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World conker champion found with steel chestnut, cleared of cheating

theguardian.com

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Re: World conker champion found with steel chestnut, cleared of cheating

#511

Post by b800h »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #491
noobermin wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the bit about UK food being attrocious is unfortunately true from my limited experience but the country itself has a lot of beauty, I think, as long as you look in the roght places.

OTOH the national dish is Chicken Tikka Masala. Still, can't beat a good British fried breakfast.

That's out of date. It was popular for a while. According to YouGov it's Fish and Chips again now. Which was based on something Jewish (and fairly different) but I think we can claim it now.

I do love a chippy tea.

Re: World conker champion found with steel chestnut, cleared of cheating

#512

Post by nanna »

flir wrote: post #301
nanna wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have fond memories of playing conkers in primary school. Sometimes you got a rapped knuckle but children's sports is full of cuts and grazes, and it didn't hurt as much as slaps anyway. The main issue was that some kids would inevitably harden their conkers by putting them in the oven or lacquering them, and so on. But spotting that was part of the charm.

Being of a geeky bent, I tried them all. It never worked. They go brittle and shatter, or they go soft and fall apart. (When I was a kid, conkers were so prized we chucked sticks at them to try to get them to drop. So it was a bit of a shock to me when they started just being left where they fell. Kids today, off my lawn, uphill both ways, etc etc).

Cheaters never prosper!

Re: World conker champion found with steel chestnut, cleared of cheating

#515

Post by Rychard »

matltc wrote: post #514

Had this cart at one point. Unfortunately it and a lot of other valuable N64 carts got stolen when my house was robbed. At least they left SSB

I think you're referring to a similarly named N64 game. This story is about a game played using the seeds of horse chestnut trees.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conkers

Re: World conker champion found with steel chestnut, cleared of cheating

#516

Post by samatman »

Theodores wrote: post #290
bee_rider wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The 23-year-old said: “My conker disintegrated in one hit, and that just doesn’t happen … I’m suspicious of foul play and have expressed my surprise to organisers.” It seems the suspicious was pretty quick.

Playing conkers at 23 years of age is a bit wrong. It is a bit like building LEGO kits as an adult, particularly wrong if the goal is to just build the design on the box and put the completed model on a shelf, rather than build your own creative masterpiece. Please resist the urge to mod me down in flames for the above, but, in former times, buying LEGO at the ripe old age of fourteen would be a bit shameful in the s…

For the record, I read your entire post before downvoting it, which I did because I disagree both with your diagnosis and its prescription (or perhaps I should say proscription).

While there is somewhat of a crisis of adulthood, I find it feasible to salvage the concept without carrying forward the sort of smothering social conformity you seem to advocate as a necessary condition.

Re: World conker champion found with steel chestnut, cleared of cheating

#517

Post by FrustratedMonky »

spencerflem wrote: post #444
FrustratedMonky wrote: post #366

Right, so picture this: you’re in the middle of a cracking game of Conker, and things aren’t exactly going your way. Your conker's looking as sturdy as a biscuit dunked in a cuppa for too long, and your mate’s conker is built like the Queen's Guard—completely unshakeable. But instead of taking the thrashing like a proper Brit, you think to yourself, “Why not get a bit creative, eh?” Now, I’m not talking about anythin…

I miss when long rambly silly comments like this were off topic and weird but at least kind charming AI ones don't have the same juice :c

I don't think you can tell it is AI except that it is long. All long blocks of text now are AI because humans have already stopped being as verbose?

This seems like a pretty big shift that has happened pretty fast, that any blocks of long text are automatically assumed to be AI.

Re: World conker champion found with steel chestnut, cleared of cheating

#518

Post by aspenmayer »

thruway516 wrote: post #503
lukas099 wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know?

https://shorturl.at/BzGuM

HN guidelines frown upon using non-canonical links. Please don't do that.

The above link resolves to this, so folks don't have to indulge in the click-tracking:

https://www.google.com/search?q=who+invented+soccer

Re: World conker champion found with steel chestnut, cleared of cheating

#519

Post by edm0nd »

aeneasmackenzie wrote: post #453
oblio wrote: post #236

The British are living proof of the fact that amazing things[1] can be achieved when the place you live in is extremely boring. [1] For varied definitions of "amazing", such as "conquer countries 10x your size", "invent 20 sports the entire world plays", etc.

“The taste of their food and the beauty of their women made British men the best sailors in the world.”

The UKs genetic pool is so small its really interesting how many "unattractive" people they have there because of it.
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