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I've never really understood how bruce willis became a big star...

You know what the worst thing is? Corden made a name for himself via the sketch show Corden and Horne, which was actually genuinely funny.
Unfortunately, it seems he's leaned into the over-the-top persona aspect in chasing fame, but I can hardly blame him considering it's worked.

I can't say i ever head of this Corden guy. Then again I never head of Noel Gallagher either and he just popped up on my bing feed for refusing to wear a mask.

Speaking of british media I'm still mystified as to how blake's 7 never got a reboot or why the young ones only had one season.

Young Ones has two series?

The came the one series Filthy, Rich and Catflap.

Then three seasons of Bottom.

 Super Ready wrote:
You know what the worst thing is? Corden made a name for himself via the sketch show Corden and Horne, which was actually genuinely funny.
Unfortunately, it seems he's leaned into the over-the-top persona aspect in chasing fame, but I can hardly blame him considering it's worked.

Don't forget Gavin & Stacey too. Everyone seemed to go nuts over that.

Crispy78 wrote:
Don't forget Gavin & Stacey too. Everyone seemed to go nuts over that.

Yeah, I purposely didn't mention it because I have no idea why that was so popular either. It was, at best, mildly amusing.

Matt Swain - the Young Ones ended because half of its characters moved onto other things. If you liked it and haven't seen Bottom yet, go do so, you won't regret it.

Had a weird timeslip were I somehow lost* a day, encountered housemates bit of rough on the landing of the shared house, and as is proper and British "mornings" was exchanged and nothing else, then maybe gfive minutes later encountered him in the corner shop, asked him how he got here so fast, only to be told that was yesterday morning

* Suspect Red Bull, Jack and no sleep may have been a factor in this whole weird deju vu nonsense

 Matt Swain wrote:

Speaking of british media I'm still mystified as to how blake's 7 never got a reboot

Because, despite how good it was, it was intended, and is still perceived, as cheapo sci-fi for kids. Plus by the end it was... somewhat erratic in terms of quality.

The B7 I remember was hardly for kids.

If we’re thinking of the same B7 then it was very much for kids. Enjoyable for adults, yes, but they weren’t the primary audience.

Could this topic be more mundane, in a thread about the weird and wonderful?

My wife is a Pharmacy Technician. She used to work in a hospital, and her super power was to have every elevator open for her, as she approached it. Never has to push the call button. I observed this while we lived in an apartment. She’d walk up to the elevator (we were 12th floor) and “bing” it would open.

By myself? Never. With her? So close to always that I recall a *handful* of specific times it didn’t happen. Still works for her.

We have 6 dogs in the house. Every time a doorbell rings on TV they all start barking and run to the door.

We have not lived in a house with a functioning doorbell, or a house folks will come up and knock on the door as long as we've had these dogs.

How do they know what a doorbell is? How do they know to run tot the door when they hear one?

Things that make you go Hmmmmm.

 CptJake wrote:
We have 6 dogs in the house. Every time a doorbell rings on TV they all start barking and run to the door.

We have not lived in a house with a functioning doorbell, or a house folks will come up and knock on the door as long as we've had these dogs.

How do they know what a doorbell is? How do they know to run tot the door when they hear one?

Things that make you go Hmmmmm.

TV and music are things that I notice many animals just sort of tune out and ignore. It's not that they can't hear/see it but that some just see it as fake and ignore it; others engage with it directly.

That said life changes can also influence them, when our last husky got old she got afraid of thunderstorms. Never had a bad experience with one, but suddenly she did not like them at all - full on whines and body shakes and all. Oddly this also extended to audio from the computer and TV - again something she'd never paid any attention to before now suddenly the lightning form the "bioware" intro to a game was suddenly the most terrifying thing!


Your dogs or one of them might have picked up the habit perhaps when visiting a friend; they noted that the doorbell sound announced people coming in and then it clicked and the others learned it from that dog.

I've always had preposterous luck with random generation mechanics in video games. Like, if someone has mathed out the odds of X happening, I will beat those odds. Usually. Somehow.

In terms of strange, I have a strange form of handedness called "cross-dominance". Apparently it's only present in less than 1% of the population, the result being that I'm neither fully left or right handed. It's not ambidextrousness, which is equal ability with both hands, some tasks I can do with both, some with only one.

Left hand only - writing, painting, using a craft knife (chisel tip),
Right hand only - using a kitchen knife, craft knife (standard tip), playing the guitar, scissors, other household items such as an iron
Both hands equally well - using a rifle, fencing, using a pool cue, screwdriver, hammer or saw.

Sounds rather mundane but it's always puzzled me, and gets the occasional laugh when someone's all confused and I hear "wait, aren't you left handed?".



As for something mysterious, I've always wondered how my life would have been had a single train been on time instead of delayed.

- Approx. 5 years ago I went out with a friend drinking with some of his workmates, one of whom I begun chatting to throughout the night. The next day I'm on my way to uni and the train is (as expected) delayed. I go round the side of the station to smoke and bump into an old friend of mine who I haven't seen in about 10 years, who coincidentally was also at the same uni. We have a good catchup on the train and she tells me the girl from the previous night is single. We're now due to get married in 2022 (after Covid has hopefully died down).

Now I don't know what delayed that train. Could be a signal fault, could be the driver was late himself, could be one of a hundred different things, but if that train was even 5 minutes quicker, I wouldn't have gone to smoke and bumped into my friend and asked the girl out. Who knows how different my life could have been.

 Valkyrie wrote:
In terms of strange, I have a strange form of handedness called "cross-dominance". Apparently it's only present in less than 1% of the population, the result being that I'm neither fully left or right handed. It's not ambidextrousness, which is equal ability with both hands, some tasks I can do with both, some with only one.

Left hand only - writing, painting, using a craft knife (chisel tip),
Right hand only - using a kitchen knife, craft knife (standard tip), playing the guitar, scissors, other household items such as an iron
Both hands equally well - using a rifle, fencing, using a pool cue, screwdriver, hammer or saw.

The older I've got the more I think the whole left-right hand thing is a tiny bit of science and a lot of rubbish.

A lot of left handed people might write with their left hand; use a computer mouse with their right; eat food using cutlery the normal way etc... Plus we went through multiple generations where you were not allowed to be left hand writing; you wrote with the right and that was it. So if all those people could learn then surely a greater part of it isn't so much "left/right dominant" but more a case that you simply spend ages practising to write with only one hand.
Meanwhile in the real world, if you do building or anything hands on you often have to learn how to use the other hand because of tricky situations or just because one arm is tired.

I think its just reinforce because its quicker to teach kids to write with one hand than both and it stems from there. You're asked as a kit "which hand are you" and if its left or right that's how most other tasks will be shown to you. Barring computers and eating of course

Not eating. My mother is left-handed, and I was taught to eat that way. But I'm right handed. To this day I'm constantly switching hands for knife and fork, usually several times during a meal. Neither way feels correct to me, since my natural tendency was partially overwritten by the way I was taught.

Not computers either. She puts the mouse on the other side of the keyboard and uses it with her left hand and types differently.
Though part of the keyboard thing is an age thing. She was unfortunately taught to peck at a typewriter, rather than rest both hands on the keyboard and type at a decent speed.
But even in other lefthanded people I've seen a very different approach to keyboard and mouse.

My family, on both sides, have many 67% one hand, 33% the other. Both my parents, myself, and both my sons fall into this category.

My Dad writes right, eats right, but all sports are left. But he shoots right.

My Mom writes right, eats left, sports right but shoots left.

One sons mostly left, the other mostly right, but they’re a mix too.

Apparently I started out mostly left, but changed to mostly right (probably mimicking my teachers) when I got to school.

My mother’s left-handed and writes upside down.

That’s a cool adaptation!

 LordofHats wrote:
I've always had preposterous luck with random generation mechanics in video games. Like, if someone has mathed out the odds of X happening, I will beat those odds. Usually. Somehow.

I have the opposite: If you can roll badly, I probably will. Especially in games like Binding of Isaac where you can luck out with the items you get. I always got gak.

 Valkyrie wrote:
In terms of strange, I have a strange form of handedness called "cross-dominance". Apparently it's only present in less than 1% of the population, the result being that I'm neither fully left or right handed. It's not ambidextrousness, which is equal ability with both hands, some tasks I can do with both, some with only one.

Left hand only - writing, painting, using a craft knife (chisel tip),
Right hand only - using a kitchen knife, craft knife (standard tip), playing the guitar, scissors, other household items such as an iron
Both hands equally well - using a rifle, fencing, using a pool cue, screwdriver, hammer or saw.

Sounds rather mundane but it's always puzzled me, and gets the occasional laugh when someone's all confused and I hear "wait, aren't you left handed?".

I have an even more mundane version of that. There are some things I do and do better with my off hand, but not as many as you count. My handwriting is bad on both sides though XD

For a period of roughly 18 months, a Welsh village would lose its Broadband at 7am every morning.

Openreach tried everything they could, including replacing cables.

The legitimate mystery has now been solved.

This is how the resistance started. Not with the powerful, knowledgeable elite, but by accident in the outer reaches. After years of oppression at the hands of their robot overlords, the people of Hicksville renewed their watching of the ancient Tell-o-visions in secret. In doing so, they unwittingly destroyed the cohesive network of information the robots shared.

Their communication networks in shambles, the robots fractured into warring sub-states, each claiming greater understanding of the universe than their brothers. The humans, dulled by their return to tell-o-vision barely took notice.

I'm just rather amazed that the TV had range on that signal interference that was enough to knock out the village.

I know when my sister is home her phone will often knock out/dominate the internet wifi signal and I get stuttery noises on my speakers at night; but to hit a whole countryside village that's some signal!

Not sure how the English countryside rolls... but would they have the old-style antenna up on a pole sort of thing? Maybe it was backfeeding and emitting a signal through the antenna instead of the other way round?

(I mean, I have no idea if that's possible, but is sounds plausible, doesn't it? )

 greatbigtree wrote:
Not sure how the English countryside rolls... but would they have the old-style antenna up on a pole sort of thing? Maybe it was backfeeding and emitting a signal through the antenna instead of the other way round?

(I mean, I have no idea if that's possible, but is sounds plausible, doesn't it? )

If its Wales they'll almost certainly have an antenna up a pole/tree/roof for reception. That's the only way I can assume it was causing the issue as well. Even with the analogue signal being turned off now they might have had an older TV and had a digital converter fitted.

 Overread wrote:
I'm just rather amazed that the TV had range on that signal interference that was enough to knock out the village.

I know when my sister is home her phone will often knock out/dominate the internet wifi signal and I get stuttery noises on my speakers at night; but to hit a whole countryside village that's some signal!

Anecdotal, and oooold recollection.

Once upon a time, before I became a Luddite, I did IT support for my old high school (yes, that does make me Screech).

One day, we had a BT Engineer visiting, though I forget why. Anyways, he was in the radio room, trying to find the telephone cable that ran through it. He had this wand thingy, which could detect the signal on the line.

Now, that was necessary because the wiring in the school was a classic late 90’s early 00’s hodgepodge, gloriously bodged together as IT established it’s ever growing importance. And that room, having been renovated from Reception to the Radio Room around.....1995 or so....had of course been painted. And the cables did not escape the paint. So one could not tell them apart at a casual glance.

So out comes his wand of technowizardry....straight onto the network cable. It must’ve confused the servers or something (it could also have been sheer coincidence), because at that point, they fell over, taking the network with it.

This seems a similar affair?

Just had a weird thing happen literally a few minutes ago. I saw something move on the floor and at first I thought I hallucinated it or something (it is pretty late at night here). I go to the bathroom and I see a small animal crawling around. I wasn't sure what it was, so I went to find a box to catch it in, but before I could do so it left my apartment by crawling under the door (which has to be how it got in in the first place). I did a quick google search and it turns out it was a guinea pig. Somebody in my building must be missing a pet.

Not supernatural or anything, but that was strange!

Guinea pigs are fairly sizeable by small animal sizes - sort of like a smaller bunny. I've never seen one able to crawl under a door unless you've got several inches worth of space for it to get through. Now a hamster or vole or such would be more likely

 Overread wrote:
Guinea pigs are fairly sizeable by small animal sizes - sort of like a smaller bunny. I've never seen one able to crawl under a door unless you've got several inches worth of space for it to get through. Now a hamster or vole or such would be more likely

Probably a hamster then, I can't distinct those buggers myself, so probably the poster also didn't identify it correctly.