2024 Dakar Rally
The race format consists of a prologue and 12 stages, including a 48-hour marathon stage.
Highlights from last year
2024 European Water Polo Championships
Marco
2024 European Speed Skating Championships
Apparently the people in @farscytheland are pretty good at this stuff.
Marmalade
Real Estate Porn
All the fixtures would need to be changed and the bathroom gutted.
How do they make that?
Rose Oil
Watcha got?
That’s guilded age right there. I like the enlosed courtyard, but I just don’t like the price.
And it’s near the Roger Williams National Museum!
Woo Roger Williams!
/who the fuck is Roger Williams?… looks up wiki/
He’s the Jebediah Sprungfeld of Rhode Island
Not the best at languages, but I got confused as a teen and thought the cologne guys named Drakkar (not Dakar) after this rally race.
Yes! Drakkar Noir. I used to wear it. It was quite the lure in gay settings when I was in college. Apparently it’s still made.
…for a glassed in atrium with an actual tree in it…totally worth it…plus…you’ll know the shower’s good…so…win win?
Glassed-in atriums with live trees are somewhat surprisingly common. We used to have a lemon tree up on our roof, there’s a structure that gets a lot of sun so it functions like a greenhouse and we can grow all kinds of things, inside and out. We also had this Japanese maple that was indestructible. It survived all kinds of weather horrors, despite its very fragile look. Sadly, though, we got an aphid infestation and we all rushed into action with some kind of insecticide but it was too late and we lost the Japanese maple 🙁
That video unlocked a new bucket list bullet point for me:
While you’re over in Bulgaria there are several Orthodox churches and cathedrals you can tour. Also Sofia, the capital, is full to bursting with very bizarre postwar architecture, so that can be interesting, when it’s not so depressing.
I hadn’t realized that the Dakar had moved to South America and then Saudi Arabia. Motorsports aren’t really my thing (avoids glare from @farscythe).
Who wants to go for a run in Scotland?
lol i dont mind people not liking motorsports…its just one less thing to talk about with someone…
anyways…if it doesnt run from paris to dakar its not the dakar rally…no idea why they kept the name….is silly
Europeans are adorable with their “sports”, although the echoes of colonialism in the Dakar Rally are a little problematic. However, I have enjoyed playing the Dakar Desert Rally video game and have dominated in that arena.
Speed skating is bad-ass. I like how relaxing it is to watch.
There are definitely some issues with the Dakar.
Witness the Incidents and Criticism sections of the Wikipedia entry.
Totally agree with you on speed skating. As a pre-teen, I wanted to go up to Wisconsin to try their speed-skating ovals, which were not available in the Kansas City area.
I got to skate once on the oval at Lake Placid and it was very fun!
Wasn’t the Dakar Rally where Margaret Thatcher’s son Mark was lost and she summoned half the British army to look for him? This is a very small plot point in “The Crown.” She cries in front of the Queen during the weekly audience and he Queen makes an effort to console her (“As a mother…”) but consolation is not really a Windsor thing. I have read Charles Moore’s magisterial multivolume bio of Margaret Thatcher and there’s no mention of what went on during those weekly audiences, except obliquely. The two had to decide whether to deploy Jeffrey Epstein’s friend Prince Andrew to the Falklands. He was hot to trot so they allowed this and he became this sexy war hero.
This reminds me of one of the hundreds of Royal Family-related films and miniseries I’ve seen over the years. D-Day is approaching and Winston Churchill, who performed so magnificently, only to be thrown out by the ungrateful voters, has an audience with King George VI, QE2’s beloved father, and announces that he plans to be on one of the boats. George VI says, “I’ll go with you. A king should be with his subjects.”
Churchill gets so freaked out by this dangerous notion that they both stay behind in London and listen to encrypted updates on the wireless. Contrast this with our and Tony Blair’s disgraceful Iraqi and Afghan misadventures in the wake of 9/11, when we couldn’t get the rich Saudis out fast enough because, as it soon became apparent, the 19 hijackers were Saudi.
I think that’s enough.
oh yeah…we love our ice skating over here
me finks the love of all things skating comes from the elfstedentocht…which is pretty much nostalgia nowadays….and we were skating long before it…so im most likely completely wrong
oh hey….having only now actually watched the skating video…thats thialf
ive skated on that track many times growing up….they also have an icehockey rink where i once caught a puck with my forehead
anyways…was that day i learnt to not stand too close to the netting
but i did get a free puck with my massive lump on my head
New cozy Canadian competition show alert! I don’t actually watch the English baking/gardening shows so I can’t tell if this is in the same vein. But it looks pretty low stakes.
The Great Canadian Pottery Throw Down! Fabulous! I wonder if they go curling at any point. Or split a few logs. Trap a few beavers. All of these things would keep me entertained for hours.
You had to make a beaver-trapping reference…
…there is(?was?) a bake-off style pottery thing in the UK…also some art ones…like portraits…or watercolour landscapes…which I know a few people who are fans of?