• We have updated the guidelines regarding posting political content: please see the stickied thread on Website Issues.

Great Acts Of Stupidity

Doctors warned Tereshin risked losing the use of his arms after he injected himself with three litres of the petroleum jelly to create cartoonish, bulging muscles, and shared the footage with his 350,000 Instagram followers.

Tereshin injected his biceps with three litres of petroleum jelly. Picture: Supplied

Tereshin injected his biceps with three litres of petroleum jelly.

Tereshin, from the city of Pyatigorsk in the Russian region of Stavropol Krai, had the corrective surgery delayed by nearly a year due to the coronavirus pandemic.

“I’m only 24, and my immune system is so far coping with this inflammation, but I really do not know what will happen next,” he said.

https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/r...h/news-story/4758f11b7c9bc60bcc07ad236193cf42
They look really sore and infected too. What an absolute idiot.
 
But the obvious question here is.......how on earth does he have 350,000 instagram followers?
Do they follow him in the same way that people slow down to look at a car crash?
 
But the obvious question here is.......how on earth does he have 350,000 instagram followers?
Do they follow him in the same way that people slow down to look at a car crash?
They may be waiting for him to post pictures of things getting worse.
 
Think he knows now but what his likely vodka soaked mind was thinking at the time
is a complete mystery.
 
That's a good point. I lived in a town in the Dallas, TX urban area and there was very good urban planning for the most part. You could ride your bike or walk on trails for miles in either direction into all the other suburban areas around Dallas. Even the older neighborhoods had sidewalks everywhere. In Albuquerque, we have many miles of bike trails but there are areas, like my neighborhood that is very old, that have no sidewalks along stretches. The speed limit on the road I would take if I wanted to walk to the grocery store is 30 mph, but people drive faster and try to go around someone who is turning and has to wait for traffic, when there is really no place to go around. They can't just use their brakes and take a breath. There is a bike trail on that road but it is not very good, just lines delineating where the bikes should go and that is where people pull around so if there were a biker it could be quite dangerous.
I like the frontage (access road, outer road, service road, feeder road, or parallel road) system that you have in Texas. We just don't have the space here unfortunately and even if we did I'm not sure our highway planners would implement it anyway. Don't forget, this is a country where there are cases of two (in one place three) very busy motorways being joined together with a roundabout- and traffic lights. Brilliant. So that can go in this thread as well- British highway designers/planners.
 
British highway designers/planners.
They're designed/planned here?
Could've fooled me.
Most places it looks like they built the roads first then drew the plans afterwards.

And for those of you in the US I think you'll find that most of your cities, seeing as they don't include any areas more than a couple of hundred years old, are not constrained by the town centres having historic buildings that were erected when you only even rarely had to have enough room for a horse and cart to pass through, so a lot of towns/cities are really based around car ownership, hence the big, wide, straight roads with little provision for pedestrians or cyclists.
 
They're designed/planned here?
Could've fooled me.
Most places it looks like they built the roads first then drew the plans afterwards.

And for those of you in the US I think you'll find that most of your cities, seeing as they don't include any areas more than a couple of hundred years old, are not constrained by the town centres having historic buildings that were erected when you only even rarely had to have enough room for a horse and cart to pass through, so a lot of towns/cities are really based around car ownership, hence the big, wide, straight roads with little provision for pedestrians or cyclists.
Having said which, there are few places in the UK that aren't accessible on foot barring the actions of idiots. Walking around in the US there are loads of places which simply have no provision for pedestrians at all. It's either climb over a wall or wander out into a highway where the users are absolutely not expecting to encounter pedestrians.

Hah. Must tell you sometime of my innocent wanderings about some of the dodgier parts of CT and NYC relying only on Being British to survive :)
 
We have plenty of places that seem to have been designed to deter any human activity outside a vehicle at all. Downright hostile, in fact. We also have a few old cities, like Santa Fe, where the Old Town has very narrow, winding streets. I used to have to shove a bus down through there sometimes. Yikes. Lovely old place though, where behemoth traffic should be banned anyway.

Speaking of roads, Texas, and buses, I had a retired highway engineer from Texas on a tour one time. It was a long one. The tour guide decided to do the mileage game, which is where everyone puts in their guess for the length of the trip. It's usually defined as the distance the bus travels between the beginning and the end of the tour, usually two hotels in different cities. It's easy to get a precise figure, since the driver has to account for every mile driven, every day, along with what state they were in. The guesses range wildly, of course, from 320 miles to 15,000.

Dexter, the old highway engineer, was an interesting fellow. He talked a bit about his work, recently completed. He said most of what they did over the years was experimental, dealing with explosive growth and constant change. That's easy to imagine for anyone who has driven in Texas. The freeways around Dallas resemble a bowl of spaghetti. You don't want to get lost in there.

So anyway, the last day rolled around and the tour guide asked me for my number. The winner received a groovy souvenir or some such. The mileage turned out to be something like 2,752. Dexter's guess was 2,752. I had seen people get pretty close before, but never a bullseye like that.
 
They're designed/planned here?
Could've fooled me.
Most places it looks like they built the roads first then drew the plans afterwards.

And for those of you in the US I think you'll find that most of your cities, seeing as they don't include any areas more than a couple of hundred years old, are not constrained by the town centres having historic buildings that were erected when you only even rarely had to have enough room for a horse and cart to pass through, so a lot of towns/cities are really based around car ownership, hence the big, wide, straight roads with little provision for pedestrians or cyclists.
Agreed. But there are a couple of things that annoy me here; firstly, in the 50s and 60s when they were building more new houses and even towns after the war, they had the chance to set things out much better. There's a late 50's estate near me where you can just about get two cars past each other but no room for parking. Also, old in old market towns instead of building new housing away from it, they often cram in more and more in the actual town, altering the feel of the place for a start and more importantly, causing extra congestion.

I once read an article in the L.A Times where back in the early 1900s before most people had cars (even there), they built a road three times wider than was usual. Of course there was uproar at the extra cost. The forefathers said they did it for the future because as a place grows they'd need more space. Sure enough it showed a picture of the road today and even with modern traffic, it's able to take two lanes each way, and has diagonal parking down each side. Because there's plenty of easy parking, all the shops and businesses- hardware stores/small markets/laundrettes/cafes etc are flourishing. (No need to go to out of town supermarkets/retail centres all the time). I know we would never have been able to have American or Australian style roads, but even a bit of foresight would have gone a long way to making things far better today.
 
…in the 50s and 60s when they were building more new houses and even towns after the war, they had the chance to set things out much better. There's a late 50's estate near me where you can just about get two cars past each other but no room for parking.

Town planners in 1950 would have required quite a good crystal ball to predict that there would be a 40% population increase (40M to 70M), but ten times as many cars on the road in 2021 as there were in their day (4M to 40M.)

maximus otter
 
Town planners in 1950 would have required quite a good crystal ball to predict that there would be a 40% population increase (40M to 70M), but ten times as many cars on the road in 2021 as there were in their day (4M to 40M.)

maximus otter
Well, they were building motorways since 1959 so they must had had a bit of an idea at least, that traffic levels were/would be rising. Perhaps they thought the 'working man' would never have been able to afford a car, true, but even so. And to end up with some major motorways, let alone dual carriageways, joined with a roundabout does seem a tad ridiculous especially for a 'first world' country.
 
Agreed. But there are a couple of things that annoy me here; firstly, in the 50s and 60s when they were building more new houses and even towns after the war, they had the chance to set things out much better. There's a late 50's estate near me where you can just about get two cars past each other but no room for parking. Also, old in old market towns instead of building new housing away from it, they often cram in more and more in the actual town, altering the feel of the place for a start and more importantly, causing extra congestion.

I once read an article in the L.A Times where back in the early 1900s before most people had cars (even there), they built a road three times wider than was usual. Of course there was uproar at the extra cost. The forefathers said they did it for the future because as a place grows they'd need more space. Sure enough it showed a picture of the road today and even with modern traffic, it's able to take two lanes each way, and has diagonal parking down each side. Because there's plenty of easy parking, all the shops and businesses- hardware stores/small markets/laundrettes/cafes etc are flourishing. (No need to go to out of town supermarkets/retail centres all the time). I know we would never have been able to have American or Australian style roads, but even a bit of foresight would have gone a long way to making things far better today.
I think the main difference, when comparing countries like the US and Australia to the UK, is the amount of space they have to start with, in the UK the amount of space is limited and the construction industry wants to build as many properties as physically possible in the space available, often to the detriment of parking, the roads on new builds are always the bare minimum width and the only parking provision is what is mandatory under the conditions of the build.
 
I think the main difference, when comparing countries like the US and Australia to the UK, is the amount of space they have to start with, in the UK the amount of space is limited and the construction industry wants to build as many properties as physically possible in the space available, often to the detriment of parking, the roads on new builds are always the bare minimum width and the only parking provision is what is mandatory under the conditions of the build.
Definitely. And I've seen it where each property has it's own single parking bay- sometimes nowhere near the place.
 
Hah. Must tell you sometime of my innocent wanderings about some of the dodgier parts of CT and NYC relying only on Being British to survive :)
When Escet lived in SF he, Escette and I went one evening to look at the Martin Luther King memorial.

As some event was going on next day there were temporary barriers around it. We nipped through a gap for a closer look and were almost immediately hailed by a policeman who appeared from nowhere, hand on gun, who politely informed us that we were trespassing.

Escet took the lead, explaining plummily that we were awfully sorry, Officer, and we didn't mean to be disrespectful. We are British and have come from England to see the famous memorial.
Escette and I nodded and wrung our hands contritely.

We were let off with stern talking to and wished a good day, and sighed with relief when the office walked away, past a group of tramps who were egging on two brawling colleagues. He didn't seem to notice them.
 
Last edited:
in the UK the amount of space is limited
Well, average population density is greater than the US, true, but 'people' when asked always tend to massively over-estimate the amount of land that has been built upon. I have seen accounts of people in the UK that think 50% of the country is built upon, and that is just ludicrous. Drive anywhere around the UK in between major towns and cities and you will go past miles and miles of empty, undeveloped land.
Space is not actually limited in the UK, but it depends on where you are talking about - residential building space in existing towns and cities is fairly limited and developers/planners are reluctant to build on the outskirts of existing areas as it would be deemed as 'urban sprawl', especially if the infrastructure such as local shopping facilities, public transport, municipal amenities etc etc are not included.
So that leads to 'New Towns' being proposed, but that brings with it an element of nimbyism.
 
Well, average population density is greater than the US, true, but 'people' when asked always tend to massively over-estimate the amount of land that has been built upon. I have seen accounts of people in the UK that think 50% of the country is built upon, and that is just ludicrous. Drive anywhere around the UK in between major towns and cities and you will go past miles and miles of empty, undeveloped land.
Space is not actually limited in the UK, but it depends on where you are talking about - residential building space in existing towns and cities is fairly limited and developers/planners are reluctant to build on the outskirts of existing areas as it would be deemed as 'urban sprawl', especially if the infrastructure such as local shopping facilities, public transport, municipal amenities etc etc are not included.
So that leads to 'New Towns' being proposed, but that brings with it an element of nimbyism.
I did say compared to the US and Australia, but I get your point, however, with planning restrictions on what can be built on, preservation of the green belt, nimbism, the amount of available, suitable land for housing is quite limited. My mum watches a lot of house make over shows, a number of which are based in the US/Canada, and the amount of space each property has, inside and out, is amazing, it must come as a real culture shock for anyone moving from the US/Canada to the UK, when they see what we have here.
 
it must come as a real culture shock for anyone moving from the US/Canada to the UK, when they see what we have here.
Yep Kirsty and Phil have had a few of those (and OZ) to try and find houses for. Managing expectations against reality is even harder than usual. :)

My ex boss met and married a woman from Indiana who came to live here until he retired and they went off to the USA. She couldn't get over how tiny our houses were. Neither can my friend in Helsinki come to that.

Looking up Parker Morris (a name I'd ssociated with room size recommendations) I found this article that gives a more indepth look to the issue of house sizes in Britain.

https://files.cambridge.gov.uk/public/ldf/coredocs/rd-h-200.pdf

Sollywos x
 
Yep Kirsty and Phil have had a few of those (and OZ) to try and find houses for. Managing expectations against reality is even harder than usual. :)

My ex boss met and married a woman from Indiana who came to live here until he retired and they went off to the USA. She couldn't get over how tiny our houses were. Neither can my friend in Helsinki come to that.

Looking up Parker Morris (a name I'd ssociated with room size recommendations) I found this article that gives a more indepth look to the issue of house sizes in Britain.

https://files.cambridge.gov.uk/public/ldf/coredocs/rd-h-200.pdf

Sollywos x
''The UK is unique amongst the member states of the European Union. It is the only
member not to set a legal floor space minimum for new all new housing''.

Doesn't suprise me. Yes, you can always cram more and more in, but at to what cost of the standard of living?
 
Wasn't it de regulated shortly after one of the big building firms passed
a very thick brown paper envelope to Maggy.
 
A Friend visiting from the US was perplexed at our small houses and tiny gardens.

She said we would be better off in flats.

I told her we tried it and it didnt work.
A US flat is normally a lot larger than a UK one.
The problem is that there isn't enough land that we're allowed to build on.
 
suitable land for housing is quite limited.
Not apparently in the grim North West where I live. Loads of huge housing developments taking place, some on land which was previously unsuitable for building. (I'm convinced that there will be structural problems on these estates in the future as has been the case on some 20 year old housing projects) Massive developments immediately adjacent to motorways as well. Where the demand is coming from given the ludicrous price of houses even here defeats me, given the number of older and better built properties for sale .
 
Back
Top