Random fact of the day thread.

Sorry to disappoint you Sara65 but we live by the coast and still see rats thanks to visitors who carelessly throw away remains of take-aways or picnics without finding a bin or feed the seagulls.

One third of UK rural land belongs to the aristocracy.

An awful lot of land belongs to the Church of England - that irritates me too!

Westward Ho! is the only place name in the UK to end with an exclamation mark!

PS I am a gran now!

Alder wood makes the best charcoal for making gun powder.

Well, this morning my business opened up for the first time an office outside of Britain, namely in Belgium.

We accomplished that by buying out an existing business in that country and so we have had all week the IT people causing chaos and disturbing everyone in both offices as they integrated sections of the two computer systems into one.

However, on the first day of full operation for the system, at six o'clock this morning when one of our staff made first touch on a linked keyboard the whole system crashed.

So many of us have been sat here all morning twiddling our thumbs while chaos reigns again with system repair people being everywhere.

So, random fact of the day in the opinion of many in this office, all IT guys are f...king useless. ?

The worlds population has doubled in the last 50 years

Yes Ginjeannie I know that... it was built to accommodate bridge over from Kingswear....but that never happened. Dartmouth railway station became a cafe...and a very nice one too!

Silverlining48...Probably nearer than 15 ft if you're an MP

A lot of golf courses are built on land unsuitable for housing eg quarries, mines. That is apart from the Trump estate incorporated into an area of special interest of course.

A kangaroo has three vaginas and can support 3 separate pregnancies of different stages at one time!!
Poor kangaroo.....

Grandad1943 - not all IT people... just the ones you have chosen to employ I'm afraid!
Hope it's sorted by now. Good luck.

Grandad1943
My husband was a programmer before he retired. One of the most fraught jobs is sticking two systems together. It rarely goes smoothly, in fact you're better off assuming it will take a lot of effort and will fall over many times before it works. I have a feeling that's what caused all the banks systems crashing a while ago. I can't check with him because he's meeting another retired programmer for lunch today.

btw Y2K aka the Millennium Bug really was a thing. People say it was a lot of guff and everything was fine and it was a big fuss about nothing but it was all hands to the pumps & thousands upon thousands of programmers worked very hard to sort it. He did loads of overtime and we were very flush for a while as a result.

lovebeigecardigans1955.
Not forgetting motorways snaking their way through our once green and pleasant land.

I am quite happy about the golf courses, I do not play, but they are green spaces, better than an industrial unit.

Every web site has a different answer about the % of land that is built on. This seems to be the best recent one which throws in a lot more information as well.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-41901297

It contains a table that shows built on land in the four UK countries as follows:

Built on: Farmland: Natural
England. 8.8%. 72.9. 14.5
Scotland. 2.1%. 26.4. 70.7
Wales. 4.2% 59.3. 35.1
N Ireland 3.5% 72.2. 23

The rest is green urban.

The area with the most land devoted to golf courses is Woking, Surrey at 11%

agranbytheendofsummer Congratulations on becoming a gran! Is it a boy or a girl?

Random fact - porcupines float in water.

NotSpaghetti, LondonGranny, many thanks for your advice and comments on our business IT systems problems up thread.

It is up and running again now, but very slow at the minute. One of the IT guys has told me the fault was found in a section of the programming going corrupt which "links to the cloud."

I Joked back that it has been raining very heavily here in North Somerset for much of the morning, so there must be a link to the cloud to be found there somewhere. ?

Anyway, we have been told to keep traffic through the system to a minimum, so finance and accounts are the only sections on there at the moment.

The rest of us on the operations side have been managing with our phones pretty well, and have now decided to adjourn to the pub for the rest of the afternoon and make a fresh start in the morning (Saturday). We will class that as having been an advanced planning meeting when we are able to get back on the system. ?

I was only joking about the IT guys in my earlier post as they have been very good really and we have used that particular company for years.

Three out of the four of them who come into us are women these days anyway.

Yesyterday Aberdeenshire Council approved the Trump Organisations plans to build 550 luxury homes at its Aberdeenshire Golf Course. Councillors backed the plans by 38-24.
The Mennie Estate is considered a "national important protected wildlife site", the Scottish Government warned that the surrounding dunes may lose their protected status.
a total of 18 objections were lodged with most focusing on the the environmental impact.
50 of the houses are designated holiday units with the remaining 500 being a mixture of private, rental and holiday homes.

A boy! ?

How do I reply with the name in bold?

Sorry the link is that this is on his golf course.