MarkW

Thanks guys. I'm not looking to make a profit out of this and have always done it for free in the past. Well, at a loss in fact, because the bugs we take in ain't cheap: they range from £1 to £6 each, and you need 40-50 of them for a day's fun. The observation colony of bumblebees we take in is about £100, and whilst the honeybees are just borrowed from our apiary for the day we still have to prep them beforehand. The same goes for anything you want to show happening such as parasite emergence or moulting, where you have to have synchronised your cultures several days in advance to ensure you get a good number of them performing on the day. That all takes time from our lab staff, who are already run off their feet. My curiosity about what sort of budget might be available is more a case of the other cool things we could do if the school had a little bit of cash to throw at it. Having the kids visit our lab is a complete no-no due to the nature of the work we do: far too many nasties on site (our human pathogen store alone would give anyone trying to do a risk assessment for a school visit a heart attack) and we're just not set up for it. I'll see about having a chat with some of the school heads when they're back after the summer.

Morning all! Has anybody here provided or procured educational visits to schools from external specialists, and if so what sort of fee is normal? The reason I ask is that over the last few years I have given a number of 'insect experience days' at my kids school in which I take in some of the critters from our lab (honeybees, bumblebees, parasitic wasps and predatory beetles, that sort of thing) and spend half a day teaching them about basic entomology. They absolutely love it, especially when they get to see baby bees emerging for the first time, parasitic wasps bursting Aliens-style out of the bodies of their aphid hosts, or predatory insects hunting down and devouring their prey. I never made any charge for this, and figured that half a day of my time and the £200 investment in livestock was pretty small beer for enthusing the next generation of entomologists. However, some of the teachers (and many of the kids) have since moved on to other schools in the area, and I am now getting quite a number of requests for visits, all asking how much I charge. Obviously if I'm going to start doing more of this then I can't do it on the same basis that I have in the past, but only ever having charged big multinational companies for my 'expertise' I don't have any frame of reference for what would be reasonable to charge a school. Any ideas? One option is that I put a pro-Brexit spin on it (sovereignty of British bees, no foreign queens, better border checks to stop non-native invaders getting in etc) and see if Boris can find a few billion quid to chuck at it.

For years I had the same barber. They say there's always someone worse off than you, and for me, he was that man. No matter how bad a time I was having at work I always knew that I'd feel much better after half an hour in the chair with a man whose life was one slowly unfolding car crash. He got divorced when he found his wife was having a serial affair with all his mates; he got arrested for punching a traffic warden who had asked him to move his illegally parked car; he tried to sue the police for attempted murder when they stopped him from getting in his car after a skin-full and he had to walk home in the snow without a coat; and he regularly regaled his customers with lurid and fantastical episodes from his depraved sexual exploits. His finest hour was when he tried to get his customers to invest in his groundbreaking invention: the iWank. Essentially an interface between an iPad and a sex doll that faithfully reproduced everything going on in whatever porn film you loaded up, this modern marvel was - he assured us at great length - designed to ensure that the complex electronics remained fully insulated from truly startling quantities of bodily fluids. He went bust not long after that, and I have to admit that I did occasionally glance at Dragons Den on the off-chance that I'd see him explaining the safety features of the device to Theo Paphitis as he was knocking the back out of it, hopefully with a shriek and a bang as the insulation failed and he fried his cock.

On a personal note, this result means that my mother is bound to phone me any time now to tell me - again - about the time she met Boris Johnson and what she thought of him. Then my brother will call to tell me - again - about the time he met Boris and what he thought of him. I must be about the only person in my family who hasn't met him.

At least Farage would do less damage than Johnson for the simple reason that he'd be too lazy to turn up.

Holy shit! I used to watch that at my grans house in the 80's! It was on around the same time as Tales of the Gold Monkey: Blast from the past!

Former NY mayor Michael Bloomberg famously said that Brexit was the single stupidest thing any country has ever done, apart from the election of Donald Trump as US president. Nice to see we're back in pole position.

This is something that has annoyed me for years, but despite having complained long and loud nothing has yet been done about it. The ratio of marzipan to sponge in a battenberg is wrong. There - now it's up to us as a community to do something about it.

But that's why you don't stick your head out of the window of a moving train, isn't it? Anyone who's been on a train - or even seen them - knows how close they pass by each other and to bits of rail infrastructure. And it's not as if the knowledge isn't transferable from elsewhere: My kids are 11 and 8 and they both know full well to keep their arms inside the car when the windows are down, and why. Ultimately he died because he elected to stick his head out of the window whilst the train was still moving. It's unfortunate, but is it really anybody else's fault?

Afternoon all! The top-hinged casement windows in our office either swing wide open or bang shut at the slightest breeze, so I'm looking for a stay of some description to keep them on an even vent. I imagined that the internet would be awash with various self-adhesive plastic casement stays for just this purpose, but it seems that they are all metal ones that require drilling. That's not much good for us unfortunately, as by the time the landlord has authorised it and got it done it'll be winter. Do any of the good folks on here know of such a gadget, and if so could you point me int he right direction? Cheers!

I have long believed that the HSE interferes with natural selection by protecting idiots from the sort of stupidity that would otherwise have long since removed them from the gene pool, and that as a consequence there is now far more idiot DNA in circulation than there otherwise would have been. I see in the news today that a rail operator has been fined £1 million for not stating more clearly why sticking your head out of a moving train is a bad idea: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-49016151 The family of the deceased said they hope that as a result of this fine "operating companies up and down the country will take their responsibilities to the travelling public more seriously." Well how about this for an idea: what if the adult travelling public took responsibility for themselves? Frankly, if you're the kind of dipshit who can't work out for yourself why sticking your head out of the window of a moving train might end messily, then no matter how much cotton wool the HSE try to wrap you in, somewhere out there is a Darwin Award with your name on it.

Any man who comes from bloody Yorkshire wants to be very careful about chucking stones regarding Geordies. Most miserable person on the planet is your average tyke and they have the longest pockets with the shortest arms known to science. He wasn't chucking stones at all geordies - just brash, oafish ones. And I'm not from Yorkshire.

Yes. I've just come back from a weekend at a campsite in Thirsk, which was rammed full of Geordies acclimatising themselves to the south before venturing down to Bridlington for their summer hols in a few weeks time. They were certainly an unusual breed, and would have made interesting subjects for anthropological study. Besides having clothes several sizes too small to cover their truly obscene beer guts and having the obligatory lower leg 'England' tattoo permanently on display, they were remarkable mainly for their social interactions: they appeared to communicate almost exclusively by breaking wind and burping, both as loudly as possible, which I suppose is an evolutionary adaptation designed to overcome the linguistic difficulties posed by having a fag permanently clamped between the lips. The closest to human speech they managed was "Jayden, ya f*ckin' bastad, gerover 'ere now or I'll put ma too oop y'arse hool." And the blokes were just the same.

Piercings could be the way to go then, although I hesitate to ask the OP: I asked a friend on Facebook a few years ago and ended up with all sorts of images you don't want to be looking at while having your tea.

You'll want to avoid starting a fire of course, but as far as electrocution goes I've done it loads of times and it's not that bad. It can actually be quite invigorating. That's the thing with electricity you don't know how it's going to go till you try it, I have also had more than my fair share of jolts, but some people get 1 and that's it numbers up. Unless you started out at end early age electrocuting yourself I wouldn't start now, would be bad if you discovered your one of the 1 shot folk. I once managed to fry myself off the same dodgy light fitting twice in less than five seconds a few years ago. That takes a special kind of stupidity.

You'll want to avoid starting a fire of course, but as far as electrocution goes I've done it loads of times and it's not that bad. It can actually be quite invigorating.

Piss poor training Mark - I blame the management. I do my best, but when you're dealing with someone who doesn't understand that you have to take the old teabags out of the pot before putting the new ones in, what can you do? Nine teabags I tipped out of it the other day. Nine!

"I grew up on t'council estate. Rough as f*ck, I tell thee. I were just like t'other kids, except I had this beard and big f*ck-off chin."

I'm more interested in ISO 1303. Now that's getting circulated to all our staff first thing tomorrow: the muck half of them serve up is beyond belief.

One of my clients phoned me up a few weeks ago with the strangest enticement to attend his conference I've ever heard: Would you like to meet Prince Charles? - Nope. Well that's OK, he's not coming.

I see your Princess Anne and raise you an Alan Titchmarsh. I met him once and was properly miffed 'cos I'd been expecting Thora Hird.

Please tell me that's true and not a headline from the Sunday Sport. We need to hear more!

Why aye, man!

Well, when I woke up this morning I never imagined I'd end the day drinking tea with Boycie from Only Fools and Horses and talking about conservation of urban wildlife!

Neither my wife nor I have the stamina to stay mad at each other for more than about ten minutes!