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    And the flying spiders?

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      They can get their own cheese.

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        [URL]https://twitter.com/financialtimes/status/1083860814359085056?s=21[/URL]

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          Because she has so much bank-running experience.

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            I suspect the cheese and spiders are on her side. Age shall not wither her...

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              Actually, I only signed back on for one thing, and this is the perfect place for it.

              Girls Aloud invented dabbing, in the very last seconds of their video for "Biology".

              And 11 years later...

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                https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBPtP4t2J1k

                3 mins 26 of this.

                AND, I am totally incorrect. No head bows. Because they are fucking GIRLS ALOUD!



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                  There's no limit to human stupidity generally of course, but teenagers will always have a bit of an edge over the rest of us:

                  https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-46846981

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                    That is a fascinating article but the use of Cubic Yards to measure cheese, and Pounds to measure milk just hurts my brain.

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                      This isn't exactly news but it's nearly 76 years since this happened.



                      This is a b-17 bomber, in a field, in Athenry. yes, those fields, in that Athenry.

                      The way this is supposed to work in theory is that as a neutral Country we are supposed to intern the crew, put them in a camp and release them at the end of the war. Except on this plane were basically the top three Officers in the US army Armoured force. Lt General Jacob Devers, (commander of all american armoured forces at the time) Maj. General Hale Brooks, later to lead allied armoured forces in normandy and Major Gladeon Barnes, who was head of Ordnance branch, who was in charge of developing all of america's weapons, including the ENIAC computer.

                      Basically the Plane came down in a field, ploughed through a dry stone wall at 70 miles an hour and came to rest. They were extraordinarily lucky that they came down in east galway which is very flat, and the walls are simply made of a single row of stones and can be knocked over by a cow that thinks about it for any length of time. Had they come down in a field in Munster or the Midlands, they would have been crashing into a four foot thick bank of earth and stones, covered in a 200 year old hedgerow. They would all have been killed instantly.

                      The plane was very quickly surrounded by everyone for nearly two parishes curious to see what had happened, and they were taken into custody by the local defence force (Dad's Army) and an irish officer piled them all into a truck and took them to a local hotel and filled them full of food and booze. Devers gets on the phone to the American embassy, and since he's about to be appointed supreme commander of US forces in Europe, it turns out that he doesn't have to spend the rest of the war in an internment camp, and they leave for Northern Ireland at half 8, arriving at the border at 2.00. (a journey that barely takes an hour today)

                      I came across it while looking at a list of Foreign plane crashes in Ireland during WWII.. Looking at this list it would seem that the Allies had very limited respect for ireland's air neutrality. There are nearly as many crashed B-17's on that list alone as there are luftwaffe planes (18 vs 28) which would tally with my father telling me that one of his earliest memories was seeing planes flying over kilmovee. I was asking him again about what he saw, but he gave me an answer that lead to to suspect his account was accurate, rather than an Abe Simpson story, because he said "Well we didn't really see too many of them, given that we hardly ever saw the sky, but we heard them all the time"

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                        Those stone signs weren't as easy to see as you all thought.

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                          Haha. Those lads had all been on a tour of the US army in North Africa, and were getting feedback on how the equipment had worked out, and what changes needed to be made to existing stuff, and what new stuff was needed. These were the people who had developed the Sherman, and they were very keen to find out if it had worked out.

                          The weather was apparently so bad that they were stuck in gibraltar for a fucking week, and when they eventually took off they took a huge detour to steer clear of German fighters. Unfortunately the weather was so bad that they quickly got lost, and wound up hundreds of miles out of their way. which until the introduction of GPS in time for the first gulf war was astonishingly easy to do.

                          I was looking through that list of crashes, and I recognized the names, because I had watched a pretty interesting lecture on youtube about the development of the Sherman. The Way America went from having virtually no tradition or skill at building tanks, to mass producing 50,000 shermans was really extraordinary, and how they set about bridging that gap is a pretty extraordinary institutional achievement. The main changes resulting from their trip was that they put a fifth hatch on the sherman and made them all bigger and easier to open, so you could get out more easily when the tank was hit, they also rearranged the ammunition so it didn't go on fire all the time. It ultimately made driving around in a sherman pretty much the safest place to be in the war if you were near where shooting was going on.

                          Arrangements for interned pilots were kind of hilarious. If the plane couldn't be flown away, They were usually sent to the curragh, in Kildare where the british and american pilots would be basically left in a room with a train timetable and a sum of money that would adequately cover their fare, and then be told to go into town for the evening. The Germans on the other hand were generally stuck here. Getting back to the Reich on the other hand was a somewhat trickier prospect. So they hung around the camp and used to go into the town to the pictures. I think a couple of them stayed on after the war.

                          A bunch of people turned up in what looked like very modern trucks, took the plane apart, and drove back North.
                          Last edited by The Awesome Berbaslug!!!; 13-01-2019, 02:25.

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                            Funnily enough I was chatting with a friend this evening who said something about his mum and her brother spending time in Dublin during WWII and German bombs occasionally falling on the city. Accidentally like.

                            Did I hear him right?

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                              Yes. There were quite a few incidents.

                              It may have been accidentally on purpose, but it also kind of has to be remembered that a lot of the time these guys had no idea where the fuck they were, and were taking a lot of methamphetamine, on a pretty continuous basis. After they switched to night bombing, most losses were to crashes on landing. There were a lot of those.
                              Last edited by The Awesome Berbaslug!!!; 13-01-2019, 03:14.

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                                This is a pretty decent article about the incident I mentioned up thread

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                                  It's neat hearing you old fellas talk about the war....

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                                    what can I say, it's probably still the most exciting thing to happen in east galway since the civil war.

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                                      I enjoyed that, though I'm not sure I will become a regular visitor to "World of Tanks"

                                      I imagine that if the Germans who stayed on were Catholic farmers to begin with, they likely got on rather well once they learned how to communicate.

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                                        It's some kind of online computer game. It wouldn't be my kind of thing either. I think there's an equivalent world of Warships. Anyway they have some Irish guy, who joined the american Army because he just really wanted to drive a tank, and the Irish army wasn't really scratching that itch. Anyway he goes around making videos reviewing the various tanks that are used in the game, and talking about military history in general and lending a patina of historical something or other to what is essentially a pretty unrealistic shoot em up game. Basically the videos take the form of him going to some tank museum or other than then giving you a tour of the tank, and then getting inside and showing you what's what. The thing is that he's 6'5", which is officially too big to be in the tank corps, but the Abrams tank is very big and roomy, Watching him climb into a t-34 on the other hand is very amusing.

                                        I've watched quite a few of these videos, and I must say that at least 75% of it is the fascination of watching someone who enjoys their job so much.

                                        There was quite a smattering of germans who moved here after the war. Some like Otto Skorzeny were essentially hiding out here because we were neutral, others came here because Rural Ireland was about as far removed from the post world war II landscape as it was possible to get. A family fleeing East Germany turned up in Dromcolliher with a bunch of moulds and set up a dresden factory. A doctor Called Rosenstock Arrived into kilfinnane (where Kim and Kanye went for their honeymoon until it turned out the Wifi wasn't up to scratch) became the local miracle healer and the backbone of the Labour party in east Limerick. His son is one of our foremost Irish language poets, and his grandson is Mario Rosenstock who makes a handy living as an impressionist, but is no dermot Morgan
                                        Last edited by The Awesome Berbaslug!!!; 13-01-2019, 16:09.

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                                          You've got to help me with "Dresden Factory"

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                                            You can't do better than hands on care.

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                                              Originally posted by ursus arctos View Post
                                              You've got to help me with "Dresden Factory"
                                              This is Dromcolliher Dresden.




                                              It's stuff like this that convinced me at a very early age that pretty much anyone, just about anywhere, can make just about anything .
                                              Last edited by The Awesome Berbaslug!!!; 13-01-2019, 16:31.

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                                                As, so it is knock off Meissen.

                                                That would have been my guess.

                                                Ta.

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                                                  Them's fighting words.

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                                                    Don’t bring a knife to a sword fight

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