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.

My grandfather, early in the war, took part in fitting those radar sets. When I was a little boy, I got a book about WWII aircraft that included stuff about those night fighters, including about the radar. Granddad saw that, and was surprised to learn that it was no longer secret. And told us all that he'd been on…

Carrot cake pre-dates that by a fair ways. The Ministry of Food circulated recipes to take the strain off the sugar ration. Originally a german dish, apparently. WEAPONS OF THE ENEMY!

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…

The thing is, with nothing but pegs-and-string methods it's possible to be quite startlingly accurate when setting out a building - I've done it numerous times and while I get a certain amount of mockery for being overly detail-minded with it, I generally get within a few millimetres of what's on the drawing. Why the…

At least one of whom got one corner of the great pyramid well over a foot out of square. Aliens, my arse.

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.

There's also the trick of piping off the methane generated by all that decomposition and burning it in a small generator. A lot of landfill sites in the UK have those, they generate all the power the site crew need and contribute modestly to the national grid. A quick google shows that one company with eleven…

Incurable, certain death (which ebola isn't) that is asymptomatic and silently airborne transmissible for a month before the onset of symptoms. Ebola's a disease of bats and monkeys that doesn't work terribly well (from the virus's point of view) in humans because it kills its host before it can really go any…

No, but if you know where's selling those bad boys, I'm in the market for one.

The effect on the ones he planed against the grain is pretty cool. I wonder if he did that deliberately?

Yeah? Explain Currywurst, then.

Well, not all trees are any good for making useful stuff from. And of those that are, some are incredibly wasteful in use because they go to shit during seasoning. Ornamental Cherry wood, I'm looking at YOU, here. (I've got four trees' worth of that. Maybe a quarter of it is any good other than as firewood. Of…

Yes, do please source that. It'll be interesting to figure out how our police forces manage to brag about their clearup rates without any unsolved crime to measure it against. It'll also be a surprise to our Home Office and Office for National Statistics, who publish remarkable actually-existing data series for…

It can be done. You just have to want to make fire on a scale usually accessible only to the severely mentally ill.

Get to bollocks. There was a time when diving and shamming would get you shunned by your own team - still will, outside the top end of the professional game.