In the name of all that's holy, will you cut it out with the broadcasting of the craft secrets? There's a world full of youtube watchers and instructables readers who think they're learning the skills, but so long as they didn't learn the tongue thing, they were never going to be true adepts.

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…

Hang on, help my goggling disbelief, did you just equate ordinary domestic maintenance with participation in genocide? Because one of those things doesn't have, as its just dessert, a lifetime of never sleeping easy ever again.

Your optimism is touching and speaks well of you. It also caused me to laugh all the air out of my body.

... with the possible exception of sanitary plumbing. Super Mario notwithstanding.

Although this fellow is a lot more cheerful than granddad, who was a miserable bugger.

Can I just point out that if you're doing it right and not just machining plantation timber for mass-produced stuff (nothing wrong with that, some of my best friends are mass-produced plantation timber goods) there is a similar level of care and attention required for cutting wood. A tree could well have spent a…

Well, now I know what my command of Italian sounds like to an Italian. At least I hope so; somehow he makes his hesitant use of a language he's unfamiliar with sound like found poetry.

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…

What's wanted now is a 1.21 gigawatt tea urn and a phased plasma cricket bat and science will finally have WEAPONISED ENGLISHNESS.

What's G-13 do?

Probably reparable: a brief overpressure will bend and buckle a few bits and pieces, but nothing too serious. It's the fire-damaged bits you have to scrap, as high temperatures do things to metals that make them useless on an ongoing basis.

I work in a woodworking shop. I've got any number of scars from places where I took all precautions. (and if you want scary african diseases, I survived Malaria as a child. Ebola? I've shit scarier.)

Just because they're trained, doesn't mean they always follow the training. It's like any other workshop accident. They swear up and down they had all the guards in place and followed all the safety drills, but lo! they're bleeding all over the table saw. Anyway, since the time it was first described by science to…

80 pounds would be, almost certainly, jousting armour, which was sporting equipment for a full-contact sport played on the back of galloping horsees. For fighting in, more like 30-50lb of metal distributed all over, almost no restriction on movement, and you tire more slowly than you would carrying that weight in a…

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, quality costs money. You want cheap, go buy slave-made rubbish with the other peasants.

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…