There's only so many syllables to go round, and some of the unfortunate combinations end up in names. The part of my childhood I spent in west Lancashire, I went to school with two Nutters and a Bucket. (Some of the older, odder names have died out, the local regimental memorials to the Boer War make surprisingly…

Gentlemen of Oscar's sort, certainly. While the word is a recent coinage, the tradition of which Wilde was the the veriest ornament has had the thing for centuries. Especially among the more earnest of us. For true mastery, delivered only in expression. (One of my early, inrequited crushes was a fencing master who…

Actually, you can be functionally illiterate and colonise half the world. You just have to be taking orders from a highly-literate complete bastard who knows exactly what he's doing and does not give one watery shit how wrong it is, so long as he gets his money.

Oh dear me yes. Engineers together, making cunning little engineer babies. And you just KNOW Scotty's in it for the long haul, looking forward to the day he gets to be the twinkly old Scots granddad.

Well, all of the people who'd been boycotting U2 for all the greenwashed 1-per-center bullshit bono pulls suddenly find themselves owning it after all. Getting a copy of, say, Mein Kampf that you never ordered differs (considerably) in degree, but not in nature.

There are a number of woods that can take a very high mechanical polish indeed. I don't make dildoes out of wood (yet, if a customer asked though...) but if I did, I'd be using something with a close grain, a high mechanical polish, shelllac to seal and a decent wax finish. One of the edible waxes - beeswax would be…

Germany's birthrate is the lowest in Europe and falling, so, Germans, apparently.

That's unusual, although the number of masochists I know is quite a small dataset. They're all HUGE wimps outside a kink context.

Exactly. My second-oldest disapproved of my brief nudity of chin. "Daddy! No! Shave it back on!" Which cuteness we remind him of regular, made all the more hilarious by him growing up to be 6'6" and about 150kg of regular workouts.

This. I've long loathed Gervais as I've loathed every purveyor of cringe comedy. He sets up an obvious target and invites us to laugh, and the thing the targets have in common is that they are clearly at the very least not too bright. The point of David Brent, as far as Gervais was concerned, was that he was an…

Heh. I'm British by birth, English by accident, and Lancastrian by the Grace of A Loving God. Although Burnley is most of the way to Yorkshire, and therefore Suspect. Yon littlun isn't a northerner.

No, west midlands. Birmingham, Black Country or Dudley, but you'd need a native to tell them apart. Which I ain't. I'm reasonably precise with northern accents, being a northerner myself, and I can usually get within ten miles or so within Lancashire.

Midlands. Looong way from Cockney.

Because wrong is being done and refusing to help remedy it at opportunities - that present themselves every day - makes you complicit.

I've heard too many three-in-the-morning crying jags to offer any sincere reassurance.

Oh, certainly they do. A lot of them can't hide it altogether, though. Especially when it's 'just us guys' and they think they're going to get a friendly audience. In as much as there's a point I'm making, here, it's that men who say they don't see the problem when they almost certainly count at least two or…

Really? Surely they smell better? (Recalling a conversation over drinks with the lass that had to clean the men's sauna at a gym I used to use).

They're not THAT hard to spot. If you actually listen to your female friends about what the problem men are like.

No. There is this huge unaddressed assumption in your thinking that violence is a symptom of mental illness. It's not. Violence is done every day by mentally healthy individuals, who've been trained to it and had it justified to them (the argument about whether the justifications are valid is a separate one) in…

One theory I heard, and it's got a certain logic to it, is that after one abusive relationship, the abusee - usually the woman, that being the way these things go more often than not - ends up with quite obvious and prickly defenses that the more decent sort of man notes and backs off from out of respect, or…