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

Damn - must read the backlog. Bluebottle beat me to it.

You got a few of your facts mixed up there.

yes, sorry, John Hurt.

I love this thread.

PH for now: the guy who works in my office who insists on having the window open wide all day (I don't mind periodic window opening) and now my hands are so cold and blue I can't type and he's gone home AND LEFT IT OPEN -in-the-eye-for-him-tomorrow

Did I? What ones? (genuinely interested)

Which is where the Roman Emperor Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus got the nickname "Little Boots" as he was always accompanying his father and his army on campaigns when he was a little boy. He is better known to us as the Emperor Caligula, the party dude.


*Writes a reply. Uses Wikipedia to verify his information.*

Oh...

Oh, dear....

Right, this is my fault, actually you were totally right. I thought you had gotten Caligula mixed up with Julius Caesar, but it turns out they share the same name.

...

*Deletes earlier "correction."*

...

That's not fair.

Didn't a lot of Emperors adopt the name Julius Caesar?

All the early emperors had the name Caesar because each one had been adopted into the current emperor's family. None of them was actually the son of the previous emperor. They all had a long string of names but, without checking, I don't think any of them had the name Julius.

I've got a new petty hate,.........Stormy weather!....we had a right bad storm last night?

Checked all the sheds today, to see if they still had roofs, all OK

Smudger.

English history being 'sexed up' on TV for the U.S.A i.e. the rubbishy series The Tudors.

By the way I think Caesar was a title not a name, the German 'Kaiser' derived from it, a title similar to King

Caesar was originally a cognomen or family name for a branch of the Julii. Gaius Octavius, later known as Augustus, changed his name to Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus when he was adopted by Julius Caesar as part of Julius Caesar's will. This name change was standard practice after adoption. As subsequent emperors were also adopted, they would also have taken the name of Caesar. Eventually it may have become a title instead of just a name.

Pretty much what CD said. Kaiser, Tsar, etc. are etymologically derived from Caesar, and Caesar was a name which came to be synonymous with 'emperor' as any fule kno.

PH: Posts to social media that are duplicated across platforms.

I may need to explain this one, and what about it is starting to really annoy me...

There's a few different social media platforms out there, with Facebook and Twitter being the largest. They've got their differences, and usually it's different people/personalities that use them. Now, if you run a social media account for somewhere, tweeting and updating can get laborious, so using software like Hootsuite to automatically post to all of them in one go is a real time saver. That in itself isn't a petty hate of mine, I do this myself.

What is a petty hate though, is when you get "lazy messages." Almost always this is done by people posting to Facebook or Instagram, who've set things up to automatically post to Twitter too, and then don't take Twitter's character limit into account.

So what you get is a tweet that gets cut off quite quickly by a link to the full thing. It's bleeping annoying, and I've started to mute anything that links out with those particular link shortening codes.

Quantum physics.

When I grill bacon, I always line the grill pan with tin foil. The bacon fat always seems to go THROUGH the tin foil.

It can only be down to quantum physics!

PP.

that short blast of lava hot water when you change the temperature of the shower... Ice cold is also available...

I didn't know so obviously I am not a 'fule'

I just checked the H2G2 Fule Book and you're not in there kasdog.

PH: people telling me that I can't be in favour of free speech if I'm against Ched Evans being offered a job at a football club... (even while I acknowledge that prisoners should have the chance at a "normal" life after jail...)

What's that to do with free speech?

apparently it's all mixed in together

People who claim to know anything about how language evolves saying that bad grammar, bad spelling and slang do not help language evolve.