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Try 'blootered'. It's pretty common in Canada, probably from some Scottish connection.

... 'slipped into' a Jersey (that's how I first heard this one)

In Canada, the practice is referred to as "nicky nicky nine doors". I was a crappy runner, so did not play very often. This sounds like a Anglo-Canadianized bastardization of Nickanan Night. I love the way language moves around and changes.

This is a good idea for pre-death coffin use: https://www.boredpanda.com/shelf-transforms-to-coffin-william-warren/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=organic

Or anyone who's actually good and useful leaves in frustration

I still get incredibly nostalgic for my childhood home whenever I smell the warm, plasticky odor of baby dolls -- the hard kind that don't do anything but lie there waiting for you to change their clothes -- or things made out of whatever those baby dolls were made of.

Mmmmmm! Pipe tobacco! I loved that smell, too, even when it was burning.

Smokers are true to their brands. When i was a teen in Canada, particular high-schools had preferred cigarettes, which would distinguish students of one school from another. As an adult, I always smoked 'my' brand of cigarettes. It really is crazy because of course there isn't much difference. I...

Drum tobacco really is nice smelling (the tobacco, not the smoke). A friend of mine used to make his rollups with Drum, and I loved to just sniff the bagful of leaf.

As an ex-smoker, I can say that the images, while gross, never were a deterrent. But the increasing prices certainly were. I quit when a pack of 20 hit $20 Australian (I guess around 10 years ago). A pack of $20 costs close to $50 now, more if you want foreign cigs, like Marlboros. Australian...

Yeah, horribly scabbed knees, grazed shins, welts and bruises were part of playground fun.

When I was a kid in Toronto, playground equipment that we called a 'merry-go-round' (you might know it as a 'roundabout') was very popular. I remember tons of kids running madly to get the thing going, then other kids jumping on (or off) while is whirled crazily. It was just so much fun. What a...

I thought at first glance that the article would be about how children are surprised at the age of their parents. My mind immediately went back to a time when I was 13 years old and out shopping with my mother. She presented her driver's licence to the salesclerk as ID for a cheque, and I...

Not a 'secret tenant' story exactly, but definitely a unwanted guest tale ... When I was a university student I had the good fortune to find an inexpensive, small self-contained flat in a large early 20th-century house that was perfect for a penurious student. It has a compact kitchen and...

bit of a bust, isn't it?

I I think I am one of those people here who you say 'laments' the wane of UFO stories. I'm not really heartbroken (I don't even really think there is any intelligent life 'out there') but I would like to know what the unexplained aerial phenomena are.

Not really disappointed. I don't think there are 'spacemen' out there watching us. But I am curious about the possible role of governments and other bodies in this phenomenon.

All this talk about the much anticipated Pentagon report about aerial phenomena leads me to believe that we are being toughened up for the eventual news (not the upcoming report, but later) that we are not alone. Any thoughts on this? Am I out of my mind (about this, I mean)? From today's...

An update on this today: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/may/26/italian-cable-car-brakes-tampered-with-say-prosecutors "The emergency brakes on a cable car that crashed in northern Italy on Sunday, killing 14 people, had been “tampered with”, prosecutors said as three people were arrested...

These two headlines were together in the Guardian Australian edition:

Not vans though. Most trucks are male, too.

Well, I did mention it was crappy!

I wasn't old enough to mock anything (and I couldn't follow the simple story lines) but I was horrified/fascinated by those lips. Even now they seem otherworldly, and too red and juicy. [edit]I just realized that I could not have seen red lips because television was black-and-white. But you...

The lips in the old Clutch Cargo crappy cartoon series really disturbed me.

If you got rip-roaring drunk, what name do you think you would choose to legally change?

You are right and you are right! I watched it recently, and it is still fresh and wonderful. I rave about it still.

One of my favourite (not favourite, if you know what I mean) scarecrows is from The Singing Detective (1986). It really creeped me out the first time I watched the series, and I still find it a bit disturbing:

As soon as I read that, I thought of Sir Ambrose Ambercrombie from The Loved One. I checked out the IMDB, and discovered that, yes indeed, he was "the inspiration for the character Sir Ambrose Abercrombie in Evelyn Waugh's satire of Hollywood "The Loved One."

Exactly! When my nephew was very young (perhaps 3), he would sit in is little car seat and listen to my sister swearing at all the drivers whose skills she deplored. Of course, when my mother the saint (his grandma) had the little guy in her own car, she was more decorous. My nephew was perhaps...

Ooops! Missed that one entirely. Thank you. I've just been reeling (fuming) about that reimplated ectopic pregnancy nonsense when I first read about it. So let me restate this: Will anyone ever be held responsible for not getting a death certificate for an unperceived pregnancy that results in...

What idiots. I wonder if anybody ever bothered getting a death certificate for an early miscarriage back in 1890. There are millions of fertilized eggs flushed down toilets every year, frequently when women are unaware they are pregnant at all. Not every fertilized egg is going to become a...

Sorry. I thought Li was the victim.

Wendigo and Windigo are just spelling variations of the same name, which is a mythological creature in Algonquian culture. (There is also Wendigo psychosis, one manifestation of which was that poor man on a bus in western Canada a few years ago who was killed and chewed on by a First Nations man...

This sent chills up and down my spine. It also sounded familiar. This is "the moors" scene in American Werewolf in London (one of my favourite movies). What do you think?

I have three mail stories. 1) In my youth, I liked to shop in a wonderful second-hand shop in Toronto that sold all sorts of wonders: jewellery, lamps, clothes, books, buttons -- you name it. I was browsing through a selection of old postcards and found one addressed to my long-dead maternal...

I think it was in the movie Serpico that the cops set up a sting of this nature to gather all the bail-jumpers and people with large numbers of outstanding tickets

That Crabbus or Bunyip looks surprisingly like a dugong.

You mean, like now? Please write it!

I had one of those woollen dickies when I was a child. I can attest that those things add great warmth under the coat in the depths of a Canadian winter.

When I was a child, I was a renowned cry-baby. I had a crying fit beside a fenced-in field and my sobs drew all the cows to the fence. My mother and sisters laughed their faces off, provoking more tears from me and more interest by even more cows. It was a vicious circle that stopped spinning...

I took an old-fashioned steam train trip several years ago. The smoke and filth and noise were horrendous (I was coughing soot for days afterwards). When we passed a field of cattle, the poor animals took huge fright and positively bolted away from the tracks at great speed. So, yeah, spooked.

My favourite Tok Pisin word is pikininny bilong kwin (Prince Charles)

I never knew that this was a REAL song. We just use to wave our arms around, like hula dancers, and just sing "na na na-na-na, na-na na-na na-na na ..." after singing "There's a town in France where the ladies wear no pants"

The third and fourth lines of this little ditty rang a bell. My mother taught us a song (for singing in the car on long drives) that has dubious origins but we learned the clean and wholesome version. I learned the "dirty" version later. Do your ears hang low? Do they wobble to and fro? Can you...

Another version: There's a town in France where the ladies wear no pants

Discussions and musings like these, above, are what keep me coming back to the FT.

A (sane) reddit I frequent, called Unresolved Mysteries, has covered a lot about the Doodler; if you do a search, you will see. Supposedly the police were well aware of who this guy was (lots of people saw him) but could not do anything about it given the homophobic nature of the times -- nobody...

First, you inflate "recreational drug use" to "addiction", then you impugn my "standards". Finally, you have made one insignificant person the catalyst for the miseries of thousands (the supply chain you speak of). This man was an occasional user, not an addict who worked full time and lived in...

Odd response given that I said he had never done anything illegal except some recreational drug use. Who were his victims?

The stone tape theory, when you think about it, isn't any crazier than the idea that you can talk into a machine and your voice can be recorded on a piece of plastic ribbon running between spools, or that talk over many kilometres through with the use of a plastic phone that's not physically...