Zombie

until yesterday / the weekend (?) there used to be: “Forums“ heading in large font (directly under “Featured Blog Posts”) and then “GAY AUTHORS COMMUNITY” heading in capitals and then a box for: “The Lounge” forum with the most recent thread activity shown (name, poster, date/time) and then a box for: “Forum Games and Humor” forum with the most recent thread activity shown (name, poster, date/time) and then a box for: “Help” forum with the most recent thread activity shown (name, poster, date/time) and then “AUTHORS AND STORIES” heading in capitals and then a box for forums in this section etc This has now all been replaced with a new box, top right, which contains the “Gay Authors Community” heading (now in lower case) with: tick box The Lounge tick box Forum Games and Humor tick box Help and the “Authors and Stories” heading (again now in lower case) with: tick box Promoted Author Discussion tick box Stories Discussion Forum These tick boxes seem to make little difference if none, some or all are ticked and certainly don’t restore the Forums to the display format that had existed until the weekend Also, the photos section above “Who’s online” has gone. Sorry this is such a long and tedious post but it’s the only way to explain how the Forums page display has changed on my iPad

interesting and old word from Latin which the OED indicates to have fallen into disuse in the UK except in linguistics and logic, the latter having obvious current relevance for data connections, algorithms etc

iPad 6 iOS 14.6 I always open at Forums because it gives (gave?) at-a-glance overview of the whole site - window for each of the forums showing most recent poster, name and date (in bold if new) e.g. Help, The Lounge, Games, Writers Forum etc - single click navigation to open The Lounge, or Games or whatever All concisely laid out onscreen without having to do a lot of scrolling of other stuff you might not be looking for This is how it’s been for a long time. Simple and neat. Is there a “classic” display option to get back to this or similar? thanks

You better watch out my Uncle Fester is very partial to penguins… boiled penguins

Well, it’s been a pukka word since it was added to the OED in 1976 . Three Associate and Deputy Editors of the dictionary have written a detailed blog about its origin and possible etymologies (something Tolkien, as an expert linguist and inventor of languages, would have been interested in) and also correspondence with Tolkien prior to the word being included in the dictionary (the draft OED entry was sent to Tolkien for his comment). In his replies it’s clear Tolkien was not entirely comfortable with the claim “invented by J.R.R. Tolkien”, accepting the possibility he could previously have come across the word in other texts when he was younger. According to the blog, Tolkien gave an “imaginary etymology” of the word as a compound based on two Old English words: “the hobbits notice that the speech (of the Rohirrim) contains many words that sound like Shire words but have a more archaic form. The prime example is their word for the hobbits themselves: holbytla. This is a well-formed Old English compound (because Tolkien represents the language of the Rohirrim as Old English). It is made up of hol ‘hole’ and bytla ‘builder’” However, the blog explains that after Tolkien died “the word (hobbit) did turn up, in a long list of ‘supernatural beings’” compiled by a Yorkshire merchant and amateur folklorist, M. A. Denham (1800 or 1801-1859), which were published in the 1840s and 50s and copies were acquired by university libraries including the Bodleian in Oxford (which would have been used extensively by Tolkien in his academic work and, most likely, background research for creating his Middle Earth fantasy world). Unfortunately Denham gave no explanation of where “hobbit” came from …so I guess we’ll never know https://blog.oup.com/2013/01/oed-hobbit-definition-word-origin-etymology/

Giant Little Ones 2018 Seemingly laden with gay trope cliches, this well written and acted and beautifully shot Canadian movie should be seen

The EU caused huge damage by making it illegal for shops to sell things like beans or cucumbers that weren’t perfectly straight, or fruit like apples that didn’t meet exact size requirements. Due to pressure from some countries about the disgusting waste these unnecessary EU rules created the EU eventually backed down but the damage had already been done - consumers had been conditioned to expect “perfect” fruit and veg and wouldn’t buy “ugly” produce that was perfectly delicious. So, well done you for supporting and embracing enjoying and promoting produce that may look a bit wonky but is fresh and tasty

Wowsers, that good was it?

The pleasure of YouTube (and its curse ) is stumbling across stuff you never even knew existed But where there’s a specialist interest there’ll be YouTubes So, this thread is for those YouTube vids that are, er… weird or wonderful To kick off… Ever wondered what it would be like to drive the world’s first gas turbine car from more than 70 years ago on a race track? Nope, me neither But Georg Mayr-Harting, an obsessed and talented twenty five year old Austrian engineer, did. And because the original is in the London Science Museum, and will never be driven again, he had to build his own An exact replica using original engineering plans and original parts including a Rover gas turbine engine and he wants us to share in the pleasure he obviously gets from driving it flat out on a race track https://www.hemmings.com/stories/2020/06/28/the-worlds-only-turbine-powered-rover-jet-1-replica-built-by-a-25-year-old-who-tracks-it

Sorted Thanks Myr

How can I stop the new software update notifications when someone merely posts in a thread I’ve posted in - I just want them if there’s a response, or “@Zombie” mention, or a new Message. thanks

Even professionals don’t always understand the maths …which is reassuring for slow learners like me In this case (and there are others ) a physics Prof lost a $10,000 bet that a youtuber’s experiment was wrong because the maths equations “proved” it couldn’t work This demonstration by the YouTuber… …looks spookily like the “reveal hidden contents” I used in the earlier post about Infinities (which turned out to be Zeno’s Paradox) : Now I don’t know if there’s a connection between the two (my head hurts ) but was the physicist’s maths equation simply wrong or is there something else going on here? P.S. when you’ve watched the video from the point that I bookmarked you might then want to rewind and watch the whole video from the beginning

teaser for new reality TV show …Jeremy Clarkson is a Farmer Naughty Jeremy!

GDPR only applies to EU member countries and so far as I understand concerns data collection not content accessed. However, since ordinary GA membership does not require/involve disclosing personal data I don’t see how GDPR applies to GA. As for the UK, I’m not aware the UK has any minimum age law for accessing the kind of material on GA. There is a “White Paper” (proposed draft law) but most of these end up in the Parliamentary trash can…

Negro Melody Number 10, Deep River, Op. 59 composed in 1905 by Englishman Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and performed by English brothers and sister Sheku (cello), Braimah (violin) and Isata (piano) Kanneh-Mason - just three of seven amazingly talented instrumentalist siblings

Sneak leak... U.S. Finds No Evidence of Alien Technology in Flying Objects, but Can’t Rule It Out, Either A new report concedes that much about the observed phenomena remains difficult to explain, including their acceleration, as well as ability to change direction and submerge. June 3, 2021 transcript U.S. Navy Releases Videos of Unexplained Flying Objects The U.S. Navy has officially published previously released videos showing unexplained objects. [radio transmission] “Whoa, got it — woo-hoo!” “Roger —” “What the [expletive] is that?” “Did you box a moving target?” “No, I took an auto track.” “Oh, OK.” “Oh my gosh, dude. Wow” “What is that man?” “There’s a whole screen of them. My gosh.” “They’re all going against the wind. The wind’s 120 knots from west.” “Dude.” “That’s not — is it?” “[inaudible]” “Look at that thing.” The U.S. Navy has officially published previously released videos showing unexplained objects.Department of Defense, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images WASHINGTON — American intelligence officials have found no evidence that aerial phenomena witnessed by Navy pilots in recent years are alien spacecraft, but they still cannot explain the unusual movements that have mystified scientists and the military, according to senior administration officials briefed on the findings of a highly anticipated government report. The report determines that a vast majority of more than 120 incidents over the past two decades did not originate from any American military or other advanced U.S. government technology, the officials said. That determination would appear to eliminate the possibility that Navy pilots who reported seeing unexplained aircraft might have encountered programs the government meant to keep secret. But that is about the only conclusive finding in the classified intelligence report, the officials said. And while a forthcoming unclassified version, expected to be released to Congress by June 25, will present few other firm conclusions, senior officials briefed on the intelligence conceded that the very ambiguity of the findings meant the government could not definitively rule out theories that the phenomena observed by military pilots might be alien spacecraft. Americans’ long-running fascination with U.F.O.s has intensified in recent weeks in anticipation of the release of the government report. Former President Barack Obama further stoked the interest when he was asked last month about the incidents on “The Late Late Show with James Corden” on CBS. “What is true, and I’m actually being serious here,” Mr. Obama said, “is that there is footage and records of objects in the skies that we don’t know exactly what they are.’’ The report concedes that much about the observed phenomena remains difficult to explain, including their acceleration, as well as ability to change direction and submerge. One possible explanation — that the phenomena could be weather balloons or other research balloons — does not hold up in all cases, the officials said, because of changes in wind speed at the times of some of the interactions. The final report will also include a classified annex, the officials said. While the annex will not contain any evidence concluding that the phenomena are alien spacecraft, the officials acknowledged that the fact that it would remain off limits to the public was likely to continue to fuel speculation that the government had secret data about alien visitations to Earth. Many of the more than 120 incidents examined in the report are from Navy personnel, officials said. The report also examined incidents involving foreign militaries over the last two decades. Intelligence officials believe at least some of the aerial phenomena could have been experimental technology from a rival power, most likely Russia or China. One senior official briefed on the intelligence said without hesitation that U.S. officials knew it was not American technology. He said there was worry among intelligence and military officials that China or Russia could be experimenting with hypersonic technology. He and other officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the classified findings in the report. Russia has been investing heavily in hypersonics, believing the technology offers it the ability to evade American missile-defense technology. China has also developed hypersonic weaponry, and included it in military parades. If the phenomena were Chinese or Russian aircraft, officials said, that would suggest the two powers’ hypersonic research had far outpaced American military development. Navy pilots were often unsettled by the sightings. In one encounter, strange objects — one of them like a spinning top moving against the wind — appeared almost daily from the summer of 2014 to March 2015, high in the skies over the East Coast. Navy pilots reported to their superiors that the objects had no visible engine or infrared exhaust plumes, but that they could reach 30,000 feet and hypersonic speeds. Lt. Ryan Graves, an F/A-18 Super Hornet pilot who was with the Navy for 10 years, told The New York Times in an interview, “These things would be out there all day.” With the speeds he and other pilots observed, he said, “12 hours in the air is 11 hours longer than we’d expect.” In late 2014, a Super Hornet pilot had a near collision with one of the objects, and an official mishap report was filed. Some of the incidents were recorded on video, including one taken by a plane’s camera in early 2015 that shows an object zooming over the ocean waves as pilots question what they are watching. The Defense Department has been collecting such reports for more than 13 years as part of a shadowy, little-known Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program within the Pentagon. The program analyzed radar data, video footage and accounts provided by the Navy pilots and senior officers. The program began in 2007 and was largely funded at the request of Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat who was the Senate majority leader at the time. It was officially shut down in 2012, when the money dried up, according to the Pentagon. But after the publication of a New York Times article in 2017 about the program and criticism from program officials that the government was not forthcoming about reports on aerial phenomena, the Pentagon restarted the program last summer as the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force. The task force’s mission was to “detect, analyze and catalog” sightings of strange objects in the sky that could pose a threat to national security. But government officials said they also wanted to remove the stigma for service members who report U.F.O. sightings in the hope that more would be encouraged to speak up if they saw something. The goal, officials said, was to give authorities a better idea of what might be out there. A video shows an encounter between a Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet and an unknown object. It was released by the Defense Department's Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program.U.S. Department of Defense Last year, lawmakers inserted a provision in the Intelligence Authorization Act that said the government must submit an unclassified report on what it knows about U.F.O.s. That report is the one to be released this month. Officials briefed on the report said it also examined video that shows a whitish oval object described as a giant Tic Tac, about the size of a commercial plane, encountered by two Navy fighter jets off the coast of San Diego in 2004. In that incident, the pilots reported an interaction with the craft, which lasted for several minutes. At one point, the object peeled away, one of the pilots, Cmdr. David Fravor, later said in an interview with The Times. “It accelerated like nothing I’ve ever seen,” he said. The report studies that incident, including the video that accompanied the interaction. The provenance of the object, the officials said, is still unknown. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/03/us/politics/ufos-sighting-alien-spacecraft-pentagon.html —————————————- So, there we have it. All cleared up...

the sublime, eternal world of Johann Sebastian Bach Prelude No. 8 BWV 853 Book 1 Das Wohltemperirte Klavier (Well Tempered Clavier)

Then live an interesting life have an interesting family live in interesting times have generous friends give you a year’s income to write have the good fortune to stumble across an outstanding literary editor Oh, and have a natural writing talent She was a one-off Inimitable

here comes the Haitian Lady so cool

The Daily Telegraph is paywall so the previous post was cut + pasted but it had links to early photos of UFOs dating back to the 19th and early 20th centuries - if anyone wants I can cut+paste these too. What’s interesting is the remarkable variety of shapes and types (and “behaviours”) of these objects. It’s like there’s a whole “model range” for aliens to choose from - “What do you think, shall we take the Big Daddy Caddy with the tail fins? Or maybe the shape-shifting little compact? Or do we need the Mother Ship this time?” Then there’s the quality of the photos and videos - or their absence. So, we get decent quality pics/vids of “objects” that can later be identified as natural events: (subsequently explained by a meteorologist to be an iridescent ice cloud) ...and this famous film shot with an 8mm home movie camera by tourist Linda Baker in 1972 while on vacation near Jackson Lake, Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming, which later analysis determined was not a UFO but a very very close encounter with an asteroid which just grazed the upper atmosphere of the planet, leaving a clear trail of vaporised debris, before continuing on into space Back in 1972 home movie cameras were pretty rare But now pretty much everyone carries a movie camera in their pocket ...that since at least 10 years ago can shoot high definition video So where are all the HD videos to prove, once and for all, that UFOs really are not of this world?

Something very curious is going on... Recently mainstream UK media have started reporting on UFOs as just another routine news feature. We’re not talking about the likes of the “Sunday Sport” (favourite headlines: “World War 2 Bomber Found on Moon”, followed a week later by “World War 2 Bomber Found on Moon Mysteriously Vanishes!” ) but “serious” publications like The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph. Yet this is all happening when public interest in “aliens” now seems at an all-time low Clearly eagerly interested in next month’s promised (and legally mandated) US Govt report publication on UFOs, yesterday’s Daily Telegraph has a big spread: The Pentagon thinks UFOs may exist after all... and the evidence is growing A new report on unidentified flying objects set to be released next month shows the US government is taking aliens increasingly seriously By Nick Allen, US Editor21 May 2021 • 6:11pm After decades of doing everything possible to keep reported UFO sightings secret, the Pentagon is changing tack Lieutenant Commander Alex Dietrich is, by her own admission, a highly rational person. A US Navy fighter pilot who served combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, she has landed a supersonic F/A-18 jet on an aircraft carrier hundreds of times, and now teaches at the US Naval Academy. She has also had one of the most famous close encounters with a UFO, or Unidentified Flying Object. On November 14, 2004, Lt Cdr Dietrich was stationed off the coast of southern California on the USS Nimitz carrier, when numerous flying objects were picked up by ship radar - see the final silent clip in the video below. The objects had descended impossibly fast, dropping a distance of 80,000ft in less than a second. In separate planes, Lt Cdr Dietrich and Commander David Fravor were dispatched to investigate. What they saw on that day has never been adequately explained – until now. “Enter stage left, the Tic Tac– that’s what we affectionately refer to it as,” says Lt Cdr Dietrich, speaking publicly for the first time this week in an interview with 60 Minutes, the venerable US news programme. “It jumped from spot to spot, and tumbled around in a way that was unpredictable. The whole time we’re on the radio with each other just losing our minds.” Cmdr Fravor aggressively engaged one of the oblong objects, which he estimated to be 40ft in length, while Lt Cdr Dietrich adopted “high cover” above. Then it disappeared. In pictures: 140 years of UFO sightings (part 1) In pictures: 140 years of UFO sightings (part 2) Ship radar picked it up seconds later, 60 miles away. A third F/A-18 then caught it on an infrared camera: it looked like a giant white Tic Tac. Lt Cdr Dietrich decided to go public with her story now – three years after Cdr Fravor – to reduce the “stigma” associated with UFO reports and, she says, to encourage other pilots to come forward without feeling “embarrassed or ashamed”. Her testimony coincides with a growing acceptance among defence officials around the world that there may indeed be something “out there” – and that it might pose a genuine global security threat. After decades of doing everything possible to keep reported sightings secret, there has been a sea change in how the Pentagon regards such sightings. A possible UFO sighting, as pictured in a 1998 report by the Journal of Scientific Exploration Credit: Reuters For starters, it no longer refers to them as UFOs – with their connotations of little green men – but to UAPs, or Unidentified Aerial Phenomena. Next month, Congress is to be given an unclassified report on evidence collected by the Pentagon’s UAP Task Force, the Office of Naval Intelligence and the FBI. Ufologists - people who investigate UFOs - across the globe are hailing it as an unprecedented watershed moment in their long quest to uncover what the US government really knows – and they have former president Donald Trump to thank for it. In December, when Mr Trump signed his mammoth $2.3 trillion coronavirus relief bill into law, it contained a little remarked upon clause requiring a full report on UFOs within 180 days, i.e. by June 25. “We’re absolutely in new territory here,” says Nick Pope, who investigated UFO sightings while working as a British civil servant for the Ministry of Defence in the 1990s. “What’s really elevated this is the sheer number, and position, of people now speaking out, saying we’re dealing with something that must be taken seriously," he added. “When top guns, who don’t impress easily, get excited about the capability of these objects, their speed, manoeuvrability, trans-medium travel in water and air… that gets my attention. "The pilot testimony is important, but there is so much more: radar data, infrared, measurement and signature intelligence… and we’ll get to see some of it.” John Ratcliffe, director of National Intelligence under President Trump, raised anticipation when he hinted recently that there was “a lot” more information than the public currently knows. He said he had seen satellite imagery of objects “frankly engaging in actions that are difficult to explain”, and incidents of them breaking the sound barrier with no sonic boom. Former president Barack Obama – who has long joked in interviews that he knows things about “aliens” that he cannot talk about – this week echoed that sentiment during an interview with James Corden. “What is true – and I’m actually being serious here – is that there’s footage and records of objects in the skies that we don’t know exactly what they are," he said. "We can’t explain how they moved.” The United States’ long history of UFO sightings began in earnest on June 24, 1947 when Kenneth Arnold, an amateur pilot, reported seeing nine objects flying near Mount Rainier in Washington state. Newspapers at the time coined the term “flying saucers”. The following month, a farmer found wreckage on a ranch near Roswell, New Mexico. In a press release, the US military called it a “flying disc”, but later said it was part of a weather balloon. A local newspaper's front page after the Roswell crash Credit: Sipa/Shutterstock Regardless, a decades-long conspiracy theory was born. By the 1950s, the US Air Force was being inundated with UFO reports from the public. One of the most notorious was the so-called “Invasion of Washington” in 1952, when numerous sightings were made over the capital in a two-week period. It was the Cold War, and the CIA, fearing mass hysteria could play into the hands of the Soviet Union, worked to debunk sightings and infiltrate UFO-hunting groups. Project Blue Book, a US Air Force unit, was set up to analyse thousands of sightings – but, in 1968, a 1,485-page government report written by physicist Edward Condon concluded that there was nothing of interest. “Further extensive study of UFOs probably cannot be justified,” it said. For decades afterwards, anyone who reported seeing something strange in the sky was considered a crackpot – even leading lights in the US military. However, there remained a few highly influential figures who believed a mystery was there to be solved. The most powerful among them was Senator Harry Reid, the Democrat leader in the US Senate from 2005 to 2017. Mr Reid represented the state of Nevada – home to Area 51, the highly classified US Air Force base which has been the subject of many UFO conspiracy theories and Hollywood films. A visitor poses a doll at Area 51, a secretive US military base believed by UFO enthusiasts to hold government secrets about extra-terrestrials Credit: JIM URQUHART /REUTERS In 2007, Mr Reid managed to push through Congress, clandestinely, $22 million in “black ops” funding for a new department. It was innocuously named the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP). From a fifth-floor office deep inside the Pentagon, a real-life X-Files team studied hundreds of reported UFO sightings – including the USS Nimitz “Tic Tac” incident from 2004. The department was led by Luis Elizondo, a career intelligence official who later resigned because he felt his findings were not being taken seriously enough. Shortly after his departure in late 2017, Mr Elizondo told the Telegraph how his team established geographical “hot spots” for sightings, sometimes near nuclear facilities, and common ways in which UFOs moved. “We began to see trends and similarities in incidents – very distinct observables. Extreme manoeuvrability, hypersonic velocity without a sonic boom, speeds of 8,000mph. A lot of this was supported by radar signal data, gun camera footage from aircraft, multiple witnesses.” He said he came to a “realisation that these are probably not any type of aircraft in any national inventory. I think it’s pretty clear it’s not us. So one has to ask the question where they’re from.” He also added: “There was never any display of hostility.” A key moment in the UFO debate – and whether it should be taken seriously – came in 2017 when the New York Times published the infrared video of the “Tic Tac” sighting. Ufologists felt vindicated, not least because it proved the Pentagon had seen fit to investigate the incident. Today, thanks to lockdown – which provided a dramatic reduction in light pollution coupled with an army of people with empty evenings on their hands – supposed UFO sightings have proliferated around the globe. In the UK alone, reports of suspected alien spacecraft doubled last year. And once-secret intelligence just keeps coming. Last month, footage of bizarre images of flashing pyramid-shaped UFOs was posted online, which the Pentagon confirmed was taken in 2019, by a US Navy ship off California. Another leaked video, taken from a fighter jet in 2015, showed a small object moving at tremendously high speed just above the water off Virginia on the US east coast. Pilots could be heard yelling: “Oh my gosh, dude” and “Wow! What is that, man? Look at that flying!” In another incident, pilots reported seeing an object that looked like a cube inside a sphere flying between their aircraft, which were barely 100ft apart. Many of these incidents are expected to be further detailed in next month’s report. But even though it will be “unclassified”, it's still unclear exactly how much will come out. “I expect a very drone-heavy narrative,” says Mr Pope, the former British civil servant. “I don’t expect it’ll plunge into extraterrestrial visitation. If there is anything really juicy, it will probably be in the classified annex. Governments are just nervous and reluctant to say ‘We don’t know...’ because it makes them look weak and ineffective. “But that may be the position we’re in.”

so “member title” doesn’t mean the text under your name - which for you shows as “Member” and for me as “Callidus est optimus” ?

yep, just done it Profile - Edit Profile (greyed box upper right - not very prominent!) - Member Title - enter new name or text or whatever - click Save bottom right Job done

In the 1980s two jazz legends from different eras, Canadian Oscar Peterson and American William James "Count" Basie, were brought together by the BBC to talk and play. Basie’s minimalist style and Peterson’s virtuosic technique work so well together and they’re obviously having a load of fun playing Jumpin’ at the Woodside