Twila - re post on your name...

for ages I was wondering what this "acronym" stood for. You know how sometimes someone will use one (like BTW, AFAIK and even FAGVON is it? from this FFORUM eg for a given value of normal) and I was thinking maybe it was "thats what I like about" for TWILA.

Funny the thoughts that pop in your head when you read a word but don't how to "read it" or say it.

Keen little reader I was I proudly pointed out the "anti-cue" shop to someone (wanting to show off my knowledge and correct usageof the grown up word "antique" which I'd read in Enid Blyton's "wishing chair tree")...

If he's got an umbrella (or a punting stick (no idea what they're called - you don't see many of them in either Leeds or Newcastle), he can use that that to press the top button...

It's a pole - you ignoramus. Honestly !

Having you never been punting ?

I'll have to take you punting on Cam. It's jolly fun, they say.

nope, never been punting. I still think punting stick sounds better.

You try going to Silver Street bridge and refer to it as a 'stick' and see how long you last. You'll be calling the thing you row with an oar next !!

Karen: You're right about punting being much caricatured but the tourists love it and it is quite good fun. Also, the line above is a reference which Jon and PSD at least will get.

the thing you row with is a rowing stick, surely?

It's not a rowing stick - it's a blade.

Unless you want to be specific about the type of blade you want people to use, in which case they'll pick up 'macons' or 'cleavers'... Crews I'm in usually have to have the colour of the handle described, for some reason. I suspect this is as rowers are not picked for mental apptitude.

Please don't get me started on rowing trivia - I'll only bore you all.

(Worst thing about punts and crappy little rowing boats - the fact that nobody can control them so they tend to drift out in front of you. In an eight, it's bloody hard to a) steer and b) stop. I've never sunk one, despite learning to cox on a river packed with tourists hiring boats, but I know somebpody in Durham who had sunk 3. Never, ever, get in a boat with that woman.)



PSD

==========

This is the work of an Italian narco-anarchic collective. Don't bother insulting them, they can't read English anyway.

Karen, yes, I do have an odd name. And I can understand how it can confuse some people or send one off on a tangent. LOL

For those uninitiated to my name, Twila is pronounced: "T-why-luh"

I do get a lot of "Twill-uh", "Twee-luh", "Twoy-luh" "Tuh-vill-uh", and I think the weirdest I ever got is "Tuh-dilla" (don't ask...somehow the grocery store put Tudila on my club card!) Oh and I went to school for 13 years with a girl who could never pronounce my name correctly and it always sounded like "toilet". Go figure!

It's not a family name. My mom saw an article on the famous choreographer, Twyla Tharp, and loved the name. Dad hated it but Mom won and decided to change the spelling! And believe it or not, Twila is an English name. It means 'woven of double thread', kind of like twill fabric. And it's sort of appropriate since I'm not exactly a petite little flower! LOL

Coulda been worse though...I was almost Maudie Marie!

PSD: Have you ever rowed bumps ? They're fantastic. You have to chase the eight in front while the one behind is after you. In order to count, you have to actually bump the boat not just draw level. Both crews are then supposed to pull in and allow the rest to carry on. However, you can get crews blocking the river so a dozen boats all going at full pressure suddenly have to hold hard and crash into each other. Serious damage to all concerned. Our cox got a severe back injury when a blade from the following crew cracked into him.

Our blades were a pretty pink - blame Winston Churchill...

Naah, never got to do bumps, which was a slight shame. There was a race for novice crews from the uni that always produced a good couple of crashes, especially when some idiot decided to give up and turn before the end of the course. I managed to coach a crew last year that won in complete darkness, as the whole thing ran three hours late.

Durham Head always created a good few crashes, especially as crews went through Elvet Bridge - too narrow to row through without drawing your blades on and at a nasty angle to the current, on a corner. If you approach it anywhere near to another crew, one of you will crash. To ake it worse Durham Head always seemed to be held when the river was in flood, or in a gale. Very amusing if you could steer pretty well, not so fun if you couldn't.

Another amusing place was on the Tyne in Newcastle. There's anything up to 6 metres of tide, and crews that weren't used to training there got a bit confused when they came back to discover their shoes had floated off. The best time was when one of the colleges brought down an Empacher VIII and went upstream as the tide fell. An hour after they'd set off they came back, carrying the boat. They'd forgotten the tide and it had dropped them on a massive shelf of rock, ripping out the entire bottom. Oh how we laughed... Another crew tied a boat onto the trailer really badly, with the end result that it left us at fifty miles an hour on the A1, landing on the other carriageway. Not so funny...

As for rowing injuries, the best/worst I've got knowledge of was the guy in Regatta a few years back with a boat having pierced him in a collision... The woamn who taught me to row had a big smash once, nad had to be taken to hospital to have a rigger surgically removed after an VIII smashed into her. They had to cut sections out of her scull and the VIII and take her to hospital still sat in her seat...



PSD

==========

This is the work of an Italian narco-anarchic collective. Don't bother insulting them, they can't read English anyway.

Sounds very painful. (Although I did first read 'cut sections out of her skull' rather than 'scull' which would be worse.)

The most entertaining thing I saw was a novice crew who came in to the bank
and all took their blades out. As stroke-side got out, the bow-side blades weren't keeping them bouyant so everyone fell in. The rest of us did laugh !

I saw that happen at Evesham regatta once, except brilliantly it was as the crew were getting in, right in front of the club house. It wouldn't have been so funny, if it wasn't for the fact it was an elite pair who had stepped into the boat as they pushed off, looking ultra-professional right up until the point they looked down in horror to realise that one of the blades had popped out.

I also saw a novice sculler who'd got his blades in the wrong way round casually lean out and undo his gate to try and change them over in the middle of the river. Not a good idea.

I've never gone over, touch wood. Not even when a blade hit a swan and popped out during a sprint in a single scull. I have however been thrown in enough times to be bored of it.



PSD

==========

This is the work of an Italian narco-anarchic collective. Don't bother insulting them, they can't read English anyway.

You two really do need to read Three Men in a Boat ... there are some very funny rowing/punting stories in there.



- - -
I am very interested in the Universe. I am specialising in the Universe and everything surrounding it. - E. L. Wisty

I checked my name, "Simon Reeve", through google. It said that there were "about 4'420" hits. The first one that's actually me is #126, which is for one of the threads that I started in the fforum, and then there are no more references to me in the rest of the first 200.

You try "Sarah Butler".

You might be there a while... 4510 is a lot of hits... and I could see any relating to me on that page...

==> EDIT: I finally turn up on 147. You wanna know what it is, go look!



Post Edited (03-11-03 22:56)

--------------

There's a hole in my creativity bucket and it's all leaked out.

stuck you into Google and got over 460,000 hits, and number 147 doesn't look right to me...



Post Edited (03-12-03 00:13)

PSD

==========

This is the work of an Italian narco-anarchic collective. Don't bother insulting them, they can't read English anyway.

Hmmm. Here's what I got for 147, 48 and 49:

Stargate SG-1 Fan Fiction Awards 2003 - 2001 Awards Nominations
... Attica by Natty Chosen by Yum@ Death Save All by GateDemon The Diary by Sarah Butler
** Go And Catch A Falling Star by Doc Hand In Hand by Jb and Jmas The ...
www.sg1-awards.com/noms-2001.asp - 89k - Cached - Similar pages

Butler Society : The worldwide society for those interested in ...
... (DS64) Sarah Butler b. 1711 Rockingham Co. New Hampshire, USA. Married James Prescott
27 Nov 1733. Who were her parents ? Maybe father's name was Ralph Butler. ...
www.butler-soc.org/page6b.html - 22k - Cached - Similar pages

Butler, Wilson & Pollock Family History - pafg21 - Generated by ...
... He died on 16 Mar 1837 in Selborne. He married Sarah BUTLER on 19 Jun 1777 in
Selborne, Hampshire, England. Sarah BUTLER [Parents] was born about 1753. ...
uk.geocities.com/islander_gh/pafg21.htm - 11k - Cached - Similar pages
[ More results from uk.geocities.com ]


Looks like this Sarah is in the ChronoGuard too, since she was born in 1753 and got married in 1777.



--------------
"I've often said that the difference between British and American SF TV series is that the British ones have three-dimensional characters and cardboard spaceships, while the Americans do it the other way around."
--Ross Smith

147 is right on the mark there Magda, and the other two? Well...

It's a Sarah thing. What can I say?

Ben, which search engine are you using?!?!



--------------

There's a hole in my creativity bucket and it's all leaked out.

Google - honest...

[www.google.com]

Note the bit in the URL about safe=off - this may explain the discrepancy - and why i get "about 469,000" hits...



PSD

==========

This is the work of an Italian narco-anarchic collective. Don't bother insulting them, they can't read English anyway.

Nope, the discrepancy is because you left off the quotes.

We were searching for the entire string "Sarah Butler" while you were searching for pages with both the word 'sarah' and the word 'butler', but not necessarily next to each other.

In other words, if you put quotation marks (double or single) around a phrase, it searches for the exact phrase. Otherwise it just searches for all the words.



Post Edited (03-14-03 07:28)

--------------
"I've often said that the difference between British and American SF TV series is that the British ones have three-dimensional characters and cardboard spaceships, while the Americans do it the other way around."
--Ross Smith