541–550 of 601 posts
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This is like concluding that Japanese food is terrible because the idea of eating raw fish grosses you out. (Also, it's "steak and kidney pie" as a unit, not a steak accompanied by a "kidney pie".)
Yeah, but a kidney is a piss filter. Eat it raw or cook it how you like, but it's still a piss filter.
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Chairs and OOP have nothing to do with each other. Fruits, seeds, etc are plants and fall into botanical definitions. I get the point that we call them berries even if they aren't, but your comparison to OOP is apples and oranges.
> I get the point that we call them berries even if they aren't That wasn’t the point. The point is that they are berries, by the real definition of berries, which is not the different definition used by a tiny minority of mostly irrelevant people in a specific context. What reason is there to prefer the botanical definition to the common one (that says a berry is a small colorful fruit)? I can see none. On the other…
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As someone that roasts and eats chestnuts, it's kind of odd to play with them. I suppose you ate many and also played, or are they simply not eaten there?
The ones used for conkers are horse chestnuts (typically round in shape), not the same as the ones that are eaten which are spanish chestnuts and normally have flat sides.
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He probably played it himself back in the day. Its interesting how games and other things like songs, stories etc. persist and/or disappear over time.
Things from my youth, as well as conkers: - marbles (can you get them anymore?) - kick the can (where would kids get cans today?) - British bulldog/chain tig (far too dangerous) I can't remember the rules of these, but they were very popular in the early 1960s, when I played them.
Almost literally never been cheaper. Under £3 for 50 on AliExpress, free shipping if you buy 150. I don't know if a child gets or loses street cred for having more cheap marbles then you can physically carry in 2024, but they could acquire that many quite easily.
> where would kids get cans today?
Pretty sure cans still exist! They might be a little more likely to contain, say, organic chopped tomatoes now than some gruesome 60s spam creation, but they're still a thing.
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I saw on the wikipedia page the following totally stupid reason for the ban in some schools: In 2004, several schools banned conkers due to fear of causing anaphylactic shock in pupils with nut allergies. Health advisers said that there were no known dangers from conkers for nut-allergy sufferers, although some may experience a mild rash through handling them.[20]
Interesting, as conkers are seeds (not a nut) - so shouldn't be an issue for someone with a nut allergy - though no doubt some people are allergic to them.
Conkers is a traditional children's game in Great Britain and Ireland played using the seeds of horse chestnut trees—the name 'conker' is also applied to the seed and to the tree itself. The game is played by two players, each with a conker threaded onto a piece of string: they take turns striking each other's conker until one breaks. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conkers
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Elaborate marble runs are very popular, although many people use steel balls instead.
Marble runs are wildly different from marbles we played when I was a kid. One is an engineering (lite) exercise, the other is a game of vague dexterity to take someone else's marble collection.
I remember football stickers bring banned on day 1 of term, having blown up over summer because someone stole a huge stack from a locker. Presumably the 90s ish was when the Made in Taiwan plastic crap availability really started to make that stuff cheap and fast enough to churn out in huge volumes to start a craze in weeks. Compared to marbles where a collection might represent years of growth, overall marble-econony production being trickled in by kids buying or being gifted just a handful at a time.
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I was about to post the same thing! I've thought about this literally for decades. I also had to wait for years to learn what conkers are - and I'm still confused. I'd love to know the context/history/culture that DNA was referring to because it doesn't make any sense to me as written So conkers are chestnuts on a string used for childhood smashing competitions. Ooookay. But why would Yooden Vranx have "lots of" ches…
Your mistake is trying to find logic in something Douglas Adams wrote. It makes no sense for alien spaceships to carry conkers. That's the joke, a small dig at people believing the local stuff they're used to is universal.
When he was being absurdist, he was very clear about it. Like you said, he was writing about conkers as if it's just the same in the rest of the galaxy, which is definitely absurd. But in order to ground that absurdity, the rest has to be normal. He doesn't just drop in complete nonsense.
So the question remains: What part of British culture or Adams personal history am I missing where it's logical for an adult to happen to have a bunch of chestnuts on hand to give to children?
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As someone that played it over 60 years ago, there is quite a bit of technique involved - for example, aiming to hit the opponent's conker accurately and hard.
Wouldn't that newton's-second-law your own conker just as hard though? As the aggressor you get to choose the points of contact, which must be where the accuracy comes in. If you can strike your opponent downwards you're more likely to knock them off the string and lead to Stamps.
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Not sure where you've been eating, but even Birmingham—my unfashionable British hometown—has nine Michelin star restaurants within a short drive. I grew up in the UK but I've lived for 15 years all over the US, and it's always confused me that Americans are convinced that British food is bad. On a whole, British supermarkets have far better produce, in both quality and diversity. UK restaurants run the gamut from cut…
> can you name an American dish that wasn't developed by immigrants? I consider Tex-Mex as American and home grown. It also depends on your definition of "immigrants" since that path looks different everywhere (and across time). Texas was at one time Mexico (and even its own country plus a few others). But tortillas, beans, corn, cornbread are Native American. Many have simply lived here through generations and name…