Fact For The Day

Michael Head from Shack/Pale Fountains/Red Elastic Band, etc is related by marriage to Karim Benzema!

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His wifes accent is great, Scouse in French.

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Isnt it odd that Grant shapps mentions it but Mick Jones doesn’t?

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All the talk of rhyming slang got me Googling earlier.

Turns out the mild pejorative “berk” originated from the not so mild Cockney slang “Berkshire Hunt”.

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That’s one that I knew. :sweat_smile: There’s a hilarious Martin Amis review of Robert Bly’s Iron John in which he explains how Bly’s attempt at forming a mythopoetic men’s movement is hobbled (in the UK, at least) by the title and its meaning in rhyming slang.

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Always used to make me snigger in a slightly schoolboy way hearing West Ham fans chanting "irons, irons … ".

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& ‘arris’ = arse comes from ‘aristotle’ = bottle via ‘bottle & glass’ = arse

French backslang is just as much fun
Keuf = cop from ‘fuck’ backwards (in French accent)

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and a record is a scud. From disque backwards.
I’m off to the alps on sunday after an absence of over 20years. Good to be brushing up on the lingo :joy:

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‘tish’ = weed (‘shit’ backwards)
I think that’s my entire vocab exhausted

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𝟮𝟭 𝗙𝗮𝗰𝘁𝘀 𝗮𝗯𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝗔𝘂𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗹𝗶𝗮 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝗱𝗶𝗱𝗻’𝘁 𝗸𝗻𝗼𝘄!

  1. The Australian Alps get more snow than the Swiss Alps.
  2. 90% of Australians live on the coast.
  3. Tasmania has the cleanest air in the world.
  4. The Great Barrier Reef is the largest ecosystem in the world. It is made up of nearly 3,000 individual reefs and can be seen from space.
  5. Australia has over 60 separate wine regions.
  6. Fraser Island in QLD is the largest sand island in the world.
  7. The Indian Pacific train has the longest straight section of train track in the world.
  8. The Great Ocean Road is the world’s largest war memorial.
  9. 80% of Australian animals are unique to Australia.
  10. Australia has the world’s longest golf course measuring more than 1,350 kms long.
  11. Australia is home to 21 of the world’s 25 most venomous snakes.
  12. It would take around 29 years to visit one new Aussie beach every day – there are 10,685 of them!
  13. Australia is the 6th largest country in the world.
  14. 91% of the country is covered by native vegetation.
  15. 33% of Australians were born in another country.
  16. Australia is the only continent in the world without an active volcano.
  17. Australia is home to the longest fence in the world, the Dingo Fence. Originally built to keep dingos away from fertile land, the fence is now 5,614 km long.
  18. The Australian dollar is considered to be the most advanced currency in the world – its waterproof, made of polymer and notoriously hard to counterfeit.
  19. Australia is the only continent covered by a single country.
  20. The world’s oldest fossil was discovered in Australia – 3.4 billion years old.
  21. Australia is home to more than 1,500 species of spiders
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This is the first picture ever uploaded to the World Wide Web.
It features an all-female parody pop band founded by employees at the CERN laboratory. They share their initials with CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. The band’s first song, written founding member and CERN graphic designer Michele de Gennaro, was about her difficult love affair with a CERN physicist.

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The story behind the song “Why Did You Do It” by Stretch.

It was apparently written after they’d been slated to join Fleetwood Mac, only to find after they’d arrived on tour in the US that they’d been stitched up by Mick Fleetwood, who then accused them of being a bogus band operating under their trademarked name.
Kindly nicked from Bill Brewster’s Patreon page.

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Glastonbury will become the most densely populated place on the planet this weekend 122000 people per square mile beating Manila which is 111000 people per square mile.

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Widely regarded as the guardian angel of female heavy vehicle drivers, Toots Holzheimer was a hard-working Mum of eight who ran her own trucking company delivering freight across Queensland from the 1960’s until the early 1990’s.

The bulk of Toot’s work however was running Cairns to Weipa - servicing Cape York Peninsula settlements without the luxury of bitumen roads, power steering, forklifts, phone communication, suspension, rattle-guns etc.

A woman of her word, Toots battled corrugation, melon holes, mosquitoes and relentless sandflies as she dug her way out of bogs and wash-aways to keep her promise to be the first truck in and the last truck out before the annual monsoons hit the Cape.

At a time when societal norms dictated women ‘keep the home fires burning’ Toots proved women can very successfully manage work and family life. The hardest part of being a ‘woman in a man’s world’ at that time however was having no support from family, friends, society or government.

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She did all that whilst recording all that great music with The Maytals :clap:

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Probably less in all truth.

my pals and i were talking about this this weekend. once the boomers die off, it’ll be significantly less than 18%.