenney has been posthumously given a plaque. John T Kenney was not only an illustrator for numerous Ladybird books but also the 4th illustrator of the Railway Series (commonly called 'Thomas the Tank Engine'). Author Reverend Awdry didn't usually get on with the illustrators, complaining about their lack of accuracy when depicting the engines, but Kenney was the one he worked best with. Kenney combined realism with a sense of magic – later illustrators were increasingly realistic with the technical details, but lost the vibrant, colourful whimsical beauty.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leicestershire-48558768

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"US Christian group condemns Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett’s [Good Omens] as ‘making satanism appear normal’ – but petition wrong company"


http://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jun/20/petition-netflix-cancel-amazon-prime-good-omens-christian-neil-gaiman-terry-pratchett



So much

This is my favorite part of the article.

~~~~~~~~~
Good Omens is “another step to make satanism appear normal, light and acceptable”, and “mocks God’s wisdom”. God, they complain, is “voiced by a woman” – Frances McDormand – the antichrist is a “normal kid” and, most importantly, “this type of video makes light of Truth, Error, Good and Evil, and destroys the barriers of horror that society still has for the devil”. They are calling on Netflix to cancel the show.

Gaiman responded to the petition on Twitter, writing: “I love that they are going to write to Netflix to try and get #GoodOmens cancelled. Says it all really. This is so beautiful ... Promise me you won’t tell them?”
~~~~~~~~~

Can we have it on Netflix? Please?

That would be great if the petition actually increases it's accessibility.

I wonder if it will eventually be available on BluRay/DVD. I'd love to own it with all the extras.

How many people will now be compelled to read the book to see what all the fuss is about?

Teaching people to think for themselves would be nice. So that if you have a good story, they will be able to decide whether it is worth following up on. (I think that sums up the message of "Good Omens" quite nicely, come to think of it)

Being of the Christian persuasion myself, I have witnessed some sermons (usually at funerals) which I could only survive by categorising them under the header "Theatre / Satire, not suitable for young viewers". If any divine plan would be like that, I wouldn't see the point following it, as it wouldn't matter what I did, being screwed either way.

In a field in the German state Hesse an undetected WWII bomb exploded spontanously. Now imagine it wasn't a field but a town... (They find WWII bombs at building sites in cities all the time)

I think that was the autoplow option of that e-field....?

Believe me, I've imagined it – they discovered there was a large UXB underneath my school's sports hall a couple of months after I left…
A few years ago my wife got a day off work when her work was shut when a bomb was discovered near her place of work, but my place of work was just outside the dangerzone so I had to work.
Here's a video of a mine they discovered last month:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-hampshire-48327618



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I can imagine them exploding when someone digs them out, but I didn't think it would happen if they just lie there.

Contracting and expanding soil due to weather can cause them to go off. Also, maybe the explosive materials just become more unstable.

I think I learned about them going off in a freeze from the TV show M*A*S*H.

The photo of the crater reminded me of the story of my physics/chemistry teacher, who claimed to have made a bit of nitroglycerin (why?: because I can.) She put it in a small glass bottle, placed it in a field and started tossing stones at it from a distance. When it finally went off, the resulting crater made her vow not to do something like that again, ever.

My father tells a similar story. Back in the early '50s when he was a school kid, the state (Texas) banned cherry bombs (1/4 sticks of dynamite basically). He and his friends had a lot of fun with those. He talked about growing up in the small town of Halletsville, going down to the creek and throwing them either into the creek to "catch fish" or throwing them up the storm drains under the town's main street to watch the man-hole covers bounce.

Anyway, they made cherry bombs illegal so he and his friends resorted to other sources for their explosive fun. One of his friend's father worked for the road department. They borrowed his key to an explosives shack and "liberated" some blasting cap material and some timed fuse. They basically made a pipe bomb with a 30 second fuse.

One Saturday, they decided to detonate their creation. The best place they could think of to do so was a large pile of dirt/sand behind the town school building (2-3 stories). They buried the pipe bomb deep into the center of the pile, lit the fuse and started running, counting out loud until around 25 when they dove for the ground. In his words, "I heard the most god-awfully loud explosion I'd ever heard in my life". They didn't bother checking the damage and instead ran back down to the creek and hid in the storm drain as they heard sirens all over town. They didn't return to the scene of the crime until Monday morning.

There was a sign on the front door of the school, indicating that it was closed. They ventured around back and saw that the pile of dirt was now a crater and many of the windows of the school building, at least 50 yards away, were broken.

He said that was the last time he ever experimented with home-made explosives.





To be honest, I don't know if this story was true. It was told to a couple of other fathers on a road trip when I was a kid, we were just listening in, lurking as it were . The conversation could be described as a "B.S. session".

Bovine Secretion session?

Yes, exactly.