Norvik_1602

I made this montage video for the female friends whom I met online. Some images were requests, but most were my own choices. youtu.be/06ZWC1r9T1U

Ela looking amazing. What's new?

@SouthernCazza1 Wotcha. Did you watch the #Eurovision semi tonight?

@urlofcork Holy god The male loneliness epidemic is about to get bigger 🤷🏻‍♀️😂🫣

The wonderful Robert Fagles translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey have audiobook narrations by Derek Jacobi and Ian McKellen and listening to them is every bit as great as you'd think it would be.

Palestine isn't a cause so much as it is a personality trait for white leftists

We have a historical, physical description of Helen of Troy. It’s not a mystery.

@NewZealandBoss Sourly it’s not unreasonable to require kirpans to be edgeless with rounded tips

A heartwarming story to end this evening. In 1948, a young British sailor named George Hickinbottom discovered a starving black-and-white kitten wandering the docks of Hong Kong and secretly brought him aboard the HMS Amethyst. The crew named the cat Simon, and he quickly became beloved throughout the ship. More than just a mascot, Simon proved useful by hunting rats that threatened the ship’s food supplies and equipment. He charmed both sailors and officers alike, especially the captain, often sleeping in his cabin and bringing comfort and companionship to the crew during long days at sea. Everything changed in April 1949 when the HMS Amethyst came under heavy attack while traveling along China’s Yangtze River during the Chinese Civil War. The ship was severely damaged, dozens of sailors were killed or wounded, and Simon himself was badly injured by shrapnel and burns. Despite his wounds, Simon survived and soon returned to roaming the ship, visiting injured sailors in the sick bay and continuing to hunt rats while the crew remained trapped for more than 100 days under constant fear and dwindling supplies. His determination and resilience became a powerful source of hope and morale for the exhausted crew. When the HMS Amethyst finally escaped and returned home, Simon was celebrated across Britain as a national hero. He received the Dickin Medal, the animal equivalent of the Victoria Cross, becoming the only cat ever awarded the honor, and was officially promoted to Able Seaman Simon. However, the injuries he suffered during the attack left him weakened, and he died only weeks later in quarantine before reuniting fully with the crew. The sailors mourned him deeply and buried him with full naval honors, remembering him not simply as a ship’s cat, but as a brave companion who shared their suffering and courage during one of the darkest moments of their lives. Have you seen the film?

I was wondering if there are any Looney Tunes fans here who are 30 years old and above, I am 38 myself

@Kristinartz I am 65. And those are are my favorite animated films of all time. The Warner Brothers animation collection is among my favorite memories of watching TV and I still enjoy them today.

@OdohertyI64991 @AminaNIre Spill the beans. Was it...

Ah, Anjem Choudary. I had a few dealings with him back in the day when he was boasting about the execution of hostages. After I called him a savage for saying child brides were acceptable, I was accused of racism by a well known Irish feminist. Feminists defending child rape.🤷‍♂️

Das ist das fürchterlichste Hosting eines #Eurovision Song Contest an den ich mich in den vergangenen 40 Jahren erinnern kann! #ESC #ESC2026 🇦🇹

@Conor1960 @JFHurstX Coming from a previous generation, I can state with authority, that yes, we were. Same is true of my parent's generation. Both emigrated. Both returned.

@JFHurstX So you think you can force our young people to come home? Best of luck with that. Our young people are in the fantastic position of having choices. They can stay, go, come back, go again, stay away and know that home is here. Previous generations weren’t so lucky.

There is a lot of talk about Mass Deportation, but this is only one sided. What we should be focused on is Remigration, of which Mass Deportation is one side of the equation; the other side is Mass Repatriation. This refers to bringing our people home from abroad, to bring families together once again, and to fill the labor shortages from the Mass Deportation. If we as a people are to survive, we need to repopulate our home land with the youth who left in recent years, they have skills badly needed in Ireland, and they have children who need a country to call their own. Deport the non Irish and return home the lost Irish. To Restore Ireland and begin the new era of the Irish 🇮🇪

@HeidiBachram @sinnfeinireland They know no shame.

The son of convicted terrorist Marwan Barghouti spoke at the recent Sinn Féin conference in Belfast. To rapturous applause. The attempt to whitewash his ordering the brutal killing of five civilians is truly abhorrent. Shame on @sinnfeinireland

@jkentt1 @ATRightMovies All wrong. His finest moment. Death Becomes Her.

@ATRightMovies All good, but definitely "back to the future", 1985.

4 ROBERT ZEMECKIS films, 1 choice. Which is your favourite of his?

I like Kemi on a personal level but her own party is the very ‘British elite’ that has appeased, and indeed is largely responsible for, this Islamist threat. Under Theresa May the UK had multiple Islamic terror attacks and their response was absurd. After the Manchester Arena it was ‘venue safety’ meaning ridiculous requirements for concerts etc. to hire useless security guards. After MP David Amess was murdered by a terrorist their response was to crack down on ‘hate speech’. There was mass migration under the Tories. They dropped salary requirements and allowed foreign workers to bring over dependents (for example, one low wage carer could bring over 10 family members, this is not an exaggeration). They cut the armed force, they cut the police. They changed the rules and made it much easier for foreign doctors and nurses with questionable qualifications to enter and work. They implemented the post-study visa which allowed foreign students to stay after their studies and work, which led to the proliferation of useless university courses and scam students. In fact Kemi personally lobbied for the scrapping of caps for work visas and international students and celebrated this scrapping in parliament. They of course presided over the illegal boats from France. They are the ones who set up the asylum hotels. They introduced legislation that enabled people to avoid deportation by claiming they are a victim of exploitation by an employer, legislation that has been highly abused. If you want the Islamist threat dealt with, I personally wouldn’t put my faith in the Tories. They are conservative in name only and are directly responsible for the situation the UK currently finds itself in.

@EoinPoil @woofknight No. Just best of friends and colleagues for decades. Both married several times, AFAIK.

@woofknight @Norvik_1602 Were they lovers

His phone number was in the book. It was 1957. Oliver Hardy had died in August. Stan Laurel was sixty-seven years old. He was living in a small two-bedroom apartment at the Oceana on Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica. He had moved there after his last divorce because the rent was reasonable and it was within walking distance of the beach. He had been Hardy's partner for thirty years. They had made over a hundred films together. They had been the most famous comedy duo in the world. They had not been wealthy — they had made most of their films for Hal Roach Studios on contracts that gave them almost nothing in residuals — and by the 1950s they had been living on personal appearance tours and what was left of their savings. Hardy had a stroke in 1956. He had lost the ability to speak. Stan had visited him every week at his home in North Hollywood. He had sat by the bed and talked. Hardy could not answer. Stan had talked anyway. Hardy died in August 1957. He weighed a hundred and forty pounds at the end. He had been three hundred at his peak. Stan was too sick to attend the funeral. He had been having his own health problems for years. A stroke of his own in 1955. Diabetes. He could no longer travel. The doctor had told him to stay in Santa Monica and rest. He stayed. He did not stop working. He could not. He had been writing comedy material for forty years, and he did not know how to do anything else, and the work was the thing that kept him from sitting in the apartment looking at the wall. He wrote sketches for younger comedians. He answered fan mail. He kept his phone number listed in the Santa Monica directory under his own name. Anyone who wanted to call him could. The fans started calling. They started writing. They started showing up at the door. Word had gotten out, somehow, that the apartment number was easy to find. Tourists who had grown up watching the films would knock on the door of 849 Franklin Street, and Stan would open it. He invited them in. Every single one of them. For eight years. He sat in his living room and talked to anyone who came. He served them tea. He showed them photographs from the films. He answered questions. He did his small thumb-in-the-tie gesture that he had done at the end of every film. He laughed at his own jokes and theirs. He did not have an assistant. He did not have a secretary. He did not have security. He had his second wife, Ida, who made coffee and brought out cake. He did the rest himself. He did this for hundreds of people. Filmmakers who would later become famous — Dick Van Dyke, Jerry Lewis, Marcel Marceau, Peter Sellers, the writer Larry Harmon — came to the apartment because they had heard the door was open. So did tourists from Iowa. So did salesmen from Toronto. So did teenagers from Glendale who had ridden the bus across town. He gave them all the same hour. Dick Van Dyke later said that Stan Laurel had taught him everything he had ever learned about comedy. He said he had gone to that apartment three times in five years. The first time, Stan had sat with him for four hours. In 1961, Stan was given a special Academy Award for his contribution to comedy. He could not travel to the ceremony. Danny Kaye accepted on his behalf and read a short speech Stan had written. The speech ended with one line, which Stan had insisted on. The line was: I wish my partner could share this with me. He was the funnier of the two of us. Stan kept the Oscar on a bookshelf in the apartment. He showed it to fans when they asked. He let them hold it. He told them which year it was for. He never said it had been awarded to him alone. He always said it was for the two of them. He died in February 1965. He was seventy-four. Heart attack. He had been resting in his armchair in the apartment. The nurse who was attending him in his last weeks had stepped into the kitchen. When she came back, he was gone. His last words, spoken to the nurse minutes before, were about skiing. He had said he would rather be skiing. She had asked him if he liked to ski. He had said no, he had never skied in his life, but he would rather be doing that than what he was doing. Then he laughed. Then he died. Dick Van Dyke gave the eulogy at the funeral. He said one line that became famous in comedy circles afterward. He said: a man like Stan Laurel doesn't really die. The thing he made is the thing that survives him. The phone number in the Santa Monica directory was removed by Ida the week after the funeral. She kept the apartment for another two years. Fans still came to the door. She told them, kindly, that Stan was gone. Some of them had not known. She invited them in for tea anyway. She showed them the photographs. She told them stories. She did this for two years before she could bear to move out. Some people, in the last act of their life, keep the door open to anyone who knocks, because they have nothing left to give but their time, and they discover, surprisingly, that their time is the only thing anyone had ever really wanted from them

@kelly_ques The Flight of the Doves (1971). Set in Southern Ireland so was always on the television growing up. Slightly creepy in the way that 1970s children's TV or films were notorious for.

What is your favourite obscure movie from your childhood that nobody would remember?