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Minor Strangeness (IHTM)

JamesWhitehead said:
I have just discovered they are really called Armadillidildo! :rofl:
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Really? How has that only come to light now? The comedic potential is endless...

Interesting that the stated photolabels you show for them is 'slaters' (this being their common name in Scotland and Ireland)
http://www.bbcamerica.com/anglophenia/2014/09/many-names-brits-woodlice
How Many Names do Brits Have for Woodlice?

ANGLOPHENIA
BY FRASER MCALPINE | 3 YEARS AGO
There’s not a lot to do in the British countryside, especially if you’re whiling the decades away waiting for someone to invent the internet. So you can’t blame the residents of a tiny island nation for choosing to pass the time creating quite so many cute little names for the common woodlouse. For entertainment value, it will have very much been the Facebook of its day.

And they’ve really made a go of it too. There are over 40 different varieties of woodlouse common to the British Isles, but there are a far greater variety of different names and spellings for the species as a whole, depending on location, imagination and the ability to think laterally. Too many to count, in fact.

Towards the west of England—Devon, to be precise—woodlice are also known as chiggypigs, or chickypigs or choogeypigs. A little farther north and east in Dorset, they’re chiggywigs, and up past Bristol in Gloucestershire they’re chuckypigs or charliepigs. You get the gist. Just think of a rotund landlady in a Dickens novel—or a similarly matronly hedgehog in a Beatrix Potter story—imagine what her surname might be, and you’re basically there.

You’ll notice a definite porcine theme developing there too, and this continues across a great deal of the woodlouse nicknames that have stuck over the years. The people of Bristol have been known to call them slunkerpigs, or there’s woodpigs, timperpigs and penny sows. In fact, some people from Cornwall and Devon managed to achieve double bacon by calling them sowpigs (or, as it came out in the local accent; zowpigs).

In Cornwall, they are also known as grammasows. And this is a crossover point between two naming traditions. It’s half pig and half grandparent, and some of the other names—granddad gravys, granddads, granny greys, granny granshers, do seem to infer a certain age and respectability to these tiny critters. In fact, in some parts of the country they have been called croogers if small, and granfy croogers if larger.
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Woodlice seem harmless enough little chaps, I don't begrudge them the odd skirting board, although they seem to have a fascination with hiding under my washing basket.
I read somewhere, or imagined it, that we will swallow x amount of spiders in our lifetime whilst sleeping. I do wonder what else gets in my gigantic gob during the wee small hours.
When young, and thus stupid, me and my fishing buddy went in all weathers.
On cold days he would gently suck a maggot before hooking it, claiming the heat would enliven it and thus make it more attractive to fish.
Or maybe he was just weird, I'll never know.
 
 
"How many names do Brits have for woodlice?"

When first married we rented a rather seedy Victorian property with quite an infestation of the little critters. My wife, whose English was not perfect back then, came up with the term "woody bloodlice". Now living in a modern Barrett's 3 bed semi, we hardly ever see one of those tiny crustaceans, but have retained her endearing spoonerism to this day.

I believe I recall my Cornish grandparents referring to them as sow-pigs.
 
They materialize at any sign of damp - opportunists!

They will eat almost anything - even each other, after the prey has been poisoned by ant-powder*.

Their cannibalistic tendencies are an excellent excuse to go Medieval on them!

*Highly effective on the threshold. :clap:
 
I saw Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall put some woodlice in an omelette on a boat. Must have been Channel 4. He reckoned they tasted of prawns and I think they did go a bit pink when they hit the pan.

It was the same program that had him taking baby Rooks from the nest to eat.
 
davidplankton said:
I saw Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall put some woodlice in an omelette on a boat. Must have been Channel 4. He reckoned they tasted of prawns and I think they did go a bit pink when they hit the pan.

It was the same program that had him taking baby Rooks from the nest to eat.
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I aways believed them to be bitter tasting. I'd have thought water lice might taste better.

Eating young rooks was common in my grandfather's time.
 
Ulalume said:
Could it have been ants? They could have trailed in through a tiny hole, then trailed out again. Whenever we find insect parts around, it's usually ants that are the culprit.
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I have never seen ants in my house. Plenty of other pests - spiders, moths, silverfish.
 
Today, someone who is almost a total stranger to me asked, in a genuine and concerned fashion, how my mother was?

I replied (in as conciliatory and graceful a fashion as I could muster) that my poor old mum has been passed away for over a decade, and that perhaps they were asking after the health of my (utterly-healthy) mother-in-law?

The response I got back from the Asker was confused embarrassment and withdrawal of all further query/conversation, blended with a backing-away apology.

Very strange....

Especially when you consider this is the third episode in two days....

So three almost-strangers ask me, in a matter of hours, after the health of my long-dead mother. How can this be? Do I have a double? In all cases, I know the names & faces of these people, but that is all (same town for decades, no other links with them, we will almost certainly share common friends, I would nod to these people in passing, speak small stuff with them in a queue, but we have no close overlaps at all)

If a fourth semi-stranger does come along with the same enquiry, I reserve the right to react badly, and disproportionately. In fact, I'm actually equally-scared that someone might again do this...and I've no idea how I'll really respond.
 
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I had the council asking for council tax from my husband, i had sent them a death certificate, but obviously it wasnt enough, so, i phoned them, they listened to me as i told them that they had sent my husband the bill, and i ended it with, well, hes dead, there was a pause and they said sorry, i never heard from them again, sometimes bluntness brings results

And quite frankly if anyone asked me to talk to him that many times i would have told them ok go buy an ouiji board
 
smokehead said:
I read somewhere, or imagined it, that we will swallow x amount of spiders in our lifetime whilst sleeping. I do wonder what else gets in my gigantic gob during the wee small hours.
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This was a story invented by an English professor (I think?) to demonstrate plausible-sounding urban myths that had no basis in fact. Ironically, it developed into an actual urban myth, much against her wishes. So you haven't swallowed anything while asleep. Well, probably not...
 
GNC said:
This was a story invented by an English professor (I think?) to demonstrate plausible-sounding urban myths that had no basis in fact. Ironically, it developed into an actual urban myth, much against her wishes. So you haven't swallowed anything while asleep. Well, probably not...
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Is this like the deliberately-invented (and rather unpleasant) explanation for the term 'nitty-gritty'?
 
JamesWhitehead said:
Looking again for Armadillidildo, it may have been a mischievious amendment to Wikipedia. The name is Armadillidiidae.
"Armadillidildo" appears in Google's summary of the Wikipedia article but the cached version does not have it. :huh:

I thought it was a bit too good to be true! :cool:
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I can attest to the fact that, as of a day or two ago, the Wikipedia article on Armadillidiidae (not to be confused with Armadillidae) began by stating "Armadillidildo is a family of woodlice." This was the sole mention of 'Armadillidildo' on that page at that time.

This Wiki page was edited yesterday (28 June), and the 'Armadillidildo' bit is now gone.
 
GNC said:
This was a story invented by an English professor (I think?) to demonstrate plausible-sounding urban myths that had no basis in fact. Ironically, it developed into an actual urban myth, much against her wishes. So you haven't swallowed anything while asleep. Well, probably not...
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It was a journalist / writer rather than a professor, she was allegedly German, and no one's been able to verify the story's point of origin actually existed.

Snopes closed their examination of the story in 2014 with this:

In a 1993 PC Professional article, columnist Lisa Holst wrote about the ubiquitous lists of “facts” that were circulating via e-mail and how readily they were accepted as truthful by gullible recipients. To demonstrate her point, Holst offered her own made-up list of equally ridiculous “facts,” among which was the statistic cited above about the average person’s swallowing eight spiders per year, which she took from a collection of common misbeliefs printed in a 1954 book on insect folklore. In a delicious irony, Holst’s propagation of this false “fact” has spurred it into becoming one of the most widely-circulated bits of misinformation to be found on the Internet.
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SOURCE: http://www.snopes.com/science/stats/spiders.asp

NOTE: The 1954 book mentioned was supposedly Insect Fact and Folklore, by Lucy Clausen.

However ...

Since then this explanation has been disputed as something of a UL itself. Nobody could find a 1993 magazine titled PC Professional, so there were accusations the explanation was yet another hoax.

I've seen subsequent postings noting there was a magazine in Germany and Denmark entitled PC Professionell. Some of these went so far as to claim the purported author Holst was a known columnist with that publication.

I have yet to locate any verification that such an article by an author named Holst indeed appeared in the German magazine.

To further muddy the waters ... Someone (on Reddit? ... ) noted the alleged author's full name (Lisa Birgit Holst) is an anagram for "This is a Big Troll."

By this point no one agrees on what the truth may be. One theory is that the Snopes article is an instance of a deliberate 'copyright trap' (akin to faked features or streets on a map).
 
ULs within ULs! It's no wonder we live in an era where everyone's confused about what's real and what's not in the news. At least the spider element is part and parcel of the overall UL. Er, isn't it?
 
Oh well, if people are just going to make stuff up then so will I.
I will post on every forum that I have good reason to believe Jeremy Corbyn is the Muller Rice Bear.
 
I sat down at the computer to do a spot of online banking. Obviously, for security reasons, I won't tell you which bank I'm with.

Anyway, I typed "hali" into Google's search bar, fully expecting the name of the bank to appear in the auto-complete options. Not only was the bank of that name nowhere to be seen, but the second option available to me - bear in mind that this is what my computer suddenly decided was the second-most likely thing I wanted to look at - was this:

"halibut recipe"

The first choice was "Halifax Nova Scotia" (or, er, possibly Barclays Nova Scotia, I'm not telling).

Turns out I can't entirely blame Google, as an Ask.com add-on had latched itself onto Google Chrome, but still - WTF was going on there?
 
Sounds like either (a) you've become less case sensitive with your inputs or (b) your software or Google's recommender functions have become more so.
 
Peripart said:
I sat down at the computer to do a spot of online banking. Obviously, for security reasons, I won't tell you which bank I'm with.

Anyway, I typed "hali" into Google's search bar, fully expecting the name of the bank to appear in the auto-complete options. Not only was the bank of that name nowhere to be seen, but the second option available to me - bear in mind that this is what my computer suddenly decided was the second-most likely thing I wanted to look at - was this:

"halibut recipe"

The first choice was "Halifax Nova Scotia" (or, er, possibly Barclays Nova Scotia, I'm not telling).

Turns out I can't entirely blame Google, as an Ask.com add-on had latched itself onto Google Chrome, but still - WTF was going on there?
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Sounds like your computer has halitosis.
 
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